Asatru Folk Assembly - 9⧸9⧸26 Victory Never Sleeps, Ep 218 - From Vendel to Vikings

00:00:00.000 Closed Captioning by Ben Serarten

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00:02:00.000 We'll be right back.

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00:03:00.000 hello everyone and welcome to this week's edition of victory never sleeps um got a special episode

00:03:12.720 for you tonight i am joined once again by michigan folk builder chris savage here to continue our

00:03:21.840 history series uh envisioned to take us from the ice age to the end of the

00:03:33.680 i don't know whatever we want to call it but the end of the viking age

00:03:37.760 and the time where our folk broke trough with the icer um

00:03:44.640 yeah so we've made quite a bit of progress in previous months i'd encourage anyone to go back

00:03:50.920 look at those shows they've been happening on the second uh wednesday of most months i think there

00:03:59.240 was one there that didn't but we've had a whole series of history episodes for you and this one's

00:04:04.760 very exciting today um top of the show stuff to get to thank you everyone who's been so generous

00:04:13.720 to us we have had some amazing donors recently and the generosity is very much appreciated

00:04:22.440 anybody looking to donate to the afa or any of the projects we're working on uh runestone.org

00:04:31.640 slash donate and that'll get you there and you can choose where you would like

00:04:36.600 your much appreciated donations go to got two big things that we've been pushing

00:04:42.680 our pavilion at sigerhang which we've cleared the ground for we've uh pulled out the dirt for

00:04:51.080 and we are fixing to put a foundation in for that one these are about 32.3 percent of the way to

00:05:00.280 our total um believe if every member contributed 32 towards it we would be able to do that

00:05:09.480 instantly as a matter of perspective but that's where we're at on the pavilion and the other one

00:05:14.840 is paying off phrase hop now you may recall we just did our dedication for phrase hop

00:05:21.960 on december the 6th of 2025 we are already 48.9 of the way towards paying that off

00:05:32.200 that is fantastic uh you guys are amazing made good progress on that and i think that looks like

00:05:39.480 85 dollars per member would pay that off so thank you everybody for your generosity and we appreciate

00:05:47.720 you um other top of the show notes uh speaking of donations gilbert donated 150 towards paying

00:05:57.880 off phrase off thank you gilbert very much appreciated

00:06:00.760 um today is the day of remembrance for prince herman of the trucey um

00:06:11.160 the hero of the german nation the uniter of the tribes the uh the bane of the legions he

00:06:24.360 The 2000, I got math, 2017 years ago, through his confederation that he knit together of squabbling Germanic tribes,

00:06:43.480 he forged a force that defeated three Roman legions and stopped Rome's advance to the north forever.

00:06:54.360 and showed that united there was nothing that our people could not accomplish and for that we honor

00:07:01.620 and celebrate him uh every year on september the 9th with his day of remembrance so hail herman

00:07:08.340 um other top of the show stuff hope everybody celebrates house float this month coming up

00:07:17.680 In a week and a half, do that at whatever Hoth is closest to you, but make sure you go if you can.

00:07:27.660 I will be celebrating at Thor's Hoth this month, so I look forward to seeing people there.

00:07:33.420 If anybody can join me in Linden, North Carolina, that would be fantastic.

00:07:41.360 Yeah, that's the news and notes I've got for the top of the show.

00:07:48.640 chris would you like to bring them up to speed on kind of where we left off in our history series and

00:07:56.320 start them through the material oh a note for everyone you can

00:08:01.440 even on one of these shows that's largely a presentation

00:08:05.920 we still appreciate questions and look forward to doing the q a portion

00:08:10.960 um much of that will probably wait until either chris has to take a bathroom break or until he's

00:08:20.640 done with his prepared material if you have questions that are relevant to you know things

00:08:26.880 as they're being discussed please ask them and we'll try to clear those up during and

00:08:33.680 if not any and all questions we have we will answer at the end of the program

00:08:37.680 At any point in time, tonight or indefinitely, if you have questions, email them to vns at runestone.org, and we will answer those at the very next opportunity.

00:08:52.700 With that, Chris, all you.

00:08:56.860 Yes. Also, top of the show, I have a moot this Saturday.

00:09:01.000 If you are in Michigan and interested, or I guess if you're in northern Indiana or Ohio, then reach out to me at csavage at runestone.org. There is still time.

00:09:12.740 All right, so history stuff. So we've done a lot of deep history and a lot of broad history to get

00:09:21.340 to Scandinavia. This is because we have a large number of heroes that show up at a very specific

00:09:27.340 time period, and the subtle nuances of the context that they live in matter. In coming episodes,

00:09:34.220 we're going to be talking about Scandinavia contextualizing the society that our Scandinavian

00:09:41.840 heroes lived in. This is not just about the heroes, but also the world that they live in.

00:09:47.560 And I want to preface all of that, which I'm going to be restating in those episodes,

00:09:53.000 with an explanation about why we care. We don't care about medieval Scandinavia as if Norway

00:10:01.920 circa 832 CE was some sort of theologically ideal society that we must reverend to. Rather,

00:10:09.820 we care about it because this is the time and place that we maximize both the recency of practice

00:10:15.660 and the quality of attestation of source material. There is far more Greek and Roman literature but

00:10:23.020 it is very distant from us and much of it is impious. The Balts practiced their native religion

00:10:28.220 far more recently but it is very poorly attested. The Norse literary tradition thus has the most

00:10:34.140 recency and the most quantity without sacrificing one or the other do you want to say anything so

00:10:40.860 yeah i do i'd like to make a note um

00:10:46.300 sometimes our message is necessarily reactive to uh misunderstandings or to

00:10:57.420 you know counter messaging or to other things on this show

00:11:06.060 we go to great lengths to demonstrate that also true isn't just vikings

00:11:12.220 it's the faith of all of our folk since the dawn of our race

00:11:19.100 it is completely appropriate and as it should be to practice in a modern context as modern persons

00:11:26.140 it's very important to understand that it's not just a viking thing and so

00:11:34.620 we make that point ad nauseum it is worth noting here vikings are awesome i think all of us that

00:11:43.100 are here at some point we're inspired to do so in some way because vikings are really cool

00:11:50.860 don't ever think that I don't know that or appreciate that or I'm not excited about the

00:11:57.900 Vikings. I am. They are awesome. And we really get to kind of celebrate that in these next few

00:12:02.900 episodes. Again, it wasn't like the perfect age of how everything was that should be announced

00:12:10.860 and true, but it is where we have the literary material. It's where we have the material culture

00:12:16.060 and the customs that are the context for the vast majority of our sacred lore it is the

00:12:26.940 palette used to paint the stories in the ads

00:12:33.420 so much of that is written in a way to describe imagery that helps incomprehensible divinity

00:12:41.900 to be understood and appreciated and pictured and conceived of by our folk and

00:12:52.040 by divine providence or by happy accident that was done in a viking context with viking imagery

00:13:04.560 and viking clothes and viking weapons and all the trappings of the viking age so it is

00:13:13.160 particularly important for us to have our bearings when understanding that know what those things

00:13:21.660 mean get a perspective on it and kind of i don't know full-throatedly celebrate and embrace vikings

00:13:31.680 are cool and we're going to learn about them and hopefully we're going to get a better appreciation

00:13:38.080 of the world that these heroes lived in and the imagery and culture that is um that permeates our

00:13:46.480 war so yes uh we are a church full of people who not only like vikings but have favorite vikings

00:13:55.760 So please, don't think that this is an attack on the Vikings being cool, but there are two concepts that I want to introduce to you as the audience.

00:14:07.300 They are Vagor and Scyther.

00:14:12.000 The first, Vagor, is transcendent principles, and the second, Scyther, is the actual customs and norms of people at a given place and time. 0.98

00:14:22.320 We sort through the Scyther to get to the Vagor. 0.83

00:14:25.680 Take Weirguild, for example. We don't care about Weirguild because we're deeply interested in 0.99

00:14:30.640 figuring out the monetary compensation that you have to pay if you kill a fast food worker.

00:14:36.000 We care about it because it's the application of the principle of men having worth, of men having

00:14:41.760 value. A McDonald's employee's life being worth 17 cows is sither. The principle that men have

00:14:49.200 value is vaguer so as we move into scandinavia i want you to keep a thin ear for the principles

00:14:57.840 at play here not just the arbitrary customs of the place and time do you want to throw

00:15:05.360 anything in about that sir um yeah to break down a little bit what you just said

00:15:13.040 very often the what our ancestors did is fascinating because it's interesting

00:15:27.440 because we love history because it's educational but the real meat from a religious contents

00:15:36.720 or context is the why. Why did they do a thing? That exposes principles and values and deeply

00:15:46.320 held beliefs. How that's expressed is dependent upon time and place and context and a variety

00:15:57.140 of other things, but the principle, the idea, the deeply held core beliefs are timeless.

00:16:05.120 So do keep that in mind.

00:16:08.780 What, where, when is really interesting, but the why is the meat of it that is what we can take and apply in our own lives and in the lives of our families and our children and community around us.

00:16:28.100 All right.

00:16:29.180 So some timeline stuff.

00:16:31.320 Let's do a quick timeline to get us started.

00:16:34.140 I'm going to very briskly recap some of the episodes that we've already done, right?

00:16:41.020 So 24,000 BC, this is the last glacial maxima. 0.96

00:16:47.120 This is when Ice Age Europeans develop. 0.99

00:16:49.760 There's a population of people who are stuck in this habitable zone in Europe. 1.00

00:16:56.080 From them, other populations come. 0.69

00:16:59.560 18,000 BC, the Ice Age starts to recede and Europeans start breaking up into smaller populations.

00:17:06.060 8,000 BC, the first hunter-gatherer populations start entering Scandinavia.

00:17:11.680 5,000 BC, the first farmer populations start entering Scandinavia.

00:17:17.020 3,000 BC, the Indo-European speakers start entering Scandinavia.

00:17:24.700 These three populations are all descended from the same Ice Age ancestral population.

00:17:30.380 We talk about this in the Proto-Indo-European episode.

00:17:34.380 1750 BC, the Bronze Age starts.

00:17:37.500 By this point, the Germanic world has successfully absorbed and recontextualized pre-Indo-European religious and social structures.

00:17:46.340 That is to say, these pre-Proto-Germanic peoples are using the same stone circles and mounds as their hunter-gatherer ancestors, going back in an uninterrupted fashion to the Stone Age circa 8000 BC.

00:18:02.240 There's no breakage here. 0.92

00:18:06.280 1300 BC in Southern Europe, the Bronze Age collapse begins.

00:18:11.540 800 BC we start seeing the first social upsets that lead to the iron age

00:18:18.880 650 BC a volcanic eruption causes a three-year-long winter that collapses the last of the bronze age

00:18:29.240 Scandinavian polities the institutions of the Germanic tribes develop in the ensuing chaos

00:18:36.240 500 bc jasdorf culture spreads throughout denmark northern germany and southern sweden

00:18:44.680 proto-germanic culture begins the iron age kicks off in earnest you want to throw up the jasdorf

00:18:50.460 culture map nick

00:18:51.320 so the red is the jasdorf that spreads out this is a material culture this is one

00:19:03.380 uh way of making things an elite culture with related cultures around it this spreads out

00:19:13.000 into den the green zone importantly right so 180 arminius goes off to learn the ways of rome

00:19:23.180 around this time a group of early swedes sail off to the baltics that's the the purple

00:19:31.240 the hot pink kind of region and a little bit north of it on the map and they slowly migrate

00:19:38.640 into the balkans they go southeast these people go on to become the goths who show up in our

00:19:44.880 athanaric episode about 380 the migration period begins this is when there's a large outpouring of 0.97

00:19:52.260 germanic peoples into the rest of europe this period is in part animated by roman aggression

00:19:58.440 against germania preventing long-term cultivation and utilization of germanic land the people in

00:20:05.160 what is today germany literally cannot just sit still and farm the romans are trying to prevent

00:20:10.200 that this leads to our anglo-saxons episode our radbot episode and our loyal saxons episode

00:20:17.560 it's also touched on in the athanaric episode albeit kind of distantly 536 the volcanic winter

00:20:25.320 of 536 begins this is when there's a big volcano and it causes a really bad winter around this time

00:20:35.800 the 530s 500s sweden is inhabited by 13 nations more properly tribes the two most important are

00:20:45.480 the sphere and the geats the goths are the ones who migrate the geats are the ones who stayed behind

00:20:55.880 but fundamentally they're still basically the same people and more importantly they are in

00:21:01.240 contact with each other right so we've still got the map of scandinavia here what happens is that

00:21:08.680 red zone is a material culture that spreads out into the green zone then a group of people head

00:21:15.240 southeast into the purple and kind of gray zone and they just keep going they stay in contact

00:21:21.720 with the people back home, right? 546, the volcanic winter ends. However, the downstream

00:21:29.580 effects of it, namely a plague, a series of wars, and economic collapse, continue for about 20 more

00:21:36.120 years in southern Europe. Up to this time, the 540s or so, the Germanic migrations are in full

00:21:43.800 swing, and there is a contiguous cultural continuity from Anglo-Saxon England to Germania

00:21:50.340 to Scandinavia, and a Germanic man can move freely between them. Beowulf is about a Geet

00:21:56.640 who goes from Sweden to Denmark to Britain to attain fame and glory, and at one point in the 0.98

00:22:02.140 story, he returns to Sweden to handle his inheritance. He can do that because Anglo-Saxon

00:22:07.940 England, Sweden, and Denmark are part of one civilization that happens to have land parceled

00:22:12.300 out to individual lords. They also practice the same native religion, ignore Christianity for what 0.77

00:22:19.260 i'm saying here they practice the same religion they have the same culture the same language

00:22:24.640 so a man can go from northeast sweden to denmark to germany to anglo-saxon england

00:22:33.040 because these are all fundamentally just one people at this time right so 500s the mid 500s

00:22:43.000 is when the so-called vendal period begins um can you throw up the scandinavian map nick that that

00:22:51.880 one okay so this is some of the places that are important in scandinavia at the time

00:22:59.480 the circled portion is where the sphere live then you have to their southwest and west you have

00:23:06.120 You have Geetland and West Geetland. That's where the Geets live. The Geets have more territory, but there are fewer of them. They're spread across more land. Then you have up in the far way north, that's Halogaland. That's where Jarl Haakon Sigurdersen is from. 0.97

00:23:27.820 then the coastline along there is norway then in the southwest there's um

00:23:34.660 that's gelling that's the center of denmark right do you want to say anything about just

00:23:42.800 the geography of scandinavia while we're here sir

00:23:46.060 sorry i had to find the microphone button um yeah it's a skew

00:24:01.580 it is like northwest oriented um i i should have corrected the map i apologize

00:24:09.180 well no i i take it for granted uh geography's always been something that

00:24:16.060 appealed to me that i was very tuned into whereas perhaps math or other things were not my strong

00:24:21.580 suit history and geography and stuff was i know that some people though maybe looking at some of

00:24:26.460 the zoomed in imagery might not have a point of reference might be confused so where it says uh

00:24:35.500 raiba there that's on the um peninsula that is denmark um

00:24:47.100 you'll also notice all of this white stuff

00:24:52.460 there's a lot of there's a lot of rocks that come there we go there's a lot of rocks that compose

00:25:01.580 scandinavia but a lot of it is either uninhabitable or certainly very rough to occupy very rough to

00:25:13.820 travel through and very rough to try to have any kind of um farm or pasture land so it's worth

00:25:23.820 noting that it seems like a big land excuse me land mass but a lot of it is very very difficult

00:25:30.140 to use for um the things that would make civilization civilized but you have what you

00:25:39.500 do have though if you look around it you have an obscene amount of coast and inlets and fjords and

00:25:49.180 waterfront so all that goes into you know why the vikings were

00:25:55.500 you know naval pirates and not i don't know horse lords or you know mass infantrymen or whatever

00:26:06.220 else a lot of that's dictated the geography in which they they occupy there and you'll also

00:26:14.300 notice at this time that we're going into these colored areas don't compose the modern countries

00:26:24.540 of Norway and Sweden and Denmark, you still have small kingdoms that are vying for primacy

00:26:32.700 in these places. And some of that, I'm sure Chris will explain here coming up.

00:26:38.720 Yes, it's really important when we talk about Sweden, Denmark, Norway, a Norwegian is someone

00:26:46.680 who lives in Norway. They are still a Norseman. They are the same group of people as a Swede,

00:26:53.540 as a dane as an anglo-saxon literally as an angle a saxon or a ute they are the same people

00:27:01.440 as a goth they don't really start at the period we're talking about like the mid 500s these people

00:27:08.680 do not conceptualize themselves as like oh norwegians and swedes are separate things

00:27:13.140 they are at the time where we're starting here like the 500s they are just starting to develop

00:27:20.280 stereotypes about like what people in that valley over there are like right now it's important to

00:27:28.360 remember that the country of norway is basically one big mountain range all of this land on the

00:27:35.880 west there that is all mountain slopes but it's also fjords a fjord is a really deep valley with

00:27:45.720 water at the bottom. So they can settle all throughout there because they're settling the

00:27:51.140 water, but they don't necessarily move too deep into the mountains. That's what all of this white 1.00

00:27:56.240 space is. If you get a topographic map of Scandinavia, I leave that as an exercise to the

00:28:02.400 reader, you'll see that a lot of this white space is mountain, very tall mountain. Most of it is

00:28:09.020 still very poorly settled today. You'll notice, however, that there's this kind of bridge of

00:28:14.820 connectivity going from uh on the map it looks like it's going north of what is labeled as uh

00:28:20.200 west ergothia up through solar into you know uh nordmare and the like if you look at a topographic

00:28:28.240 map that's cutting right through a mountain like some of the thickest mountain country in norway

00:28:34.280 too why is that the case we'll get into that right so while we've still got this map up

00:28:42.020 the white people that move into scandinavia do so by do so by going up through denmark

00:28:49.900 into sweden then they go west into norway and you know north further into sweden

00:28:55.240 so so you mentioned earlier just to see if there's a note about geography look at that

00:29:04.500 what Odensee, what's the other, forget the name of the major islands of Denmark, but

00:29:15.600 if you look at them, they really are that close. Like they touch, like you look out and you

00:29:25.140 clearly see, so the island hopping, you don't need super advanced ships to do that. You know,

00:29:32.920 it's not a difficult thing to take that almost complete land mass to hop from one to the other

00:29:41.480 to get to uh southern sweden from uh from denmark at that time and also it's worth kind of noting

00:29:52.440 when i say southern sweden i don't i mean southern modern sweden the southern end of

00:29:57.160 the scandinavian peninsula virtually touches the archipelago that connects to the northern end of

00:30:02.920 the um uh peninsula so it's they can they're very easy to go between the one and the other

00:30:13.880 i mean it's so close that in today's world there's literally a road across the water yeah

00:30:20.440 Yeah. So, all right, the Vendal period. I'm going to sum up the Vendal period here really quick.

00:30:28.120 While Europe is figuring out what it means for a Germanic man to be a Christian, Scandinavians are building. 0.73

00:30:36.020 Scandinavia is, at this time, almost a kind of colonial project, right? All of that white space on the first map is slowly being filled in. 0.76

00:30:45.440 There's a lot of uninhabited territory. This is one of the last places in Europe, until Iceland enters the story, just ignore that for now, where a European man can say, I wonder what's out that way, and just like go that way and start a farm.

00:31:01.260 And there's a high likelihood that, you know, when you settle your farm, you are the first human being to have set foot on that patch of territory. Right? So, the Germanic world, which unified and centralized in Denmark under the Jastorf culture, goes on to, by 500 AD, to have undergone a series of shifts.

00:31:23.480 Various incentives pulled men south, which ultimately led to the migration period,

00:31:28.820 which can be summed up as working for and then conquering Rome can make you rich. 0.52

00:31:35.460 This attitude eventually results in the whole of continental Germanic Europe

00:31:39.780 being absorbed into the broader post-Roman civilizational sphere.

00:31:44.880 when rome gets sacked by alaric alaric is doing so as an employee of the byzantine empire he is

00:31:58.140 working for one faction of rome against another faction of rome there is a civilizational block

00:32:05.340 in continental europe that when the actual political governance of the roman empire collapses

00:32:10.540 keeps going through sheer impetus we're not talking about a place in that sphere at that time

00:32:18.300 right so in the vendal period we start seeing the meaningful results of the buildup of population

00:32:26.700 in scandinavia by this separate civilization so to say how we're getting there we're getting there

00:32:35.620 Um, so, uh, urban, urban centers start forming, namely with access to water, large scale burials, usually in the forms of mounds start showing back up more commonly.

00:32:53.920 So mounds were common in the bronze age, and then they go away in the iron age, and then they come back in the, uh, Vendal period here, right?

00:33:02.860 this is one of those vaguer versus cither things burial traditions actually fluctuate pretty wildly

00:33:09.000 between cremation secondary inhumation which is where you uh burn the flesh off of a body and

00:33:15.320 then store the bones um internment of ashes internment of urns scattering of ashes placing

00:33:22.100 bones in like earthen graves putting them in mounds it's all really complicated and it fluctuates

00:33:28.540 pretty wildly something to veer off on while we're here especially talking about burial

00:33:39.980 custom and we had spoken earlier about the pre both of these ages stone circles there is

00:33:51.180 a lot of mystery that still surrounds very old custom at the time you have uh i was fortunate

00:34:02.300 enough to go in you know the history better than i do even though i was there what 2014 2013

00:34:11.500 went to denmark with uh our founder on an afa trip and also a number of years later was able to go to

00:34:21.180 sweden and norway and especially in denmark because it's so flat you can see all of these different

00:34:26.860 little little tiny hills i see a lot in southern sweden and

00:34:35.020 there's this idea of dolmens where you have these rock

00:34:39.820 formations that are quote unquote burial mounds of some sort they don't typically find bodies

00:34:46.860 in these burial chambers in these burial mounds which is interesting so you have a very evolved

00:34:53.500 culture of mounds and stuff relating to the treatment of the dead one theory that

00:35:03.500 the uh the danes were suggesting was the idea that some of these places

00:35:09.580 are where there would be a period of time where a body would lie

00:35:14.300 let the soul decouple and do the things that has to do and then later be transferred to a different

00:35:23.720 location for uh internment or however else they they dealt with it but it is interesting to note

00:35:33.120 that was well underway before this period and it kind of evolves a little bit um during this and

00:35:40.320 into the next but uh you know if we have the opportunity discussing the the burial mound and

00:35:47.760 what that is would be cool if we get to that the the denmark trip was august of 2013 by the way um

00:35:57.360 so uh cultures and civilizations have really complicated burial rights when they're in a good

00:36:05.920 time burial gets sloppy when they're in a bad time just as a heads up anyways so another thing that

00:36:14.720 shows up in the archaeological record is board games board games start showing up here people

00:36:20.400 not just elites but also like the middle class start having enough physical capital built up

00:36:25.600 that they can engage in leisure there start being larger amounts of imported goods owned by commoners

00:36:32.240 and commoners start exporting more resources to foreign commoners and foreign elites.

00:36:37.840 The elites of this Vandal Age Scandinavian society start getting elaborate, intricate,

00:36:43.200 and very technologically sophisticated arms and armor. You want to throw up the Sutton Hoo helmet, Nick? 0.99

00:36:53.600 The Sutton Hoo helmet was made at this time. This is a reconstruction because the actual one that

00:36:59.200 survives to us today is in very poor quality but this helmet is composed of iron bronze tin gold

00:37:07.600 and several different kinds of gems one of the eye holes is missing a piece of foil um the whole

00:37:13.440 helmet when in low light has this kind of shiny flickering effect except for the the one black eye

00:37:18.720 that stares at you the entirety of this helmet is covered in religious and ideological imagery

00:37:25.840 and delicate interlace and embossment this is not just a piece of protective headgear

00:37:32.320 it is a walking icon of the religion and ideology of its wearer and it required a very large and

00:37:38.880 very sophisticated economic system to make these are not a primitive people um you can see this

00:37:45.840 picture much larger on i know wikipedia has a big version of it where you can see a lot of what's

00:37:51.200 going on here there's horned dancers there's um he has a mustache that the face the face of the

00:37:59.280 helmet has a mustache which signals that he's a warrior there's birds and dragons on his head

00:38:06.080 there's interlaced creatures there's a warrior with a spear in profile so he has only one eye

00:38:13.440 riding a horse this thing is covered in a lot of pretty things now this is actually from anglo-saxon

00:38:20.720 england not the vendal period but remember beowulf goes from sweden to denmark to britain right so

00:38:29.280 uh throw up the vendal helmet nick

00:38:34.640 this is the vendal helmet this helmet being buried in a grave in the village of vendal

00:38:41.520 is what got the period recognized as a distinct era in scandinavian history so vendal age is a uh

00:38:49.280 material culture. I've said this before. I'll have to say it many times in the future. 0.97

00:38:54.720 A material culture is so named for one of two things. That place where we dug it out of the

00:39:00.900 dirt or look at those weird symbols. Don't they look like an X? Bell beakers. Their beakers look

00:39:08.200 like bells. Linear pottery. Their pottery looks linear. Corded ware. Their wares look corded.

00:39:14.200 Vendel, the thing from the village in Vendel, Neanderthal, from that cave in France.

00:39:23.360 As an aside, Vendel, originally Vendil, comes from the words, either the words Vinda or Vanda, meaning like the windy place, the turny place, probably regarding the lake.

00:39:37.680 anyways so i want to go back to the imagery here because even on this the vendal helmet which is

00:39:45.100 in significantly poorer condition than the very nice reproduction of the sutton who helmet you

00:39:51.660 can see a lot of stuff this thing is covered in symbols there's a dragon there's an eagle there's

00:39:58.100 a man's face there's these two like snakes above the eyebrow right and you can kind of make it out

00:40:04.980 if you see this image up close, that the nose bridge and the eye guards and the head part of

00:40:12.140 the helmet used to have that delicate interlacing embossment on it. It's kind of been lost to rust

00:40:17.460 over time. This helmet is covered in symbols. Less important than what the images actually are

00:40:25.640 is the fact that they are symbols. These people aren't primitive barbarians. They have a complex

00:40:31.280 symbolic inventory that they use to convey meaning visually. The king's helmet is covered in birds

00:40:37.520 and warriors, is not just fanciful decoration. It denotes to the onlooker his status and his

00:40:44.240 participation in the religion, politics, and culture in which he lives. These people at this

00:40:51.120 time have a complex society that conveys values, norms, and roles through material culture.

00:40:58.400 so two things start happening in the vendal period the first development is that the

00:41:06.480 scandinavians start getting really good at navigating the water in the 500s the scandinavians

00:41:12.620 realized that a man with a boat can go anywhere and that it's much easier to move things over

00:41:18.360 the water than it is to move them over the land it's at this time that the scandinavians start

00:41:23.160 trading everywhere from Ireland to the Levant and literally everywhere between that they could

00:41:28.740 reach by boat. During this time, the Scandinavians become very familiar with the world outside of

00:41:34.640 Scandinavia. I need to underscore this. These people are not dumb. They know that there is a

00:41:40.760 world outside of Denmark. They know that the land keeps going once you go past Jutland. They know

00:41:48.500 that there's germania and frankia and iberia and britain and finland and russia and italy and

00:41:55.780 all of these places they are going there they are interacting with them through mercantilism

00:42:02.980 do you want to throw anything about that in sir

00:42:09.620 yeah one thing too and i think chris is doing a great job of illustrating it

00:42:15.380 it these people weren't backwards these people had extensive trade networks they were not primitive

00:42:25.300 they um architecturally left something to be desired from their southern european

00:42:36.900 neighbors because that's not how the culture developed but as far as uh weapons and armor and

00:42:46.900 seafaring um these people top-notch they weren't ignorant of the world around them

00:42:54.020 history had been continuous there wasn't a period of lost history where they had no idea who these

00:42:59.540 people were who came before them as we see in the saga tradition especially in the bolsung saga

00:43:06.900 They're aware of the history of the Goths and the Burgundians and the Huns.

00:43:16.300 You know, I wouldn't necessarily say they're great historical scholars,

00:43:21.580 but they're aware in characters from those episodes in history that occur far, far away

00:43:27.380 and often hundreds of years askew from them.

00:43:32.180 They're aware.

00:43:33.400 They know these things.

00:43:34.900 So there's a tendency in our understanding of the Vikings to, I don't know, to act like these strange people out of the north appear out of nowhere.

00:43:49.580 No one's ever heard of them. No one knows who they are.

00:43:52.380 And then they're ignorant of this world they discover to their south when they go raiding.

00:43:58.860 And it's, you know, the reality is very much not that way.

00:44:04.900 The Romans knew that there was this place in the far north called Scandinavia.

00:44:11.600 That's not what they called it, but they had a name.

00:44:13.740 They called it like Scania or something.

00:44:16.420 There was this place in the far north full of these very far northern Germanic peoples. 0.99

00:44:22.140 And it was too far away for it to be profitable to go and enslave them. 0.96

00:44:27.060 They knew that like, you know, 100 B.C., right?

00:44:31.080 Just so we're clear here.

00:44:32.100 Chris, we've got a question before you continue that's contextual here. Folkwilder Savage,

00:44:41.740 is there any records of the Norse folk having any maps or places they marked as they discovered?

00:44:50.440 Um, yeah, uh, so there's, uh, runestones that say, you know, like, a Ragnar was here, or, you know,

00:45:01.200 Hlufschild's boat came through this way, kind of stuff.

00:45:04.500 Um, there, uh, Norsemen apparently did not see a problem with just, like, defacing stones as they'd find them.

00:45:17.220 including stone statues like there's like lion statues in like baghdad and byzantium

00:45:25.060 that some viking was just like let me get my chisel out and chisel some designs on and it's

00:45:30.660 just like some palace is lion right um there's a pretty famous runic inscription in i believe it's

00:45:36.980 Hagia Sophia in what is today turkey where some guy just started like chiseling a message on a

00:45:44.860 block in this big church right um i'm not aware of any maps per se that have survived to us um

00:45:54.500 but i i do know that i have seen people reconstruct like the world as the scandinavians

00:46:00.820 saw it based on you know in the sagas they say and then we sailed west until we hit such and such

00:46:08.480 place kind of repeat repeat repeat what do these people conceptualize the world as um they knew

00:46:14.580 what the shape of europe was um does that kind of answer the question i think i'm sorry i didn't see

00:46:21.320 this one come in i apologize do you want to throw anything on maps sir um yeah i think so uh

00:46:28.800 just more did they themselves like write a map or have you know how we've uncovered in

00:46:38.620 gamelapsala this you know clear drawing of the new world and of ireland or whatever else

00:46:46.220 i don't know that i've ever seen a viking age no yeah produced by

00:46:52.380 by scandinavians um the closest thing is like chris said they would leave graffiti when they

00:46:59.820 would go places um yeah allegedly depending on what you want to believe they would leave graffiti

00:47:07.980 uh at a couple of sites in the new world um i don't think that's the case but i still think

00:47:14.940 it's interesting and that may be the case on certain places but i don't think the

00:47:19.180 havener runestone or the uh whatever the minnesota one is uh are evidence of that but they are

00:47:25.740 interesting but that is very much in the style they go places and just carve graffiti into stuff

00:47:30.700 The Hagia Sophia inscription is one of the famous examples, and it's one that Steve visited when he was on one of his many world travels years ago.

00:47:44.640 If the Vikings did show up in those places, they absolutely would have written, Olaf was here on a rock, is the important thing to note, though.

00:47:55.420 Is that the Hagia Sophia one, Nick?

00:47:59.560 Yep.

00:48:00.700 Okay. I'm going to get to the boat stuff in a minute, because if you couldn't tell, I'm a boat nerd. But it's worth noting here that how we conceptualize navigation by sea today descends from the Greco-Roman tradition by way of Western Europe.

00:48:23.160 but the scandinavians do seem to have had a very sophisticated understanding of how to navigate the

00:48:29.860 sea without like gps and satellites it's not super well attested there's some theories that

00:48:37.940 they might have used quartz uh the fame it's very famous the sunstones basically it's this rock and

00:48:44.880 if you shine it up to the light you can tilt it a certain way and the light will come out of the

00:48:51.140 light comes through the rock will change there's a theory that these were used for navigation

00:48:54.900 some people argue against that it's way too complicated um the point being here if you go

00:49:02.840 to a completely separate unrelated group of people the polynesians they had really complex

00:49:09.900 very intricate very sophisticated methods of navigating by a stars and winds and currents

00:49:17.000 that developed completely unrelated to the ones that show up in Western Europe,

00:49:23.460 namely deriving from ancient Rome, then the Germans, the French, the English, et cetera, get their hands on them.

00:49:29.440 So the Scandinavians having very complex navigational systems that they just come up with on their own.

00:49:35.700 We're told about it. We're not told much about how it worked, however.

00:49:39.880 It probably did involve the stars, though. You want to say something, sir?

00:49:42.320 yeah just a fun factoid but before i do jeffrey in texas donated ten dollars towards

00:49:50.880 a billion and ten dollars to pay off phrase law thank you jeffrey we appreciate you thank you um

00:50:05.520 i want to say

00:50:06.160 want to say in 2016 when the afa was in a time of expansion we had a very significant west coast

00:50:22.080 population we have a significant east coast population and we've been developing a significant

00:50:28.560 southern population we were working on developing our

00:50:37.040 foothold in minnesota and the surrounding states and so

00:50:45.360 folk builder jason gallagher hosted a very special event up there um

00:50:52.640 fall fest and the first one was a very big deal it was the first time something like this something

00:50:59.600 of the afa had gone up there to a group of very very devout people that really care about this

00:51:06.160 and gave them some attention and you know people from all over that they may have

00:51:13.200 talked about online or heard about went up to visit them and to

00:51:18.960 spread the austral folk assembly in their area and it's the event that set in motion

00:51:23.680 our getting baldur's hawk there in murdoch at that event up there at the time we had a group of

00:51:31.520 of reenactors that were also members.

00:51:38.080 And there was some LARPiness sometimes,

00:51:41.980 but there was other clear,

00:51:43.800 oh, we also do this fun reenacting thing

00:51:46.260 because it's fun.

00:51:47.620 Oh, but now we also do Ausatru

00:51:49.680 because we're normal people doing something to believe in,

00:51:53.260 which is great.

00:51:54.100 Reenacting's fun if people like to do that,

00:51:55.980 that's awesome and history is wonderful.

00:51:58.020 Just, you don't have to conflate the two necessarily.

00:52:01.120 So, a guy up there gifted me one of those sunstones in the hope and with the words that like his,

00:52:15.740 there's a thing when you make like a proclamation over something when you give a gift, when you speak over the horn.

00:52:21.500 I will have to look that up while Chris is talking.

00:52:23.680 But anyways, he made a little speech when he presented it, like hoping that I would find my way back there

00:52:30.240 and that it would lead to future travels to their corner of the world.

00:52:36.200 I don't know that it did or didn't, but that was the first time.

00:52:39.940 I've been up there every year since. 1.00

00:52:42.080 We put a hof there.

00:52:43.480 We've built a major part of the Astro Folk Assembly

00:52:46.200 with amazing people in that part of the world.

00:52:49.440 And that was just a fun little thing that happened

00:52:52.240 at the start of that great adventure that we continue to be on. 0.69

00:52:57.420 all of this is to say these are not dumb winter hillbillies sequestered away in the far reaches

00:53:06.500 of the world they are in contact with people all around western eurasia which you know it might as

00:53:12.960 well be the world as far as people living in western eurasia are concerned right he's talking

00:53:18.060 about benighted minnesotans what oh no your segue was curious sorry um i have to get back to where

00:53:30.420 i was going with this so these people are in contact and familiar with the world outside of

00:53:35.120 scandinavia in the migration period the germanic peoples became enamored by roman coins which they

00:53:42.300 thought were super cool so cool in fact that they felt it inappropriate to trade with them

00:53:48.040 instead they'd wear them the result was a bracteat which is either the bauble on a necklace or

00:53:56.280 perhaps part of a brooch or basically a pin like a campaign pin and then the germanic peoples

00:54:03.020 realized that actually rome was lame so they started making their own coins to use as jewelry

00:54:10.180 on the model of roman coins these tend to have a variety of symbols of importance to the germanic

00:54:17.000 peoples of the time, like a singular eye, spears, torques, runes, a raven, a forked tongue. We'll

00:54:25.160 get to that one in a minute. Horses. You want to throw up the first Bracteat image, Nick? 0.98

00:54:34.280 So this here looks like a Roman coin. Notice he's got the little, that's supposed to be like

00:54:40.560 his toga, right? Then he's got this thing on his head, those like beads, that's a diadem.

00:54:47.000 um so greek and italian elites wore a diadem which is it initially starts out as just a headband

00:54:57.440 then it becomes a fancy headband and then bro what if my headband was made of gold am i right

00:55:03.420 and then the persians get the idea of bro what if my headband had the sun on it because i'm that

00:55:10.780 cool and so they'd put like the orb or the disc of the sun on the front of their headband up here

00:55:16.720 right and then the greeks got a hold of that idea and took the sun and moved it from an orb on the

00:55:23.240 front of the head to points coming out of the rim of the skull that's where the crown comes from

00:55:29.940 the crown that the statue of liberty wears is an intermediary where the rays of the sun sun come

00:55:35.320 out of the head like that and then over time they just kind of bend backwards like that because it's

00:55:39.780 just easier to make happen leading to the archetypal crown this guy in this image this is

00:55:46.020 not a roman coin this is something a germanic smith made to look like a roman coin but have

00:55:54.020 germanic stuff on it he's got a toga on he's got a diadem on those are two symbols of power and

00:56:00.280 royalty in the roman and greek world but notice what's on his left he's got a raven right he's

00:56:07.340 also got a brooch on his uh left shoulder there and then he's got a forked tongue right it's it's

00:56:15.100 not forked. It's a snake's tongue, right? It's a snake's tongue. So snakes were seen as animals

00:56:22.720 of power, eloquence, and wealth in Scandinavia during the Vandal and Viking period. They don't

00:56:28.220 blink, so they're always watching an alert. They have hidey holes, which was apparently where they

00:56:33.820 stored their treasure. They're unmovable and quite stoic, and of course, they're lightning fast and

00:56:38.880 deadly. Also, that flicking tongue was a symbol of eloquence, good speech, being a powerful

00:56:46.480 speaker, right? Again, what do you mean snakes are like symbols of royalty? We're talking about

00:56:53.880 a civilization separate from the Greco-Roman one in a certain sense, right? So they have 0.99

00:57:00.380 a complex symbolic language, and they display this character to look like a Roman emperor

00:57:07.660 in germanic terms but he is distinctly a germanic lord um you want to throw up the second bractiate

00:57:15.940 image nick so this is an actual bractiate it's like the size of like it's a little bit bigger

00:57:23.220 than a quarter just so we're clear this is not a big thing so notice all of that detail on something

00:57:30.300 you know like this big something only slightly bigger than my afa pins here right no no keep it

00:57:37.920 up i want to keep talking about it um so this guy here he's riding a horse you can't really see it

00:57:46.920 because it's all gold but there's a horse underneath him about here or so he's wielding a

00:57:51.900 spear there's birds there's a singular eye him being in profile is to accentuate his one eye

00:57:58.480 He's still wearing a diadem in his hair, but he's got a lot of hair compared to the first guy.

00:58:04.980 Germanic, long hair.

00:58:09.280 This guy doesn't have the tongue, but it kind of looks like he does because of the bird's claw.

00:58:16.180 But this one here has a twerk on it, kind of underneath the bird.

00:58:21.520 It's kind of like a U with two dots on the end.

00:58:24.040 But it's also got runes.

00:58:25.820 Some of these are actual futhark.

00:58:28.100 And sometimes these, um, is this, this, I don't know if this is the one that has Alu on it, but some of these have Futhark on them. Some of them have just like pseudo writing that's meant to look like the, uh, what the Romans would do is they'd put, you know, like glorious emperor, friend of Jupiter, king of the world on their coins, but then they put it in acronyms.

00:58:53.160 So it'd be like, you know, Glor, Gip, Ink, Up, Rome, we're, right?

00:59:00.140 And so these-

00:59:01.560 I'm looking at impressed and not mad at AI now.

00:59:07.020 AI makes up runes all the time, but apparently so did the Vikings.

00:59:11.200 Oh yeah, no.

00:59:12.500 Some of this stuff is meant to look like the writing on a Roman coin, which is gibberish to a Germanic smith.

00:59:18.760 but it's not necessarily a rune because it doesn't have that religious meaning but what

00:59:25.120 does writing look like if you're a germanic smith oh it looks like a futhark so he the smith has to

00:59:30.400 like make up fake runes to mimic the roman coin while not also making this a runic object right

00:59:37.960 um all of this is to say they're displaying cultic and ideological imagery on their jewelry

00:59:46.080 the best modern equivalent to this would probably be a campaign pin that you like get from your

00:59:52.560 church and i'm wearing pins that i got from my church right into the vendal period the

01:00:00.660 scandinavians get a ton more coins and they start festooning themselves with them women

01:00:06.460 in particular women just like cover themselves in coins at this time they cover themselves in

01:00:12.660 christian zoroastrian roman greek and islamic symbols with seemingly no care or concern for

01:00:20.620 what the symbols mean a popular thing to do was to take coins with crucifixes on them

01:00:25.540 and turn them 90 to 45 degrees creating an x shape persian coins meanwhile had the shah and

01:00:33.360 shah's face on one side and the zoroastrian fire on the other and they'd wear these coins as

01:00:39.140 necklaces brooches belts and other baubles with the little fire visible end up right so they're 0.88

01:00:44.700 taking these coins that they get from the trade with the rest of the world and they're like using

01:00:51.060 them as jewelry because of what's on the coin and what they can do with the coin if like oh what if

01:00:57.000 i rotate it what if i punch a hole through it and put it on my necklace or what if i put a bunch of

01:01:01.900 them on a string then i get this cool necklace all these strings what if i put it on a big cord and

01:01:06.200 wear it around my waist so now it's like this jingly kind of belt right now it's important

01:01:11.800 to remember here scandinavians do actually have metal coinage of their own usage at this time

01:01:16.340 but they also have a bullion economy in which silver is exchanged via weight and purity rather

01:01:21.500 than distinct units of currency they aren't using seniorage we'll talk about that more later so the

01:01:27.440 actual shape and make of the coin is irrelevant because in when it's money the atoms of silver

01:01:33.360 or what's fungible we'll talk about this more later this facility facilitates a great movement

01:01:39.920 and settling of people all of this water stuff we're talking about because remember we're talking

01:01:43.680 about water the coins are arising from the water so they can move people around they can move goods

01:01:52.000 around they can settle people very easily so while scandinavia has far fewer people than continental

01:01:57.760 europe and not as much good land it is far better at getting people to the good land that it does

01:02:04.800 have this means there's a lot of farmsteads lots of villages lots of trading trading cities all

01:02:10.160 occupying the optimal land and all rather independent and all quite productive this

01:02:17.360 this decentralized thalassocratic society is ultimately possible because while scandinavia

01:02:22.960 has hierarchy, it doesn't actually have the system of fixing land to people that is found

01:02:27.880 in the mainland continental Christian Europe. It doesn't have feudalism as we think of it.

01:02:33.980 A man is expected to pay a tax to his lord and to contribute to the local religious organization

01:02:38.540 in his area, but how he actually makes those payments is not really important. He can grow

01:02:45.260 barley or cattle or mine silver or hop in a boat and go trade with the Rus or steal it from an

01:02:49.560 Irishman or whatever. You want to throw up the Sutton Who boat, Nick?

01:03:01.600 No. Okay. All right. So the Sutton Who burial site was a ship burial. There we go. There we

01:03:10.580 go. This is the Sutton Who ship and it can hold about 40 rowers. This was buried with the guy

01:03:15.760 who um was buried with the sutton who helmet this was his boat this was an actual seagoing vessel

01:03:22.980 it was used it wasn't built for the purposes of sending him off long ships like this had a single

01:03:30.120 mast perpendicular to the boat's fore-aft axis the mast uh the sorry the sail was perpendicular

01:03:36.760 the the mast could be raised and lowered easily and the sail was kept taut by ropes held by the

01:03:43.080 rowers. However, these boats weren't good at tacking. An innovation that sort of helped with

01:03:48.980 this was the beitas, which is, it sort of looks like a boom for the mast. It's basically a big

01:03:56.720 rod that tilts the sail and sits in these pockets. Longships didn't have rudders. Instead,

01:04:05.860 they'd have a large steering oar in the back. They also lacked keels or leeboards. This combined

01:04:11.760 with the the very small draft meant that they could navigate rivers and shorelines easily

01:04:17.360 it also meant that they were actually quite fragile and could capsize easily and were quite

01:04:23.200 difficult to write do you know what all of that means also here you go sir i don't know if you're

01:04:28.560 a boats guy i don't mean to be rude i don't know the difference between a steering or and a rudder

01:04:34.400 it looks like it does the same thing it does the same thing it does the same thing so

01:04:41.760 um because this means that they can basically flip the boat around and go backwards

01:04:47.720 whereas if you're if you have a rudder your boat has a front and a back right

01:04:52.200 but the these like a long ship theoretically they could just be like all right we're parked

01:04:58.320 all right boys row the other way and just go that way and just flip the detachable udder or a rudder

01:05:05.320 detachable under that would be another i mean that would be useful i guess viking age innovation

01:05:11.700 um so tacking all right the wind pushes the boat right so how do you sail into the wind

01:05:23.160 if you got to go that way so what you do is you sail basically 40 if you want to go north you you

01:05:29.240 go northwest or northeast with your sail really tight and the wind it pushes into the sail at the

01:05:36.980 angle and as it pushes off when it goes at that 45 degree angle it pushes the boat forwards right

01:05:46.820 so tacking at this time is not something boats can do all that easily this combined with the

01:05:54.820 the oarsmen that staffed these long ships meant that these boats were very nimble and very agile

01:06:01.860 right so um the keel you'll notice if you look at that boat it's not all that deep right the keel

01:06:12.020 is a big um fin on the bottom of the boat can you take the image off nick

01:06:21.620 so when the wind blows on the boat goes like this right what happens if the wind blows too much

01:06:28.660 goes like and tips over so you put a keel on the bottom of the boat so when the wind pushes it like

01:06:35.380 this the keel pushes on the water like that so it doesn't tip over as easily right um a leeboard is

01:06:43.620 one that comes off of the the side of the boat right and it can be picked up for moving through

01:06:50.260 shallow draft riverways so these boats are very agile they're very fast but they are

01:06:59.140 a little flimsy in terms of like getting knocked over right but that's also good because what do

01:07:06.040 you do if you're in river a and you want to get into river b well you and your boys get out of

01:07:11.020 the boat you pick it up and you carry it um across the the the land they are light enough that you

01:07:20.940 know 40 men can pick this up and hoof it as opposed to um having to like drag it across the land which

01:07:29.100 is really cumbersome and damaging to the boat right um all right anything you want to add in

01:07:36.580 about boats sir boats are cool um i mentioned earlier about all the coastline boats made

01:07:48.100 life so much easier in all the possible ways it is the only way to travel if you had

01:07:58.580 the means it gets you all the places and it also gets you significantly inland in a lot of places

01:08:06.000 because it's got such a low um low water displacement you can go deeper into

01:08:17.200 the land mass than you can with other types of boats at the time

01:08:25.360 they're really good to land troops to raid stuff and then abscond with valuables

01:08:32.160 but they're also really good to be able to go trade trade upriver to places that don't have

01:08:39.140 other access to trade as often to really get far afield their ability to

01:08:45.460 their one decent i don't know how i want to put this one upper middle class guy could go a lot

01:09:01.680 places that you couldn't in continental europe not of your own power you'd have to go through

01:09:07.680 a bunch of different road systems and things and over national boundaries and

01:09:14.480 you had a much harder time of it if you were a landed guy who had a boat in scandinavia you could

01:09:21.600 go and trade in a lot of distant places if you wanted to put the effort in you could go to the

01:09:26.640 mediterranean you could go deep into russia you could do a lot of these things and it really

01:09:35.040 i think this may overextend the analogy but

01:09:39.360 in studying the united states when you get the car it changes the world for everybody

01:09:46.320 you have people that are very regional and if you're rich or you were in the military you had

01:09:51.200 some like actual reason to you can get on a train do a big journey if you're rich maybe take a boat

01:09:57.680 somewhere um you could invest months of your life on a wagon train to try to one time move somewhere

01:10:06.640 and then you got to a point in the 20th century where a young person with very little you know

01:10:10.720 hey i just graduated high school i got my car i can drive across the country i can

01:10:15.600 see the world that can do all these things this boat development opened that up for the

01:10:22.620 vikings in a very particular and special way so these people have boats to move people and stuff

01:10:32.640 around they are starting to have people they're starting to have stuff the second big development

01:10:40.200 is that Scandinavians start having enough stuff for it to be worth trying to centralize power.

01:10:46.440 The elites of these tribes start gathering increasing amounts of wealth and men into their

01:10:52.180 own hands via taxation, patronage, and raiding each other. The conflict between the Sphere and

01:10:58.400 the Geats is already discussed, and by the time of the writing of the sagas seems to have cooled

01:11:02.480 through a simmer, but Sweden has these two big power blocks that are coming to blows, the Sphere

01:11:07.440 and the Geats. Increasingly through the Vandal period, the power of the tribe begins to wane,

01:11:14.440 and the power of the warlord begins to rise. The warlords increasingly become expected to settle

01:11:19.640 legal disputes, to fund public works, to become religious patrons, if not leaders, and so on.

01:11:25.400 They are not just bandits hoovering up silver and pretty coins from Rome. They are civic leaders

01:11:35.100 and elites who are simply put expected to like ply the socially useful trade of being an elite

01:11:44.220 the wealth makes them great patrons and allows them to amass large amounts of labor for

01:11:51.240 vanity projects such as lavish burials but they also have smiths and jewelers who make them pretty

01:11:58.080 things, right? And who work for them. These people have like jewelers living on their estates.

01:12:06.420 This is where the institution of the thrallar, or thralls, comes from. Thralls aren't actually

01:12:13.560 slaves in the traditional sense, as they aren't actually property per se. Rather, they're people

01:12:19.080 who perform relatively unskilled labor in return for food and housing, either due to legal obligation

01:12:24.280 or simple lack of alternatives. This is really important, the terms thrall, carl, and yarrow,

01:12:32.800 thrall, yarrow, carl. These terms get moralized pretty early in the Norse lexicon. Sayings that

01:12:41.180 someone is yarrow-like is just as much as a compliment about their demeanor and their 0.88

01:12:46.160 character as it is to say he's rich and has a bunch of war bands, right? Saying someone is

01:12:52.260 Thrall-ish is just as much about their character as it is to say he is legally forced to perform labor, right?

01:13:05.740 So, why are Thralls not slaves? 0.59

01:13:10.900 Scandinavians never natively developed the legal notion of someone as being property. 0.87

01:13:15.280 That idea is actually imported with Christianity, in part because foreign Christian priests wanted and expected to have slaves.

01:13:24.680 At this time that we're talking about, 500 to 900 AD, Christian Europe still has slavery. 0.52

01:13:30.900 Slavery is just a norm in Christian Europe at this time. 0.64

01:13:34.920 Christian priests wanted and expected to have slaves. 0.52

01:13:37.960 Christian monasticism was possible in much of Europe due to slavery. 0.90

01:13:41.720 When Scandinavians thus enslave someone, what they're really doing is either inducting them into thrallhood or they're going to then sell them to Christians in Europe or in Western Europe or in Eastern Europe. 0.82

01:13:57.160 So a thrall is someone who their labor is owned by someone else, not their person. 0.65

01:14:04.640 And that's a very subtle distinction, but it matters a lot in the legal treatment of them. Right.

01:14:13.060 So, as I said, when Scandinavians enslave someone, they're kidnapping them and they're either going to, we'll talk about this more later, forcibly resettle them in Norway as the client of a lord, or they're kidnapping them to sell at a slave market in Christian Europe, basically. 0.87

01:14:29.420 So, we have this growing aristocracy, and they're finding themselves with laborers to parcel out to middle-class farmers. 0.86

01:14:38.680 They're finding themselves with fishermen and craftsmen in boats and shipyards.

01:14:44.360 These craftsmen can then provide these aristocrats with nice things.

01:14:48.320 and of course these aristocrats are fighting with each other and realizing that an easy way to get

01:14:55.460 cash is to take it from the peasants that your enemy aristocrats are taxing but you know what

01:15:02.860 would make you really cool if you were a lord what would make you a great warlord if you were known

01:15:08.800 for going out and raiding outsiders now that would be cool anyways hypotheticals over so scandinavia

01:15:15.180 has this massive buildup of capital and people and stuff, and these elites that are saying,

01:15:22.860 I want a piece of that, that are investing in the land that they have. They're not just stealing

01:15:27.940 stuff. They're investing in it. They're building roads. They're building capital. They're funding

01:15:32.520 expeditions. They're funding farmsteads. They're funding fishing villages. They're funding shipyards.

01:15:37.380 They're funding trading centers. Now, it's worth noting here that the tribes as political

01:15:42.880 institutions fade, but they don't go away as a social framework. Rather, there's a sort of

01:15:47.540 turnover that occurs. The old tribal affiliations become pointless as eventually everyone is part 0.93

01:15:54.680 of the tribe, and family membership and affiliation with the Lord and other non-tribal

01:15:59.320 political institutions become more important. When everyone is a sphere, then it doesn't matter 0.96

01:16:06.680 if anyone is what does matter is me and my cousins right what does matter is i am the

01:16:14.480 thane of lord such and such what does matter is i'm part of this religious network right

01:16:19.700 as an example and just to go back to that parallel civilization kind of thing primogeniture does not

01:16:27.480 actually seem to be something of significant importance in germanic culture at this time

01:16:32.780 Rather, the Germanics had this idea of property as being shared in ownership by a family, with one member of that family actually having the right to use the land.

01:16:41.560 This is where the Odal that Beowulf has to attend to comes from.

01:16:46.440 This is also where the legal concept of wereguild functionally originates, as the legal system is set up to minimize conflict via recompensation because a man is expected to have kin that are socially obliged to back him if he's wrong. 0.89

01:17:00.220 And that can obviously lead to feuds, which are diffused by a recompensation.

01:17:06.920 As an aside, ODAL, I believe it's maybe, is it ADAL today?

01:17:11.480 I don't remember.

01:17:12.440 It's still a form of property ownership in Denmark.

01:17:15.060 It's basically where the property cannot be sold to someone outside of a family unless everyone in the family turns down buying it from the current owner first.

01:17:24.260 Go on, sir.

01:17:26.660 Oh, okay.

01:17:27.600 I thought you unmuted.

01:17:30.220 You might have heard about a Norseman being required to know nine generations of his kin

01:17:34.960 to access the legal system. That's not technically true. Rather, various legal procedures would

01:17:41.360 require him to know who his kin were, which was defined by varying degrees of separation. So like

01:17:47.420 Sippenhaft. Sippenhaft is a German word. If we use the cognate today, it would be Sibheft.

01:17:54.460 That's basically where if your brother steals something and the authorities can't get their

01:17:59.500 hands on him, you have to pay for the writing of the wall, right?

01:18:05.760 So like Sip and Hoff, you might have to know seven degrees of kinship, but like property

01:18:12.120 transfers might only require four, right?

01:18:14.540 The nine is just because nine is a cool number.

01:18:17.820 You want to throw up the Beowulf map, Nick?

01:18:22.440 As we're talking about a couple of words and things Chris has used lately that I think

01:18:28.940 I think it's worth talking about um Norse and Germanic understanding of justice

01:18:41.960 he mentioned where guild and he mentioned um Odal uh land and Odal estate and that comes

01:18:49.400 from the room or it is the same concept as the room Othala that means your

01:18:54.980 ancestral inherited property there's

01:19:00.620 one of the things that is particularly important in the concept of justice is not

01:19:09.020 as much punishment that's a fun side issue or whatever but more everything has value to it and

01:19:20.580 And when I commit a crime against you, against, I guess, in later iterations against the state,

01:19:33.220 whoever I commit a crime against, I've taken value from either by inflicting damage, by

01:19:42.360 literally stealing something, by damaging your reputation.

01:19:45.760 If we're, you know, in the hall and I call you out and I defame your character, it's not that I owe you to, like, make you feel better or because I've transgressed.

01:20:00.820 Your reputation has a tangible value.

01:20:04.560 And I have diminished its value by saying, you know, by spreading rumors or saying something wasn't true.

01:20:13.000 so I would need to

01:20:15.300 do the best I could

01:20:19.380 to make you whole

01:20:20.840 with what I've taken from you

01:20:22.700 so in the idea of wereguild

01:20:25.260 or the man price 1.00

01:20:26.340 if I kill your 1.00

01:20:30.080 dim-witted brother 1.00

01:20:32.760 there's a value to that 1.00

01:20:35.680 if I killed your brother 1.00

01:20:38.340 that's a hero 1.00

01:20:39.100 and that's a hereser

01:20:40.480 I would owe you a different value

01:20:43.000 the other option is you can diminish me in my house of equal measure by taking your

01:20:50.060 vengeance on me but it's not i'm so mad at this guy i'm going to hurt him or i'm going to punish

01:20:57.120 him for what he did wrong it's the scales of reputation and value between us has been altered

01:21:05.240 by your transgression so you can either compensate me to bring that back to right or i can take

01:21:13.400 something from you to bring it back to right so i can by either addition or subtraction we're going

01:21:19.500 to regain our standing relative to one another and sure these are our people so yeah you want

01:21:28.720 to hurt people that have hurt you and done something wrong to you but it wasn't so much

01:21:33.260 about punishment as it was about reconciling a taking of value. And I say that to reiterate

01:21:44.060 out some true things that matter, like reputation. Reputation has a value. It's not just an idea.

01:21:52.120 It's not a warm and fuzzy. It's not just an ego thing. The way your community views you

01:21:58.940 has a metaphysical value.

01:22:05.260 Restoring that or recognizing the loss of that

01:22:08.200 is a real thing.

01:22:09.420 That's something that's very relevant to what we do.

01:22:11.840 And it kind of goes into some of these things.

01:22:14.520 As we'll see later,

01:22:15.600 a lot of Viking feuds and things

01:22:21.660 are to address this kind of an issue.

01:22:26.220 When it comes to punishment,

01:22:28.040 the idea of outlawry

01:22:29.860 counts. And again, that doesn't really

01:22:32.200 balance the scales, but it recognizes

01:22:34.600 whereas what I just talked about earlier

01:22:38.240 in justice is man versus man

01:22:40.380 or family versus family

01:22:42.440 outlawry

01:22:43.360 affects

01:22:45.800 man versus society.

01:22:47.780 And if you're going to transgress

01:22:49.560 versus society, you've broken the

01:22:51.660 social contract and you're no longer

01:22:53.480 part of and entitled to the protection

01:22:55.780 society brings you.

01:22:58.040 So you were out by yourself and then it's kind of sport for anyone that then wants to rob you or kill you or whatever they want to do to you because you no longer have rights.

01:23:08.880 So surely more on that later, but those concepts are relevant to what we're talking about and they're brought up a little bit.

01:23:17.700 So I figured I'd throw that out there.

01:23:20.960 And this here that was just said, that's vaguer, right?

01:23:25.960 The actual price of, or like the procedures for how you go about getting the wereguild, that is Scyther, right?

01:23:38.640 People and things having value, that is the principle that we're talking about here, right?

01:23:47.100 That's the important thing in terms of like the theology of what this is, right?

01:23:55.960 and it's worth noting here uh just to say it the king does have a price on his on his head that

01:24:05.560 sounds odd but you know like there is a wereguild for a king you can kill a king and pay the wereguild

01:24:12.360 and theoretically restore what was broken but there are certain circumstances in which

01:24:20.000 that is acceptable and there are certain circumstances where it's not and where it's

01:24:25.180 not also is important this is getting far afield here but like you know um there's a difference

01:24:32.280 between killing a king and being able to pay wereguild and treason which you cannot pay wereguild

01:24:39.140 for right so um back to beowulf so you don't need to put the map back up nick but um beowulf is set

01:24:50.800 during this time in what is about the 500s. You will notice that Beowulf is very concerned with

01:24:55.640 heroism, with virtue, with manliness, but there's relatively little piracy. There's a war band,

01:25:02.420 but it seems more like the war band is there to fight other war bands rather than outsiders.

01:25:09.020 Hrofgar is described as a Theoden, which is the term for the leader of the tribe,

01:25:14.980 but he's also obviously a warlord who rules in a hall and isn't involved in

01:25:19.940 the tribe at all.

01:25:24.360 I was hoping that the Altair Goody would be back so I can bring it.

01:25:28.480 Okay.

01:25:28.840 Do you have anything you want to say about heroism in Beowulf?

01:25:32.920 Yeah,

01:25:33.440 it's awesome.

01:25:35.840 So read Beowulf.

01:25:37.360 It's really good.

01:25:42.680 Throughout.

01:25:43.200 out certainly throughout all of the period that we've talked about in the previous episodes

01:25:51.120 from the very earliest time up to and until today and into the future

01:25:59.680 our faith is a heroic faith we celebrate heroes

01:26:06.480 heroes negate the concept of equality

01:26:09.920 people cannot be equal and you have heroes inequality creates the struggles in life

01:26:21.460 necessary to overcome them and do something heroic we have always celebrated the hero

01:26:29.780 we are in an age where we feel the need to buck that or to celebrate the anti-hero or to

01:26:40.640 you know act like we're better than heroism we're not we've always celebrated heroes

01:26:48.080 and that's what our stories celebrate and tell us and that's what we

01:26:53.440 do our best to honor uh to this day beowulf displays that in a very particular way this period

01:27:03.840 shapes our our conception of the individual hero in a very particular way

01:27:15.280 different versions of our folk in different parts of europe have refined their heroes

01:27:23.520 in slightly different ways but it is a concept that is always there it's a concept that now

01:27:31.280 because the world is opposed to white values it's harder to find but certainly up into and through

01:27:43.440 the second world war you see that you see the celebration of the hero of the warlord

01:27:49.440 of the outstanding single combatant you see that with the fighter aces you see that with

01:27:54.960 The recipients of, you know, in the First World War of the Portland Marit, you see that in Medal of Honor winners, you see that in Victoria Cross winners, or in Iron Cross winners, the oak leaves and swords and diamonds, you see the celebration of the hero.

01:28:15.960 So this Vendel period is where that really takes on all of the trappings of, you know, guilt, ridiculous armor and helmets and swords and teams of horses that are gifted and the height of that hero veneration and celebration.

01:28:39.180 and it carries through and it very much informs the period to come but it's displayed in a really

01:28:44.620 beautiful way in bay wolf and i would really encourage that everybody take the time to

01:28:50.220 um read it and really savor it because there's a lot there also we did episodes on this with uh

01:28:58.380 with brandy a long time ago that are worth revisiting and taking a look at if you haven't seen

01:29:04.140 those yet

01:29:08.300 The important thing here is that these warlords, these elites that are building in the Vendal period, are not bullies who are just kind of taking stuff.

01:29:23.980 They are just as much givers of wealth as they are takers of it. Beowulf is a ring giver. He rewards his friends and punishes his enemies.

01:29:35.440 he is a man who is accumulating value not just in terms of like shiny gold things and land and

01:29:43.580 concubines but in the sense of spiritual and mental value as well he is a man who does great

01:29:50.680 things and he's a man who has good things he's a man who tries to win and that is what these elites

01:29:57.380 are trying to be. They're trying to be winners, right? So, while this is happening, in 635 AD,

01:30:07.380 Nidh Ugin of Ireland founds the Lindisfarne Priory as a center to train Christian monks for

01:30:15.000 the purposes of spreading Christianity amongst Northumbria and beyond. The island that he founds

01:30:21.280 this monastery on had essentially been given to the project for the use as a fortified center

01:30:26.660 of ideological attack on Anglo-Saxon Osatru.

01:30:31.080 The water, separating it from the mainland,

01:30:33.860 protected it from any reprisals against attacks on the true faith.

01:30:37.560 It was here that Cuthbert, the famed sorcerer and Christian ideologue, would rule from.

01:30:43.920 Lindisfarne was wealthy, fat, and devoted to the cause of Christianity. 0.88

01:30:49.580 Then, on 793 June 8th, a boat full of Scandinavians showed up.

01:30:57.620 And thus begins the Viking Age. Because the Priory lacked any sort of fortification as it

01:31:06.020 was defended from the Anglo-Saxons by traitorous kings, the Vikings simply landed their boat on

01:31:11.540 the coast and walked up. Because it lacked any sort of armaments, they just walked in.

01:31:17.460 Anyone who got in their way was hacked to death with axes, although some were drowned in the sea

01:31:23.140 and others were thrown into chains and tossed onto the boat to be sold into slavery.

01:31:28.420 And that is the official first Viking raid in history. Now, of course, raiding had been going

01:31:35.220 on for quite a while, but this is the one. This event was shocking to the elites of Christian 0.79

01:31:42.300 Europe, who were comfortable in the delusion that they were approaching the obvious end of history 0.87

01:31:47.760 and the conquest of the world by the open society and its managerial elite.

01:31:53.300 An attack on a center of ideological correctness by people from outside was unthinkable.

01:32:00.300 It was also very weird. 0.77

01:32:02.340 Scandinavians were, from the Christian perspective, 0.96

01:32:05.180 simple bumpkins on the edge of the world waiting for Christianity to finally come and educate them.

01:32:10.720 An actual act of aggression by them was unheard of. 0.97

01:32:14.000 Pagans didn't fight back. 0.99

01:32:15.920 They existed to be victimized by Christians, especially these, like, weird fishermen merchants from the far north. 1.00

01:32:24.920 Would you throw up the Viking Age map, Nick? 1.00

01:32:30.980 So, this here is a map of Viking settlement and also raids.

01:32:38.020 The term Viking is going to show up a lot here.

01:32:40.740 I'm going to define it a little more properly in a bit.

01:32:43.480 But long story short, the dark red is early Norse settlement, lighter red is later, then you get orange, then yellow.

01:32:55.540 Green areas on this map are subjected to large-scale raiding, but there's not a lot of settlement, right?

01:33:03.160 So, as I said, Scandinavians had in reality been raiding the coasts of Europe for several decades before this.

01:33:09.420 But this act in 793 was what, you know, woke up Christian Europe to a possibility that it had been ignoring for some time.

01:33:17.760 The Battle of Tours was in 732, 59 years prior.

01:33:22.440 Christian Europe was thus faced with an uncomfortable reality. 0.88

01:33:27.660 Christianity and its endless consumption of the globe was sandwiched between two hostile outside civilizations 0.78

01:33:34.200 that did not care about the finger-wagging of the managerial elite

01:33:37.980 and both had no problem asserting the legitimacy of their systems

01:33:42.340 and both had no problem defending themselves. 0.86

01:33:47.500 Christians wanted to make victims of them. 0.98

01:33:51.460 Those two civilizations are the Norse in the north 1.00

01:33:54.280 and the Muslims in the south, for clarity.

01:33:57.160 It's worth noting that circa 793, Christian Europe,

01:33:59.840 used Scandinavia, the Baltics, what is today Finland,

01:34:02.300 and much of the territory of the Rus as one disorganized block.

01:34:06.700 So it's not just like, oh, goodness, the Swedes are waking up.

01:34:11.460 No, it's like Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, the Baltic world,

01:34:17.380 all of Eastern Europe down to Bulgaria. 0.97

01:34:20.260 There's this huge Northeast block that is a problem for Christian Europe. 0.94

01:34:27.400 The Vendal period was marked by Scandinavians looking beyond the horizon and thinking, 0.95

01:34:33.640 what's out there?

01:34:35.600 The Viking Age was marked by Scandinavians looking beyond the horizon and thinking,

01:34:40.120 I wonder what I can take from out there.

01:34:43.140 What's important about the Viking Age is that it corresponds with a population explosion

01:34:47.940 matched with a technological leap.

01:34:51.060 Scandinavians attain better boats, better armor, better weapons, better farming, better tools,

01:34:55.740 and they have more of all of it. They also have increasingly sophisticated governance.

01:35:01.600 The tribes and polities fade and instead have been replaced by complex kinship networks of

01:35:06.600 extended families, local aristocracies, Yarlar and Konangir. We'll talk more about them in a little

01:35:11.640 bit. They've done away with local assemblies, having to solve everything, and instead have

01:35:16.680 complex legal systems, ways of engaging in arbitration, and sophisticated methods of

01:35:22.220 property ownership. You might have heard of like law speakers. These guys are kind of like mobile

01:35:26.920 law courts, right? A law speaker and a yarl, an aristocrat, are basically a mobile law court

01:35:37.380 and enforcement unit of that law. So whereas Christian Europe develops states out of the 0.86

01:35:43.740 personal ownership of lands by aristocrats and essentially hiring peasants to manage their

01:35:48.780 land holdings in theory um king charles owns all of britain and then tasks parliament to

01:35:58.180 run it for him they are his ministers there's a prime minister the top guy that runs his estates

01:36:07.740 right that develops out of the king having a bunch of land and then tasking some of the

01:36:14.540 the lowborns, with running the various aspects, and then he's got the chief lowborn that, you know,

01:36:20.080 fills him in on things every now and then.

01:36:24.800 Ossetrus Scandinavia is developing statehood from legal systems meant for lower class and

01:36:30.500 lower ranking aristocrats, settling their disputes, ensuring and guaranteeing their property.

01:36:36.480 And these proto-states are essentially hiring the aristocrats as enforcers and patrons in a certain

01:36:41.920 sense. Go on, sir. You have angered someone in the chat room. He feels that you were defending

01:36:54.540 the Muslims against the Christians. I don't think that you were, but would you like to contextualize

01:37:03.200 that situation? I felt like you were just giving the raw at this time.

01:37:10.480 Oh, yeah. No, it's just people outside. Yeah. No, it's pencerning Christianity, one of which happens to be Muslims.

01:37:20.080 Yeah. No, this is also going on with Central Asians, too. The Huns, much later, it's the Mongols, who do actually end up taking up Islam, but that's so late as to not really be relevant to the Mongol invasions. 0.87

01:37:37.180 No, I mean, there is two power blocks sandwiching Christian Europe, both of which are willing to take stuff that they want and are willing to fight back against Christian Europe when it wants to take their stuff. 0.59

01:37:54.160 This is just the raw geopolitic of it. 0.69

01:37:56.860 Where this becomes interesting is that Christian Europe had developed.

01:38:00.860 so if you look at the situation with greece and rome there's the christian religion more or less

01:38:08.260 captures the empire and then the fist tightens and there's this progressive unfolding of christian

01:38:15.100 power against the pagan world against the greeks and the romans right and there develops this 0.78

01:38:21.340 attitude of these people are ripe for the picking and there's no islam at the time right so circa 0.76

01:38:30.060 like 400 AD, Roman Christians just see the world as an open horizon for conquest by the Roman 0.95

01:38:38.540 Empire and the spread of Christianity amongst the Gentile world. Then Islam in the South 0.96

01:38:46.800 cropping up presents the Christian world with a very odd dilemma because up until then they just 0.99

01:38:54.080 assumed yeah there's there's no one who can you know fight back physically and no one who's willing

01:39:01.000 to engage with us intellectually on these terms like uh christian authors talk about how like 0.96

01:39:07.980 well the romans the greeks and romans don't have a singular holy book they're barbarians muslims do 0.50

01:39:12.640 have a singular holy book christians have missionaries muslims have missionaries who 0.88

01:39:17.640 doesn't have missionaries the greeks and romans um i have to read the comment real quick to see here

01:39:23.320 i mean i'm not saying that oh man okay um i think this is a more complicated thing that

01:39:33.380 we should revisit in a little bit here uh i said this is a more complicated thing that

01:39:38.940 we should revisit in a minute here sir i have to like read the entire thing no you're fine

01:39:46.160 i know that guy's misses the point of what you're saying it was just reacting i just

01:39:51.500 figured while it was fresh, you might want to contextualize if there's anything to contextualize

01:39:57.940 because someone in the audience was unhappy about Muslim incursions into Europe.

01:40:05.820 I also, for the record, am unhappy about Muslims' incursion into Europe. 1.00

01:40:10.700 Yeah, me too. 1.00

01:40:11.780 I am glad that they were driven back. 0.86

01:40:13.820 I'm glad that El Cid and his folks drove them from Spain. 0.99

01:40:23.100 We are not in any way in support of them or those folks. 0.99

01:40:28.640 But history is history.

01:40:30.620 Truth is one of our virtues.

01:40:31.840 And we do like to present accurate understanding of history and time periods.

01:40:37.860 i don't i don't know if the asset true folk assembly of all of all institutions has to like

01:40:46.180 clarify though like we commit shirk every day we live in a world where one of the things that's

01:40:52.520 cool about vns is as we do this we end up getting in a lot of different people's feeds and people

01:40:59.740 who've never heard about us before never heard about this have no idea what we're talking about

01:41:03.820 pop in for a second like oh this is live what are they talking about and they can catch something

01:41:09.560 at a at a strange time so it's worth clarifying in case uh the casual audience may pop in and not

01:41:18.360 um you know and not be as familiar and i think that's that's good to you know be aware of so

01:41:24.400 also charles donated 50 towards uh this very program and 50 towards balder's house steeple

01:41:32.840 thank you charles and steven in japan uh frequent donor to the program donated ten dollars to paying

01:41:40.440 off very soft and five towards uh uh so thank you so much we appreciate you uh very much appreciated

01:41:50.840 we appreciate your consistent generosity so before i uh continue about the political structure of

01:41:59.160 viking age scandinavia i just want to kind of contextualize something important here 793 the

01:42:06.360 sacking of the lindisfarne priory scares a lot of people in christian europe they are terrified of

01:42:13.640 this it is not something that they see as supposed to happen right there was an arc of history things

01:42:23.160 were supposed to go one way and they weren't intellectually sure how to handle things going

01:42:30.520 the other way this isn't necessarily to say that like sacking monasteries is like good or something

01:42:38.360 as much as it is to to describe to the audience about how big of a deal this was for people in

01:42:47.560 in Francia in Italia in Germania who are extremely upset about this event because if you go looking

01:42:57.560 you you will see a lot of people are really scared of the Vikings there are people who are scared of

01:43:03.720 the Vikings that live nowhere near a river there are people that are scared of the Vikings in an

01:43:07.640 area that never gets hit by Scandinavian colonization or raiding they are scared not

01:43:13.960 Not because they're necessarily worried about, like, getting in a fight with a Dane.

01:43:18.960 They're scared because this is an intellectual problem for their worldview, right?

01:43:25.960 And we will get to some of that stuff later here, going back to their statehood here.

01:43:34.960 So, initially, as the Iron Age came into swing, Germanic society was dominated by tribes.

01:43:40.960 no republican institutions led by a sort of pseudo-democratic, I guess you could call it,

01:43:46.620 council of elders. These elders would elect, as in elevate, a powerful aristocrat to the position

01:43:52.700 of Theodhanaz to be their leader. This leader would hold autocratic power, but only for the

01:43:57.660 good of the tribe as a whole. Membership, or rather citizenry, in these tribes as a man was

01:44:04.860 contingent upon one being a landholder and fighting in the army or rowing in the fleet.

01:44:09.220 In return, one was allowed to participate in the thing, which was both a law court and a sort of democratic legal assembly.

01:44:17.520 This is very similar to the city-states of Greece, as both the Germanic tribe and the Greek city-state emerged from the same post-Bronze Age collapse environment.

01:44:28.900 When I say city-states of Greece, think Sparta, Thebes, Corinth, and pre-democratic Athens.

01:44:33.800 The democracy that characterized classical Athens was in many ways an aberration, and the whole biger way into citizenship thing was viewed as scandalous and abhorrent by the inhabitants of most Greek city-states other than Athens.

01:44:47.340 And as Plato demonstrates, quite a few Athenians actually really disliked it, too.

01:44:54.020 I'm not going to get into the tyranny of the 30, although it's a really cool period in Greek history.

01:44:58.480 so when we talk about like when people talk about like democracy in the viking age here remember

01:45:04.160 that what makes athens and athenian democracy unique is its focus on suffrage rather than like

01:45:11.520 you know okay let's ask people what they what they matter or what matters to them what they care

01:45:16.840 about the former says that if one more man votes for item a then item b then item a is what will

01:45:23.360 be done. Athenian democracy was first past the post. Whereas this latter Germanic system holds

01:45:29.660 that men should be allowed to plead a case, even if it wasn't the more popular one, and that their

01:45:34.320 concerns should still be accounted for. Speaking of Greece, Nick, throw up the Viking age map real

01:45:40.740 quick. I had a cool bit here. I'm sorry. Um, throw up the Viking age map real quick. Number seven.

01:46:03.760 All right. So this is the Norse colonization and conquest. Now throw up the Greek colonization 0.93

01:46:09.840 map very similar phenomena here people who live on the edge of the world penned in by mountains

01:46:18.720 realize that boats are awesome and they spend a lot of time building up their population and

01:46:25.100 then they just explode across the sea right all right so what's essentially happening here is 0.97

01:46:33.080 that as the number of people increases the old tribal assemblies become unable to achieve

01:46:38.040 significant mass to obtain consensus. Thus, they break up into smaller units. Meanwhile,

01:46:44.160 the aristocrats gain enough power to tip the scales, as it were, by holding military power,

01:46:49.460 social prestige, wealth, and religious office. But they hold these things by appealing to the

01:46:54.640 people in the kinship networks that are forming on the ground. So this is important because we

01:47:00.360 talked about heroism in Beowulf and the spiritual and cultural aspects of it.

01:47:05.740 And what does that look like if you apply that to a culture that values these things and believes that political leadership is in some way related to heroism, related to manliness, right?

01:47:21.100 That leads into this aristocratic and unironically elitist political culture in Scandinavia.

01:47:29.240 The elite of this society were the Jarls or Jarlar.

01:47:34.260 The term Jarl and Earl end up becoming codified into pseudo-governmental offices around the 1200s,

01:47:40.840 but in the Viking Age, you know, the 800s.

01:47:43.000 Before that, they refer to a general term meaning aristocrat.

01:47:47.520 Owning a horse, wielding a sword, being suitably wealthy, being able to call on a suitable number of men to fight for you,

01:47:54.660 and, of course, being literate and religiously earned, these are all marks of a Jarl. 0.75

01:48:00.840 Yarlar are deputized by the Konangir, the kings, and lower Yarlar are deputized by higher Yarlar.

01:48:09.920 In something more like, pardon the comparison, more like the mafia than a government office,

01:48:15.300 the king will task a trusted guy to handle a matter, but that guy is trusted in part because he holds status and authority independently. 0.81

01:48:24.700 The king does not grant the Jarls their status.

01:48:27.660 That's an important thing to understand.

01:48:29.920 So, there's a transition that happens whereby the paramount ruler of a land in a region goes from being the Theudanas to being the Konomer, the leader of the race to the first amongst the king. 0.80

01:48:42.380 This happens as the power of the tribe wanes and the power of the warlord rises.

01:48:46.800 This results in a hierarchy as membership in society becomes increasingly associated with loyalty to a lord and increasingly less about participation in tribal assemblies. 0.61

01:48:57.740 the middle class were the carlar who were free landholders they had various thrallar

01:49:04.880 thralls living on their lands again it should be noted that not all thrallar are slaves and the

01:49:11.800 reality of what a thrall is is far too complex to get into here and it baffles academics because

01:49:17.980 it's not a one-to-one with you know roman or pre-civil war antebellum slavery right so the

01:49:28.620 carlar are then lorded over by the yarlar and the yarlar receive taxes labor military service etc

01:49:34.540 from the carlar in return for offering protection legal services and religious leadership again this

01:49:39.180 is important these elites are offering patronage they are building roads they are funding the

01:49:45.420 creation of towns they're offering loans which is important right they are not just stationary

01:49:52.940 bandits they are actually productive for the economy of scandinavia above the yarlar was the

01:50:00.620 konunger who was the paramount leader in a region a yarlar was not accepted due to votes but because

01:50:07.580 no one contested his power so too was a konunger or rather a king these are a combination of ascent

01:50:15.180 to rule in return from benefiting a populace and military strongmanship. This means that there can

01:50:21.020 actually be joint rule of multiple kings at one time. This shows up a few times and it's interesting

01:50:27.780 to see how it happens, but I digress. The Koninger was the top dog, the supreme religious leader, 0.77

01:50:34.440 the highest ranking military officer, and the legal authority. What he said went, but he was

01:50:39.640 still a person and held these positions by virtue of social standing. This is why multiple Koninger

01:50:44.920 can rule a given area. The position is determined by the individuals. Because these positions of

01:50:52.260 governance are held by individual ability and power, Yarlar and Konamir are actually

01:50:58.160 encouraged both by the social system and by the actual people living in the society

01:51:03.960 to increase their power base. You, as a Karl, want to live under a wealthy Jarl,

01:51:11.700 And you, as a Swede, want to live under a powerful king.

01:51:16.760 The stronger your elites, the stronger your aristocrats, the better off you as an individual who is not an elite or an aristocrat are.

01:51:27.020 Do you want to throw anything in, sir?

01:51:35.060 Aristocracy, good.

01:51:41.700 No, just as a general statement of Ausatru governance, I think that there is a, I think

01:51:56.980 in the 1980s and 90s there was a particular focus on also true in a

01:52:07.460 like a two print two pincered germanic tribes you know around hermanstein

01:52:17.940 thrust and a focus on the very last gasp in iceland

01:52:26.980 There is a wide range of appropriate Austro governance.

01:52:32.240 I think some people in their head have the idea of these assemblies.

01:52:37.800 But there's very much, and a lot of places spread out, strong monarchies.

01:52:46.600 There's strong monarchy in the Austro kingdoms of England, in Denmark, in Norway, in Sweden, and in Gothia.

01:52:56.880 There are these examples of royalty and of very centralized, for the time and for the circumstance, powerful rulers.

01:53:10.200 So there's a lot of right ways to do it.

01:53:12.540 And there's a lot of different ways that at different times and different places, our ancestors practiced.

01:53:18.980 So I think it's easy to get stuck in your mindset like, oh, you know, us sure always were democratic or they always had a king or they always did this.

01:53:29.860 They didn't. It depended on the circumstance and the location and the tradition where they were at.

01:53:35.460 One thing that does mark high Viking age Scandinavia, though, is kingship.

01:53:43.160 And it's important to note here, we talk about kingship.

01:53:47.260 This is not simple, thuggish, I'm the king, you have to do what I say kind of stuff.

01:53:53.300 These are complex political systems that terminate in one man who has to do a lot of things.

01:54:01.560 I don't want to say to earn his position, but he's king because he does a lot of stuff.

01:54:06.860 In the chat, it was mentioned about the Spartan system having two kings. Again, go look at the city-states of Greece and Rome, I mean Rome too, but of Greece and Rome, other than Athens and the cities that it inflicts democracy upon.

01:54:27.200 if you want to see what I'm talking about here in terms of what a politically complex aristocratic and monarchic state and society looks like, right?

01:54:38.620 All right, so, big event that happens, the unification of Norway.

01:54:44.480 I alluded to this a little earlier.

01:54:46.340 So I would like to apologize to the audience.

01:54:48.940 When I do these for an hour and 57 minutes, my tongue gets a little tired, and I can sometimes trip over my own jaw.

01:54:58.940 Unfortunately, 99% of men in Scandinavia at this time are named Haraldr, Olafr, Eirikur, or Ragnar,

01:55:08.760 so I'm probably going to say the wrong name in a few of these instances.

01:55:13.620 Around 872, Halfdanr Svarti, Gududson, dies after having amassed a great amount of power in Norway.

01:55:23.500 This is Halfdan the Black.

01:55:25.480 He's called Halfdan the Black because he has black hair.

01:55:28.700 His son, Haraldr Harfagri Halfdanson, a.k.a. Harold Fairhair.

01:55:34.480 He's called Harold Fairhair because he has beautiful hair, apparently.

01:55:39.700 He assumes command.

01:55:41.620 Harold was very pretty and very charismatic and had gathered a great number of warriors to his service.

01:55:48.040 Big army.

01:55:49.960 Would you throw up the United Norway image, Nick?

01:55:55.360 So this is where Norway kind of starts. 0.90

01:55:59.380 The Red is the kingdom of Hafdan and Harold, right?

01:56:06.620 he sets about expanding his father's holdings creates a united norwegian kingdom harold fair

01:56:14.200 hair was a pretty interesting guy but unfortunately his kingdom basically exploded once his sons came

01:56:20.200 of age and took power would you throw up the disunited norway image nick

01:56:23.960 sorry i'm multitask what's your what now could you throw up the disunited norway image

01:56:38.480 yes so the united these are all of this is how norway breaks up pretty pretty quickly after um

01:56:47.460 herald fair here's realm collapses you'll notice a recurring pattern here remember how i said

01:56:56.060 land is typically owned by a clan that then parcels it out remember what happened with the

01:57:03.320 carlings how whenever one of these uh frankish bigwigs die there's a civil war between their

01:57:10.740 sons who are all fighting for supreme lordship but all got a chunk if you've ever played crusader 0.96

01:57:17.040 kings too you know how you're supposed to get rid of gabokind inheritance asap that's what this is 0.64

01:57:23.140 right um the reason why christian europe adopts primogeniture other than like uh christian um

01:57:34.140 ideological stuff deriving from the yahudak begat yitzhak kind of stuff in the bible um is to solve

01:57:41.960 this problem like no the first son just gets everything we're done with this civil war

01:57:46.460 inheritance kind of stuff. So, as I said, the United Norwegian Kingdom lasts for about 60 years

01:57:52.180 before Norway returns to rule by Jarlar, with the occasional upstart claiming to be a kunonger. 0.91

01:57:57.780 What is important here is that for a time, Norway becomes internally stratified and organized. 0.86

01:58:05.360 All of the territory that Half Dan the Black and Harold Fairhair gather up become an organized 0.95

01:58:10.620 and accessible polity. That is to say that you could go from Hologaland in the north 0.99

01:58:16.940 to Ringeriki in the south as part of a contiguous legal, cultural, political, and economic body.

01:58:24.460 People could move inland through Norway with a great deal of ease. Before that, they had to

01:58:29.680 engage in movement via water. Piracy was a continuous problem for that. But thanks to

01:58:36.880 Harold and Halfdan, people could sail around with far less threat of pirates

01:58:40.500 and could move through the interior of the country.

01:58:43.320 That is because it's the yellow spot on this map.

01:58:47.920 Harold and Halfdan build roads connecting the purple through the yellow

01:58:52.840 down to the coast north of Norway.

01:58:55.540 They are literally using their kingship to develop the colonization

01:59:01.800 and ability to settle the land that they rule, right?

01:59:06.880 So, this allows for a flourishing of population, culture, economy, and politics, as people can now just have more space to access and travel more efficiently.

01:59:21.660 Because if you're going from, like, Yemtland to Ringerikki, it's actually kind of just easier to go overland than it is to get in a boat, go all the way, and you know what I mean?

01:59:31.260 so scandinavians lived in small urban centers accessible by water aka cities and small villages

01:59:41.020 or farmsteads when i say farmstead i mean it's technically the estate of like one carl but there

01:59:46.760 might be dozens of people living there in a lot of buildings um the nuclear family extended family

01:59:54.520 retainers tenants thralls tradesmen a scandinavian farmstead was a small village unto its own

01:59:59.960 greater movement through norway's interior meant that these farmsteads villages and cities could

02:00:05.340 interact far more easily there's a question to be asked about uh i i please scandinavians don't

02:00:14.200 hate me but why are sweden and denmark and norway separate polities part of this is why because

02:00:21.200 denmark or norway stops just being like the coastal colonization by norsemen and starts

02:00:26.780 having this interior body of its own increasingly separate from what's going on in sweden right

02:00:34.780 because remember there is a mountain range that separates norway and sweden right do you want to

02:00:40.780 throw anything in about norway here sir norway is really cool um i think that

02:00:56.780 um it's interesting I think that early on Norway are the

02:01:06.380 brand of Vikings that we become the most familiar with

02:01:10.940 I think in large part the Heimskrangla by Snorri Sturluson

02:01:17.420 does a very good job of

02:01:20.540 building and documenting the history of Norway in a way that you don't have other places.

02:01:28.460 I think Saxo tries with the guest of the norm and I don't think you have an equivalent text

02:01:34.280 for Sweden. So I think Norway is easily accessible to a Western audience. I think Sweden is less so

02:01:43.960 although the more we dig and the more we do deep dives into things we end up getting a lot of our

02:01:49.480 heroes from Sweden. But a lot of the great age of the sagas talk a great deal about Norwegians

02:01:58.560 because that is the line of our folk that end up producing the Icelanders who end up

02:02:06.940 writing the stories of their homeland and the traditions of their countrymen back in

02:02:13.140 the kingdom of Norway. And it's really interesting because there's

02:02:17.260 a lot of literature about sweden that survives to us by icelanders because there's this movement

02:02:24.700 of scalds uh the plural in old nurses school from um from sweden to nor to iceland right

02:02:34.860 and so the icelanders write down this scaldic literature that the swedes just either don't

02:02:40.780 or it doesn't survive to us right but that's that's more complicated than where we're going

02:02:45.900 with this so would you like to throw up the europe map nick

02:02:59.340 there we go okay so this is i i didn't uh color in at britain here because you know where britain

02:03:07.820 is this is the world and various places that are important in the story of scandinavia right

02:03:16.440 we've got denmark we've got norway iceland's up in the northwest we've got the holy roman empire

02:03:22.300 in the south then there's poles or i proto-west slavs they're poles they go on to become the

02:03:28.460 poles then there's balts there's the russ like east slavs right then we have the sphere and the

02:03:35.500 geats right as i said there were initially 13 tribes in sweden those 13 tribes congealed into

02:03:42.020 two tribes the geats in the sphere the geats attained great wealth and power through trade

02:03:46.380 with their cousins the goths who had migrated southeast however the geats continuously lost 0.79

02:03:51.880 political power to the swedes despite them being a wealthier people and having more land this

02:03:57.740 probably happened because they had a smaller population spread out across more area so

02:04:02.520 So eventually what happens is that the Geats attained a greater connection with continental Europe through trade, and they leveraged that for a maintenance of status in the burgeoning Sweden that they were increasingly subject to the sphere.

02:04:14.060 Thus, the Geats would be ruled by the king of the sphere, but would wield substantial wealth and power in that kingdom.

02:04:21.400 We aren't really told of any great Geatish kings, with the exception of Stenkel, who shows up in the story of King Blotswain.

02:04:31.260 Stenkel was crucial in the apostasy of Sweden.

02:04:34.760 However, his position was probably one more pragmatism than actual belief or disbelief.

02:04:40.380 His rule brought a great degree of wealth to Sweden by opening up Sweden to greater trade with continental Europe.

02:04:47.520 So what basically happens is that the sphere and the Geats are in conflict. 0.70

02:04:51.980 The sphere get the upper hand.

02:04:53.920 The Geats reach out to continental Europe. 0.98

02:04:56.180 Continental Europe demands Christianity in return for aid, so the Geats oblige. 0.93

02:05:00.060 and the Christian clerics keep cranking the ratchet. 0.54

02:05:04.080 Stenkel was apparently fat, quote, heavy on his feet,

02:05:07.760 which I believe means he waddled when he walked,

02:05:10.360 liked drinking, was not one to wield the power of government with a tight fist,

02:05:14.580 and liked to leave people alone.

02:05:16.700 That's because he was a merchant king, not a warrior king, right?

02:05:21.360 The Geats, despite lacking great kings, however, do have complex economic networks,

02:05:26.540 a number of burgeoning urban centers, and, of course, a complex legal system.

02:05:32.000 The sphere also have these things, of course.

02:05:34.620 Remember, what's important to understand here is that these Geets and sphere groups

02:05:39.400 aren't primitive ooga-booga peoples on the edge of the world.

02:05:43.280 They are intelligent and noble people, and their society is run by noble aristocrats,

02:05:49.000 clever merchants, and wise lawmen.

02:05:51.180 They are not a loose confederation of decentralized men in the woods who are afraid to be seen in public except when they want to get mad during a parliamentary session.

02:06:00.960 They are deeply embedded in a very hierarchical society where position in life is about wealth, power, status, loyalty, and value to those with more of those and with less of those than you.

02:06:13.880 the lack of a king of the geats is not a feature it is a bug caused by them being dominated over

02:06:20.960 by another group in this case the sphere right worth noting beowulf is king of the geats for his

02:06:27.820 yeah sure yes that's a good point here but um big gap of time between beowulf and stinkle

02:06:35.520 is my point here right i don't i don't think the geats never had a king right um

02:06:41.540 the geats in the sphere end up getting absorbed into the singular body of the swedes that we see

02:06:48.140 today um as i understand it there's not much meaningful distinction there i would not surprise

02:06:54.700 me if there's some guy who's going to hear this and get upset because he's a geat nationalist but

02:06:59.060 i digress all right so this is a goofy topic but um if you go looking into this you will hear about

02:07:10.180 this i i have to bring it up because you you will hear about this if you go looking into this um

02:07:18.020 if you go looking you'll find talk about the viking age being caused by female infanticide 0.98

02:07:25.060 this is wrong um this is a narrative that derives from feminist scholarship essentially there's a 0.92

02:07:33.860 theory that the only reason why the norse legal system could treat women the way they did or it 1.00

02:07:39.700 did was because the Norsemen were constantly murdering their daughters. There's zero archaeological

02:07:46.500 evidence for this. There's no textual sources talking about this. When infanticide does show

02:07:53.220 up, it's only as a bad thing that is bad on Asatru terms. Now, the Norse legal system did treat women 0.98

02:08:01.280 differently from men. What exactly that meant depends on the when and the where and which legal

02:08:06.800 code and which king it's very complicated but the norse legal system does not much like how it

02:08:12.020 doesn't believe that you can technically like treat a person as property it also doesn't believe 0.90

02:08:16.720 that men and women are like the same class of thing per se um again this is ridiculous if you

02:08:25.120 say it out loud but i ran into it like 17 times when preparing for this episode so i just have

02:08:31.500 to bring it up um there's another thing that i want to touch on here because it sometimes comes

02:08:39.420 up when talking about like well why did the vikings invade and conquer europe right so in

02:08:46.720 dudo of saint quentin's history of the normans he talks about how what's his name dudo of saint

02:08:53.580 quentin brother doo-doo um he talks about how the northmen are sexually ravenous and that their 0.92

02:09:03.040 powerful lusts drove them to in a most unchristian fashion have lots of uh kidnapped sex with their 0.94

02:09:10.060 huge numbers of concubines which they needed many of um that doesn't actually seem to be the case

02:09:16.660 that is much like how so there's a thing called a moral panic a moral panic is when people get

02:09:24.680 panicked about immorality we talked about this earlier about how christian europe got really

02:09:30.720 scared by the lindisfarne priory raid this is also something that christian europe is scared of

02:09:37.500 is the sexual norms of people who are outside of their own norms so while it's true that jarls

02:09:44.980 konangir did have concubines they actually don't seem to have had harems right a powerful king

02:09:51.940 would have had one one wife and maybe a concubine like two or three at most if he was you know a

02:10:01.380 particularly opulent man but the wife would have the actual legal status the norse legal system

02:10:08.260 makes a distinction between the wife and the concubine and the wife outranks the concubine

02:10:16.020 right Jarl Haakon Sigurdsson having a large number of kids with many women was considered

02:10:22.500 odd and uh if not a little undesirable socially right these people are not or were not lust

02:10:31.700 driven barbarians despite what modern and medieval pop culture says about them right

02:10:40.740 do you want to throw anything in here sir

02:10:45.220 um i mean i could but i think you're doing a good job of it that one of the big themes

02:10:50.020 about this is these are not ooga booga people um there is the popular narrative in

02:11:01.700 I don't want to hurt people's feelings about their favorite, you know, ooga-booga pagan bands or their favorite ooga-booga Viking shows or whatever.

02:11:17.840 But these guys aren't running around wearing ashes and loincloths and skull helmets acting barbarous.

02:11:29.140 These are sophisticated people.

02:11:31.700 I went to the museum in Stockholm and also in Copenhagen and the Viking Age finds are

02:11:41.320 all delicate metalwork, detailed combs and earwax scoops and like little beard and mustache

02:11:55.240 snips and I know these are well dressed.

02:12:00.320 wanted the finest um fashions and things they could get from europe from the or i said orient 0.87

02:12:07.200 i don't mean like chinaman orient but like from muslim territories when they would come back from

02:12:15.360 service in the barangian guard they'd want the you know silken pantaloons and the whatever they

02:12:22.160 wanted the fancy things they had a fancy material culture they wore bright colors

02:12:27.680 we have this thing now when they're all you know dirty we have the thing with uh

02:12:34.440 scars guard in it where he was what is that what was that the one lately you see it in the

02:12:39.500 in the memes a lot it talks about the um proto hamlet story um anyways the guys

02:12:46.260 yeah he's just wearing pelts and dirt and filth

02:12:51.480 no these people were very highly um developed people and they weren't barbarous savages

02:13:00.420 they were scary to monks because they weren't christian and they had the boldness of a previous

02:13:09.400 age uh a heroic age of our gods but yeah these it these aren't strange 0.97

02:13:20.040 bone-rattling voodoo ooga-booga folks from the north they were kin to the people in europe 1.00

02:13:28.920 separated from the same distance from the birth of our race in terms of chronology as anyone else 0.99

02:13:38.820 and they weren't like a foreign unknown thing they were occupying a fringe of civilization

02:13:46.200 like a fringe area. They were occupying the frontier, but they weren't ignorant and they

02:13:54.440 weren't primitive. And I think that's something to really digest and embrace because one always

02:14:05.720 paints the enemy as savage and barbarous and foreign and gross. That's just how we do things

02:14:14.740 as people you always do that to the other and you see that reflected in the medieval writings they

02:14:19.940 write about these terrible monstrous people because they're the enemy they would write that

02:14:25.460 about anybody else who was there you know that's just kind of what you do um a lot of that you see 0.90

02:14:32.500 in world war one where they're you know referring to the germans as huns and they're like you know 0.94

02:14:36.900 the the propaganda poster they're all like savage beasts from out of the east 0.70

02:14:42.180 no they share the same royal family with you uh englishmen they're like the same they have the

02:14:50.060 same aristocrats they run in the same circles and six months ago you guys shared the exact same

02:14:56.820 understanding of european culture but when war breaks out when there's hostilities

02:15:00.620 it has always been the way of things that we paint the enemy as being savage and monstrously

02:15:07.900 terrified i think that's very much at play here there's a character to these i say this as a white

02:15:17.020 american in 2026 right so i'm not a medieval scandinavian i i worship the icer but i'm not

02:15:24.940 a dane and i'm certainly not a dane circa like 800 880 right so there is a character to these

02:15:33.500 people that at least i i kind of picked up on of like a very soft isn't the right word but almost

02:15:42.940 kind of delicate interior you know like the yarrow who wants to have the silken jammies

02:15:49.140 and he has like his his little mustache trimmer and his delicate little comb so he can look all

02:15:55.800 fancy for his wife and then he gets in this boat and spends a week on the sea braving dehydration

02:16:04.860 death by waves the the perils of the ocean so he can go commit brutal violence against some guy in

02:16:13.680 France right there is this very hard exterior but there's also a very rich and nuanced interior

02:16:22.900 right like the sagas have humor in them it's not necessarily our humor but they have like jokes

02:16:29.800 and they have very deep discussions of the human the human condition you know of of what it means

02:16:39.260 to feel and think and be alive we shouldn't we we need to strike a balance between recognizing

02:16:49.440 that these were very hard men and hard women but also that they were not they weren't like orcs

02:16:56.140 from from warhammer or something right these are people with very sophisticated cultures

02:17:02.340 and a very rich inner life it's not necessarily what we do today but it's not

02:17:09.720 it's not like they're savages right um so okay for example pirates

02:17:20.100 they have chosen a lifestyle that makes them excel at a certain amount of savagery

02:17:30.300 but there wasn't a they weren't a different race or civilization of people than Englishmen or 0.90

02:17:37.420 Frenchmen or Spaniards of their age. They were just engaged in a life of being pirates or any

02:17:43.060 other mercenary for any other period of time, any other professional soldiery for that matter that

02:17:49.880 spends most of their time or long periods of their time in the field. Same with French long hunters

02:17:56.380 in colonial America. Yeah, you spend a lot of time out in the woods, start looking real rough,

02:18:03.100 But, you know, you were born in Toronto with, you know, upper class Frenchmen. 0.91

02:18:11.040 You just happen to have spent the last six months on the hunt.

02:18:15.580 And it's worth noting here, Vikings are pirates.

02:18:20.860 When you use the word pirate, it recontextualizes what exactly these people are.

02:18:26.020 And we're going to talk about like Viking Vikings in a minute here.

02:18:28.340 But this is a good point to bring up.

02:18:30.180 so there's a very interesting viking by the name of sigur the crusader and he is a a christian

02:18:39.200 i believe he might actually be a king around the 1200s and he is out raiding scotland

02:18:47.100 engaging in mass butchery of christians in scotland and the pope basically says to him hey

02:18:58.780 you want to go steal stuff from muslims and then he does and he takes his pirate fleet that he had 0.83

02:19:04.720 previously been using as a christian to raid other christians to go raid muslims in the levant and 0.90

02:19:12.440 then he sails back up to scandinavia and keeps raiding other christians right like piracy is a

02:19:20.320 lifestyle that some people take up as a job at this time and doesn't go away there's still there

02:19:26.460 our privateers even to this day we just call them like private mercenary companies well so

02:19:31.180 it's interesting you mentioned privateers there's like state sanctioned pirates and there's freelance

02:19:40.700 pirates and at this point there is a tremendous amount of overlap um

02:19:48.220 raiding culture is that has been with our focus since the beginning you see it displayed in

02:19:57.820 different ways but raiding your politically in your political enemies or at least people

02:20:04.840 that are neutral to you that you have no diplomatic agreement with was very common throughout

02:20:13.000 um i assume throughout the entire world but certainly throughout the the aryan world at the

02:20:20.160 time it was something that was frequently done now the vikings became very good at it and

02:20:27.480 i'd say had a much higher percentage of the population engaged in it than other people

02:20:33.860 due to their geography and their circumstance but it wasn't like an unheard of thing and on top of

02:20:40.900 that outside of rating there's a hundred different examples of this job is legal or not versus the

02:20:50.060 government says so appalachian moonshiners versus jack daniels distillery the drug dealer on the

02:20:57.500 corner versus the pharmacist at cvs so i want to explain what actually is a viking because

02:21:10.600 word is used all the time and like even wikipedia has like if you look up viking on wikipedia it

02:21:16.760 just uses that term to mean like norseman like guy who lives in norway and farms pigs for a living

02:21:22.760 right the norse word vikinga means to camp to journey it is cognate with if we still use this

02:21:30.520 word the english wicking a viking is someone who goes a viking to go a viking is a weird archaic

02:21:39.320 english phrase literally translating a norse term the they have the viking your viking your

02:21:44.000 go viking on me right the norse used this term basically meaning anyone who leaves the farm

02:21:52.680 slash hall to go on a journey to make money in a way that doesn't involve staying at another farm

02:21:58.500 slash hall fishermen vikings merchants vikings slave traders vikings pirates vikings and anyone

02:22:07.020 And any Norseman with a boat and a crew could do any and all of that.

02:22:13.260 They'd haul a load of wool to France and then fish up some herring and sell it in England and then raid a village in Germany and haul off the women to sell in Scotland. 0.96

02:22:21.000 And sometimes they do.

02:22:22.400 Like if you go look at the sagas, they sometimes just get into these wacky side quests where they like all of the sudden are committing piracy in some other country just because they needed cash.

02:22:32.780 Right.

02:22:33.000 when we talk about i want to talk about the slavery one in particular because it's important

02:22:41.340 to contextualize how things work at this time when we talk about viking slavery what we are

02:22:48.840 really talking about are three separate trade networks the first captures slobs fins and bolts

02:22:57.780 in Eastern Europe, and in return for silver, funnels them into this trade network that moves

02:23:04.000 them into Christian Europe and the Islamic world. Funnels and moves. The Vikings are not putting 0.93

02:23:13.360 Slavic women on a long ship and then sailing them to Baghdad. The principal source of these people

02:23:20.580 was the Slavic world, Slavs. This was part of a large-scale network that moved people through the

02:23:26.460 hands of various slave traders of various ethnic groups. The Vikings themselves didn't actually

02:23:32.820 ship Slavs to Baghdad and were just one group alongside Germans, West Slavs, East Slavs,

02:23:39.900 South Slavs, Finns, Balts, Bulgars, Greeks, and Central Asians that were doing this. 0.75

02:23:45.700 Rather, the Vikings would raid a Slavic village, sell the captives to Finns on the Volga, who would 0.87

02:23:51.580 sell them to Bulgars, who would either sell them to Khazars, who would sell them to Persians, 0.83

02:23:55.740 and then to Arabs, or the Bulgars would sell them to Greeks, who would sell them to Syrians, 0.84

02:24:00.320 who would sell them to Arabs in Baghdad. This is the smallest of the three types of slavery that

02:24:05.220 the Vikings participated in. Also, yes, I used the word Khazar. The Khazars in question here 0.97

02:24:11.000 are Christians. They're not Muslims. They're not necessarily Tengarists. Secondly, the second type 1.00

02:24:18.900 of slave trade network that the Vikings were engaged in was one that funneled people from

02:24:23.420 continental and most importantly insular that means ireland scotland england insular europe

02:24:30.540 into scandinavia slaves were brought particularly to norway for resettlement again this basically

02:24:39.580 means you're an irishman you get kidnapped you take a long boat ride and then they drop you off

02:24:44.860 at a village in norway for you to like you know grow barley at these the slaves in this class 1.00

02:24:54.380 weren't free and they lived very harsh lives don't get me wrong but remember these are thrallar they're 0.96

02:25:00.940 not slaves these people had remarkable amounts of agency you know in comparison to blacks in

02:25:09.100 in kintaki circa 181810 right and again some of them were basically just dropped off for farm work

02:25:18.380 this shows up in the in the sagas many of them ended up buying their freedom and were just

02:25:23.480 normal carls afterwards this was done to facilitate the settlement of the norwegian

02:25:29.000 coastline and again the primary victims of this are the irish the third and final type of slavery

02:25:36.140 that the vikings engaged in was capturing people in continental and insular europe 0.86

02:25:40.780 and selling them into the existing slave trade there christian europe until christian europe

02:25:48.300 at this time like the 800s or so has a thriving slave trade it took a surprisingly long time

02:25:56.460 before christians owning christians was seen as anything other than completely normal slaves were

02:26:01.740 necessary for a lot of Christian monasticism at this time, for example. And when Christian

02:26:07.300 opposition to slavery does happen, it doesn't actually start as opposition to the institution

02:26:13.140 of slavery on legal grounds, but on moral ones. Christians, when they start disagreeing with

02:26:18.620 slavery, start thinking that, well, you know, Jesus would look poorly on you for not just 0.92

02:26:24.920 freeing your slaves now. They don't necessarily start saying that slavery is like inherently

02:26:30.960 immoral because how can one man own another so what the vikings would do is capture people in

02:26:38.320 say england and then they would sort them out the wealthy victims they would hold hostage for ransom

02:26:44.120 because aristocrats and clergymen would be paid for by other aristocrats and clergymen

02:26:50.000 and then they would sell the poorer victims into slavery like taking them from england to

02:26:56.700 Flanders or something, right? Where they'd get sold off to toil for some guy in Germany.

02:27:04.560 Now, yes, people from this European slave trade did go into the Islamic world. They were sold

02:27:10.940 into slavery to Muslims by people in France, by people in Germany, by people in Greece,

02:27:17.120 by people in Italy. That's just how the world at this time worked. Whatever you want to think

02:27:23.700 about slavery now and i'm not a pro-slavery guy slavery was just a reality of the world at the 1.00

02:27:30.180 time and these vikings are making a bunch of silver off of enslaving people and selling them

02:27:38.040 to europe and uh in some cases to central asia they don't seem to have really done it in like 0.99

02:27:44.440 carted them to the levant to get to the islamic world all that much because vikings really really

02:27:52.180 really, really did not want to move large amounts of cargo around. They wanted to move physical 0.98

02:27:58.960 goods, and people are goods if they're slaves, from point A to point B as quickly as they could,

02:28:05.620 particularly humans. You know what you need to do if you're on a boat? Eat and drink. You know what

02:28:12.160 you can't just get willy-nilly if you're on a boat? Food and water. If you have a slave on a boat,

02:28:18.160 you have to feed it this sounds goofy but feed and water them or they die so they don't want to like

02:28:25.680 pick up some bolt coast through the north sea loop around france go around iberia through the

02:28:32.240 pillars of hercules around italy all the way to like someplace in syria they want to just give

02:28:40.660 this slave to the first person that'll buy them because what they're doing this for is to get

02:28:45.420 silver to go back to scandinavia right so this is a pretty grisly topic that we're exploring here

02:28:57.020 but it's important to discuss because it demonstrates a few things first these people

02:29:02.140 are engaging in what the rest of western eurasia considers and has considered right when the greeks

02:29:10.620 considers and has considered to be totally normal business. When the Greeks get writing 0.98

02:29:17.660 Linear A, they have slaves. Slavery in Europe predates the invention of writing in Europe. 0.67

02:29:27.980 Second, these people have complex trade networks that are interfacing

02:29:32.140 with other complex trade networks in the British Isles, in continental Europe, and in Central Asia.

02:29:38.600 Third, these people aren't just ravening hordes on boats.

02:29:41.500 They're people trying to make a profit.

02:29:43.740 Fourth, slavery is an extremely complex economic venture and is actually extremely civilized

02:29:50.740 in as much as the legal apparatuses necessary for slavery to happen are very complex

02:29:55.360 and can only happen in the event of a uniform legal system.

02:30:00.100 Part of the reason why thralls aren't slaves is because the idea of a person being property

02:30:07.100 only works if that person can be property if they up and run away to a different part of the 0.53

02:30:14.540 country if a thrall made it from sweden to norway he's just another guy that's not how it worked in

02:30:23.480 rome if a slave in rome hoofed it to ravenna he was still a slave do you want to throw anything

02:30:30.200 in here sir um no other than it's always useful to not judge the past by a present lens and to

02:30:47.000 take in into account the context and the situation um and i think you did a very good job of

02:30:55.080 demonstrating that at this time slavery was the norm it happened in wartime it happened in raids

02:31:04.760 it was a very common thing and medieval serfdom which continues in russia until last century

02:31:17.240 is really similar to the thrall system in quite a few ways where it's similar to a lot of

02:31:23.000 of slave arrangements at this time because they needed people to work the land and people to you

02:31:30.120 know fill out the armies and to do the things but yeah so no i think you did a real good job with

02:31:38.100 that i hope my dry presentation punctuated by the occasional barb of snark

02:31:44.940 does two things here one i hope that it conveys the reality of the world that these people lived

02:31:54.020 in whether it fits with our modern moral notions or not and also i hope that anyone that no one

02:32:00.880 gets the opinion that i'm like advocating for slavery because i'm not i am presenting to you

02:32:07.580 what people lived in circa 900 ad i feel silly for having to preface like you know like just a

02:32:16.860 heads up i'm not advocating for a return to slavery but um i mean something something similar

02:32:23.580 happened this episode so i kind of i'm like i let me hedge my bets on this one all right

02:32:29.260 yeah so for the record chris is not pro-muslim and he has no particular affinity towards slavery

02:32:36.300 um just let it be known all right so to kind of cap this off this this episode has been a lot of

02:32:47.240 rambling and i kind of apologize for that but it contextualizes a lot of the groundwork that

02:32:53.980 will be laid in future episodes where we talk about more nuanced and kind of fine-grained

02:32:59.440 aspects of scandinavian culture and society i want to talk about to end this why christian

02:33:06.300 europe was so vulnerable to the vikings i've already talked about it spiritually this idea

02:33:13.540 of these outsiders who can fight back but i want to talk about it like materially

02:33:20.900 why could a bunch of scandinavians get in their fishing dinghy and then come back with a horde

02:33:28.280 of gold and silver looted from a church. So going back to Lindisfarne, you might be thinking,

02:33:33.840 wait a minute, these people didn't have walls around the monastery? They didn't have weapons?

02:33:39.740 How could they be so stupid as to set up their ideological education center like that? 1.00

02:33:45.380 In continental Europe and Anglo-Saxon England, society was composed of feudal lords and clerics 1.00

02:33:50.980 who held suzerainty over land and the peasants that lived on it. As the Viking Age neared,

02:33:56.180 ever more europeans were tied to the land they weren't technically slaves rather they were

02:34:02.360 legally bound to the land whoever its owner may be the landlord which is where that term comes

02:34:10.040 from by the way the lord of the land the landlord was entitled to a cut of the production of the

02:34:15.040 serfs that lived and were tied to the lived on were tied to the land and some of their labor

02:34:20.460 so they'd grow wheat and he'd get a percentage and then the lord's lord gets a cut and then

02:34:26.000 lord's lord's lord gets a cut and then it goes up a pyramid this is feudalism and it's extremely

02:34:32.320 complicated talking about feudalism as if it was one thing is wrong feudalism requires a time and

02:34:38.800 a place to make sense but this is the basic idea peasants are tied to the land lords harvest them

02:34:45.840 pass the produce upwards an important point here is that this locks up large amounts of europe's

02:34:53.120 population and also locks them out of economic ventures because the right to mint coins called

02:34:58.480 signorage from the french was a privilege so if a peasant got his hands on a block of gold

02:35:06.720 he couldn't necessarily sell it or buy anything with it even if he chopped it up

02:35:11.360 the economy was controlled by the aristocrats and the clergy buying and selling was done with coins

02:35:16.880 which were only legally minted by whoever held seigniorage.

02:35:23.200 What actually held seigniorage, or sorry, who actually held seigniorage is a very complicated

02:35:29.200 subject, but we can basically say that the king of France slash England slash Germany did.

02:35:33.840 And he would give the right to loyal retainers that owned mines, or maybe he'd give them the

02:35:38.160 mine and the seigniorage. Again, it's very complicated. So wait, only the king can mint coins.

02:35:44.640 So why does the metal content matter? Well, it doesn't. The worth of an English penny,

02:35:51.960 a Frankish denier, or an Arabic dirham was not actually based on its metal content.

02:35:57.280 Likewise, peasants couldn't buy and sell or barter freely. They had to do so within prescribed

02:36:02.240 limits set by the aristocracy and clergy. And when I say clergy, sometimes you'll hear about

02:36:06.880 sumptuary laws where like some bishop just decides that like silk is sinful, so peasants

02:36:12.640 aren't allowed to own and buy silk anymore aristocrats and clerics can of course so the

02:36:18.780 u.s dollar a u.s dollar is not its value is not based on the trade value of the the cotton that

02:36:26.880 makes the dollar a u.s quarter is not based on the value of the nickel that uh the sorry the

02:36:34.720 zinc copper tin that makes up the quarter

02:36:38.480 not so in scandinavia the norsemen operated according to a more or less free barter and

02:36:46.700 bullion system while coins were made in scandinavia and important importantly they were

02:36:51.040 imported their value derived from their metal content this is referred to as specie of course

02:36:57.680 pretty coins were worth more because they were frequently used in jewelry but they were used in

02:37:01.520 jewelry because the Norse didn't really make a distinction between money and pretty metal stuff

02:37:06.760 as an aside metal typically didn't involve gold at this time the preferred metal for trade was

02:37:13.500 silver um do you want to throw something in sir

02:37:21.040 no no uh there was there was a time estimate that was wildly inaccurate that's fine I'm sorry

02:37:28.880 good and i wanted to make sure we did talk about hack silver sword all right yeah silver and hordes

02:37:34.480 if we could sure so um while there were taxes and tolls and import duties and a given norseman could

02:37:42.560 buy and sell whatever he wanted freely as long as he gave his lord some kind of product he was good

02:37:49.120 he could be silver it could be wheat it could be furs it could be beer whatever if the carl or

02:37:54.960 jarl was paid in something other than silver he'd just take it and market it take it to market and

02:38:00.240 sell it so there's this inflow of silver into scandinavia because these norsemen are selling

02:38:08.640 herring slaves they're going raiding they're selling furs they're doing trading they're doing

02:38:13.520 mercenary work to get silver because they're trying to build up these silver catches because

02:38:18.880 that's what they would use for money right and so they would build up these these treasure hordes

02:38:25.600 and they they you know used gold but silver was like the metal of money right you wouldn't like

02:38:32.080 take a crown and cut it in half and give it to someone necessarily but you would like take a

02:38:38.240 block of silver cut it in half here you go as payment right um rings seem to be the exception

02:38:44.720 but that rings are complicated um so the reason they're doing this is because at a certain level

02:38:54.400 although although they wouldn't conceptualize it as this they are buying and selling atoms

02:38:59.600 so your pretty necklace can be broken up and sold for food very very easily this is a very fluid

02:39:07.920 and very liquid economy and because people weren't legally tied to land they could move

02:39:14.320 pretty freely the lords didn't care how their retainers earned a living just that they got cut

02:39:19.840 because the lords lords weren't intentionally trying to keep people tied to the land people

02:39:24.400 could move more freely namely going on naval voyages you could totally just go fishing and

02:39:30.000 get some silver to pay your lord your tax so people would like this this leads to like buried

02:39:36.240 treasure kind of stuff because it's like do you want to cart around all of your silver on a boat

02:39:41.360 and risk losing it or do you want to like make a horde so when you come back it's safe do you want

02:39:47.360 to throw in something about the silver and the hordes here sir no there's just a mr t element too

02:39:53.200 like if you wore all of your wealth in jewelry and stuff 0.99

02:40:05.200 yes you were a target so that i could kill you and take all of your jewelry and stuff 0.78

02:40:10.400 but also you had maximum liquidity you didn't have to go find your hoard or do your thing 0.99

02:40:19.280 you could be like oh um here take uh take this ring um and give me you know how many butts of

02:40:29.040 me or give me you know whatever i need you could oh um sure here you go you had um

02:40:36.640 liquid assets on your person and a lot of the time you would find that people do that they

02:40:45.960 would chop up their arm rings or their neck their neck torques or you know pieces of jewelry and

02:40:52.160 things that they had for quick bartering to get stuff done i think this shows up in ale saga

02:41:00.740 um he like loses his brother or something in battle and so he's kind of like clearly a little

02:41:06.200 perturbed and the jarl he was working for like take i can't remember if he takes the arm ring

02:41:12.260 off or he like takes it and cuts it but he gives ale an arm ring and ale's still kind of clearly

02:41:18.360 a little perturbed he's like rocking back and forth while kind of like nursing his axe a little

02:41:22.880 and then the king gives him like another ring and another ring and eventually ale's like no no i'm

02:41:28.160 i'm okay i'm good right so the king has like his arm is just like covered in rings because he might

02:41:36.180 need to be like oh here take a ring you have a ring and this was just and then they could take

02:41:43.300 this ring they could wear it or they could make it into something pretty for their wife or they

02:41:48.020 could take a chunk off and buy some food with it you know it's it's a much more fluid economy than

02:41:54.180 the christian european one is continental europe's legal system is also really really concerned with

02:42:00.580 preventing robbery and theft because if one peasant takes something from another then it's

02:42:05.540 actually the lords who lose out. Scandinavia's legal system is concerned with preventing endemic

02:42:11.460 blood feuds. If you get jumped and lose all your rings, I mean, hey man, you should have buried them,

02:42:18.580 right? During the Vendal period, Scandinavians start trading with the outside world. They also

02:42:25.620 start raiding each other. The Vendal period is marked by a great degree of internal violence.

02:42:30.820 The Viking Age, in many ways, starts when it stops being safe to go raiding in Scandinavia because the aristocrats have enough power to prevent that.

02:42:38.820 You don't want to raid the wrong village and suddenly a 20-boat fleet shows up to kill you, right?

02:42:45.780 So if you're a fisherman in the Vendal period, you've got a boat, the harvest is done, you're looking to make some cash.

02:42:51.300 It's a bad idea to steal from your neighbors, but it's really profitable to steal from their neighbors.

02:42:56.760 In the Viking Age, all of those trade connections with Europe get people realizing they could steal this stuff and get back to Scandinavia.

02:43:10.360 And who's going to hurt them?

02:43:13.000 Scandinavian settlements end up with a few characteristics.

02:43:17.420 Elevated and or defensible locations.

02:43:20.680 Settlements on rivers are set up to make unallowed navigation of the river difficult.

02:43:25.480 Cities, towns, and villages tended not to be close to the shorelines unless they were defended with earthworks or walls.

02:43:32.580 Often, a settlement would have a harbor that was accessible by a road or pathway that was more inland than the harbor village.

02:43:41.980 As an aside, this is actually how Athens worked.

02:43:44.140 Nick, can you throw up the Athens map?

02:43:45.580 so athens the this this the big line cutting that kind of highway there is half is a river

02:43:58.040 athens is a walled city right with this walled road going to the city of piraeus

02:44:07.500 athens is actually inland piraeus is where the harbor is so when you hear about the athenian

02:44:14.420 naval power understand that we really mean the athenian power to use a road to get to their city

02:44:22.900 which is a harbor and at various points in time athens actually lost their access to this road

02:44:29.380 and as such their navy just was completely cut off from the city proper so a smaller scale version of

02:44:35.940 this arrangement the village is up on a hill everyone goes up and down a road to get to the

02:44:40.740 harbor. Socially, everyone was more or less expecting the possibility of a fight, resulting

02:44:47.640 in almost all men being, in theory, capable of violence, if just with a farm tool. Social

02:44:52.760 structures, namely villages, aristocratic Lord Thane networks, and extended families were very

02:44:57.840 aware of the possibility of their members being preyed upon, and were set up to very quickly

02:45:02.360 mobilize for defense and revenge. You know in the Havamal, where Odin is like, hey, when you walk in

02:45:09.020 a room, look around. Hey, when you're out drinking, know who you're drinking with. Hey, when you talk

02:45:15.200 to someone, figure out who they are and who they know. That is very important because if you get

02:45:21.960 the wrong person angry at you, they're going to pull out their sword and their boys are going to 0.96

02:45:27.320 hold you while you get stabbed to death. And you need to figure that out before they get angry at

02:45:33.720 you. Because this is a world where that kind of thing can happen relatively easily. Continental

02:45:40.740 Europe did indeed have fortifications and defenses, but they were set up to prevent

02:45:44.520 overland movement of armies and control of peasants. They were not there to stop random

02:45:49.920 dudes in boats. Christian Europe also had very juicy targets. Churches, cathedrals, and monasteries. 0.77

02:45:56.200 These structures were protected by force of arms and legal might. If you stole something from the

02:46:01.420 church the church as an institution would seek restitution even if you killed the bishop and all

02:46:08.340 of his clerics the bishop from the next diocese over would prosecute the matter with your local 0.99

02:46:12.700 lord but a viking raider couldn't be taken to court and the speed at which they could strike

02:46:19.000 because remember those very agile nimble boats they can go in a river i've read that they could

02:46:24.660 They have, like, a draft of, like, five feet, right, or less.

02:46:29.360 These boats can go up a very shallow river, strike a church, and then literally just go backwards because they have the rowers and the sail can be flipped around.

02:46:38.940 Viking raiders can't be taken to court.

02:46:41.320 They're fast.

02:46:42.240 They can strike basically any target that they can reach by a river or a short hike.

02:46:46.160 they can strike um far more quickly than the much larger but more cumbersome

02:46:52.300 armies of the settled christian lords could uh muster in time for their draft was anywhere

02:46:58.360 between 20 and 39 inches yeah like i mean that's like that's less than five feet yeah that's less

02:47:08.660 than two feet to maybe three feet yes that's like the shallow end of a pool right if if you can fill

02:47:18.020 a kiddie pool a viking ship could theoretically sail through it right this is why many christian

02:47:25.140 writers who were clergymen were so scared of norsemen the thither two traditional methods

02:47:31.940 of protecting the christian clergy as a privileged class didn't work against the norsemen what's

02:47:38.500 more, Christian monasteries in particular were usually outside of society in order to deliberately

02:47:43.820 separate the individuals housed within from the rest of society. And there's a lot of reasons for 0.98

02:47:49.220 this. The Lindisfarne Priory was separated in order to hone these people as Christian ideologues,

02:47:55.400 but some monasteries were basically prisons for aristocrats, others were centers for ascetics,

02:48:00.720 some were mausoleums it doesn't really matter but remember the guy who farms pigs in ringerickey

02:48:11.200 buys and sells with silver the guy who farms pigs outside of paris didn't so when european

02:48:21.640 christian peasants would walk into church they'd see all this gold and finery and beautiful gems

02:48:26.020 And if they plucked a gem off of the crucifix on the altar, they could take it home and look at it.

02:48:33.660 They couldn't buy and sell with it.

02:48:35.340 They couldn't exchange it for anything.

02:48:37.520 They would be arrested and punished. 0.95

02:48:39.260 If they chopped one of the limbs of the cross off, they couldn't chop it further up and buy and sell with it. 0.98

02:48:44.280 They couldn't turn it into anything.

02:48:45.920 In some parts of Christian Europe, peasants just weren't allowed to own gold.

02:48:50.680 These are called sumptuary laws, by the way.

02:48:52.360 um so a lot of this very fancy stuff was just allowed to sit freely because there was no one

02:49:00.960 that would want to take it because they couldn't do anything with it but then olafer and ragnar

02:49:07.000 and eriker and haralder they can just chuck it in their boat and take it with them and they can

02:49:12.440 actually make use of it i'm there's also very active magical protection too

02:49:19.720 even

02:49:24.460 I mean in the ravages of poverty

02:49:27.160 people were willing to do a lot of things

02:49:29.600 but there was a certain protection of

02:49:31.600 no you're 0.84

02:49:33.480 going to burn in hell if you 0.92

02:49:35.460 take the gold from the 0.92

02:49:37.440 monastery or from the church or

02:49:39.380 if you rob a bishop or do that

02:49:41.600 that has no effect on you if you

02:49:45.340 worship over it

02:49:46.220 you're not robbing a hoth you're not 1.00

02:49:49.260 despoiling the temple of the all-father this foreign jewish scrawny zombie figure on a on a 1.00

02:49:59.820 torture implement by these people that have sold out their ancestors no that's just easy 0.94

02:50:07.100 gold and if anything not only was it not scary it was virtuous and you could contribute that

02:50:15.580 to your contribution to the hawth like it it had reverse i don't go so far as to say it was

02:50:25.340 an intentional like i know that some historians have recently you know i said recently in the

02:50:31.420 last 30 years or so positive that it was some kind of an offensive

02:50:38.220 hammer said against christianity to you know do violence on on christian institutions i wouldn't

02:50:45.020 go that far but i do think no these people are worshiping this strange god that's foreign to us

02:50:52.300 foreign to their ancestors this whole thing's bad cool let's go get it and i think that

02:50:58.940 attitude was very prevalent and uh it may seem disconnected but that's one of the the things 0.92

02:51:06.060 that stands out on our 1400s swedish heroes no they were in cahoots with odin to rob churches 0.71

02:51:17.020 and such so and it's we don't get a lot of like the you know the this is revenge for the urban

02:51:27.580 soul kind of rhetoric but men like jarl hakon seger this would not be lost on them because

02:51:35.420 remember for like a century or two after he died the norse and the english were still one race as

02:51:41.040 far as norwegians were concerned right it might not have been a universal attitude but like there

02:51:46.900 just were enough people bumping around at the time raiding english monasteries while worshiping odin

02:51:51.920 that surely a number of them must have thought wow huh we're doing this we're fighting the enemy

02:52:00.860 religion when we do this right and certainly the christian clerics understood it as that way

02:52:08.620 so certainly men like your hawk on secretism they would have heard it from scandinavian christians

02:52:15.100 because that rhetoric does show up in scandinavian christianity

02:52:18.780 right the sins of the father in the viking age as it were

02:52:24.700 so and it's it's worth noting here before we get to questions or anything the altar

02:52:29.260 he wants to end with christian europe does pretty quickly realize like hey we need to start putting

02:52:34.220 walls around some of this stuff we need to start having guards on some of this stuff right these

02:52:39.900 people aren't idiots it just things moved slowly back then right all right then thank you chris we

02:52:49.740 have much more to discuss when next month rolls around in the meantime though we do have some

02:52:57.100 questions caleb would like to know is it standard for afa couples to go through

02:53:04.540 premarital counseling before the gothar will agree to marry them

02:53:08.540 i've read that this can reduce the chance of a divorce by over 30 percent

02:53:15.500 no but we would like for it to be it's something that the gothar have discussed and that

02:53:22.620 has often been suggested it has never been compulsory and it isn't the standard but this

02:53:34.980 offer often and I agree it's a good practice it's always worth having that conversation

02:53:42.440 and trying to I don't know set the relationship on that kind of a foundationally good course

02:53:51.420 before uh before going through as a marriage but yeah to answer your question it's something we've

02:53:57.980 tried to do it's something we would like to do more of but it's not yes i i just want to throw

02:54:04.780 in real quick um when my wife and i got married we did afa pre-marital counseling um i would say

02:54:12.780 you should do it if you're given the choice you know so so there you go it does happen i did not

02:54:19.020 know that that had happened in that instance before i said stuff um my wife and i did not

02:54:27.820 but it was a different kind of scenario um but it's worked all right so far

02:54:36.220 um random question from cj odinson does the afa have a stance on organ donation

02:54:45.020 morbid topic but i've been doing some planning for my will slash funeral wishes

02:54:50.940 slash health care directors and it's pretty complicated i want to leave a high percentage

02:54:57.340 of my assets to the afa but discreet and that takes a lot of paperwork worth it in the end

02:55:03.900 though so a couple of different pieces there thank you for wanting to include us in your will

02:55:10.380 that is very much

02:55:12.560 appreciated

02:55:13.220 a lot of people don't realize that's

02:55:16.560 something you can do it is

02:55:17.800 also I would suggest

02:55:20.840 if you want help

02:55:22.120 to navigate that legally

02:55:24.720 reaching out

02:55:26.740 to our law speaker

02:55:27.640 turnage

02:55:28.660 turnage

02:55:31.920 at runestone.org

02:55:34.260 he would

02:55:37.380 he is a practicing attorney

02:55:39.600 especially his bankruptcy law but he does do this kind of thing and deal with this kind of scenario

02:55:45.720 so uh he would be the person i would go to for any little questions that i had

02:55:52.140 and i would recommend you talk to him the afa does not have a stance on organ donation um

02:56:00.620 you know they're they're your organs and you can kind of do with them what you like but i think

02:56:08.740 that the closest thing to an official AFA stance on them is the guidance.

02:56:15.360 Think it through and make an intentional choice.

02:56:18.080 Don't leave it random and don't let the DMV decide.

02:56:23.080 Make the choice that you want to have happen with any of these things.

02:56:31.060 Make your decision a willful one and not one that you stumble into

02:56:34.620 or that your loved ones stumble into.

02:56:36.520 I can recall one AFA member who passed that I was you know close enough to know about

02:56:45.640 that situation and he did donate his organs so but I think that's personal choice

02:56:57.880 if you were including them in assets that you wish to donate to the AFA

02:57:02.560 I appreciate the thought.

02:57:03.980 We do not have meat of organs.

02:57:06.000 So if you could monetize those and send the proceeds, that would be preferable.

02:57:13.140 But, yeah, joking aside, that's really thoughtful of you that you'd like to include us in your will that way.

02:57:20.120 And I think that's a good example to all of us.

02:57:24.120 And Alan would be the guy to ask for help on that.

02:57:26.380 party ivy says is there a bns podcast or blog post on spiritual or energetic projection

02:57:38.540 my apologies if this has been recently discussed

02:57:43.740 so i hope that you are still around to hear the answer for this this is one that was here

02:57:52.380 before we started today if not i hope you come back and check it out to be fair a couple of

02:57:57.980 these i pulled off of mewe because they had never gotten answered so i'm like let's get a

02:58:04.060 answer on here so i can direct people to where they're answered at yeah i'd like to figure out

02:58:09.260 why they didn't get answered or whatever and fix that but i'd be happy to answer um so

02:58:15.740 So energetic or spiritual projection can mean different things depending on what we're talking

02:58:27.380 about.

02:58:30.540 There hasn't been an episode about that, but it's something that's been spoken about a

02:58:36.580 couple of different times.

02:58:39.340 and it depends what you mean

02:58:44.440 I'm trying to think off the top of my head

02:58:53.280 again this is kind of a rapid fire question

02:58:55.120 about something I prepared for

02:58:56.960 I would say

02:58:58.200 Star Wars-esque

02:59:04.880 force lightning is

02:59:06.800 energy projection

02:59:08.160 in the most, like, just quick come-to-mind thing,

02:59:16.620 and no, I don't really, that's not really a thing,

02:59:21.600 but it's also the most kind of crass example.

02:59:25.560 If the idea is...

02:59:27.160 Chris you're good with words and they escape me moving stuff with your mind and bending spoons

02:59:41.900 what's that called telekinesis telekinesis there you go tip of my tongue that I think

02:59:48.260 is another form of that I don't believe that we have touched on that but the AFA does not

02:59:57.160 dismiss that

03:00:01.140 as not possible or not something

03:00:03.080 to do. I certainly don't know

03:00:05.240 how to do that.

03:00:07.060 But I'm also under the belief that

03:00:08.840 people do and people have.

03:00:13.680 It's a little bit more nuanced

03:00:15.380 and more complex. I think another

03:00:17.380 form of energy projection would

03:00:19.340 be

03:00:19.820 spiritual healing in the form

03:00:23.420 of laying on hands or

03:00:25.400 uh reiki or things like that

03:00:29.000 i know there is an advanced oriental school and technology to that that's not really our stuff

03:00:41.060 and i've never been a practitioner or receiver of that

03:00:44.900 I do know someone who has and does claim to do, like, Chinese Reiki.

03:01:05.320 Again, I haven't experienced it, so I can't speak to it.

03:01:08.200 I certainly haven't done an episode on it.

03:01:09.980 So I have done spiritual healing by creating a magical chain and projecting that energy towards an intent.

03:01:27.340 So for more, you know, basically everybody holds hands or you touch, everybody touches each other and then touches an object they want to project the energy into.

03:01:40.860 that is something that i've done i forget which volume of evola's ur group's introduction

03:01:46.940 of magic they talk about that in i think that is one of the more effective examples

03:01:53.340 of energy projection i've seen um

03:01:58.220 i can't swear that that did the healing that we tried to apply it to but the person in question

03:02:12.220 was in fact healed um you know it didn't like magically transform or something but the outcome

03:02:19.900 was was positive so i i hope that is the case um

03:02:25.360 I suppose another variant would be intentional meditation where you're trying to direct your

03:02:35.280 consciousness towards an outcome I have participated in that myself with very

03:02:43.780 favorable effects I know others who have done it and found it to be successful

03:02:51.160 um that is a practice that is done by afa members at times

03:03:00.840 the other one that comes to mind is the idea of projecting yourself

03:03:06.920 out of body in some kind of an astral projection way

03:03:14.360 in the sagas that will be sending out your hammer into the world

03:03:18.680 um your hammer there we go i can't really roll the r's as well as chris chris can do the michael

03:03:25.960 buffer thing um i'm not as adept at that but the sending the vicky or the the magical

03:03:35.000 practitioner being able to send out their projected self astrally to

03:03:41.160 remotely view something to send a message to someone to project magical might in that way

03:03:55.720 is certainly very elusive i know a number of people who have tried to

03:03:59.480 crack the door at that and

03:04:04.440 not found tremendous amounts of success but again i think that's a very difficult

03:04:08.840 thing to do i have also heard about that happening spontaneously with people who are adept at

03:04:17.800 spiritual work and them you know falling into a deep sleep and

03:04:24.040 their self being projected towards an end and um

03:04:29.820 that has happened and been accomplished by a you know a frequent um co-host on the program but i'll

03:04:41.700 leave that to them to discuss and share with people if they would like but that's absolutely

03:04:47.280 occurred and it is talked about in the sagas it is a thing it's not something i can just go do

03:04:54.700 but also about these topics i would recommend uh the ur group which is a group put together

03:05:06.140 that julius avila participated in early in his career

03:05:11.500 and they have a three volume set called introduction to magic

03:05:15.580 i think there is equal parts a lot of it is nonsense and i think also equal parts a lot of

03:05:27.980 it is so far outside of something i have a point of reference for that i can't make sense of it

03:05:35.820 so i think both of those are at play but there are gems scattered throughout that i have found

03:05:43.580 very beneficial you know those are both um compilations of many different articles

03:05:53.180 but i'd say there's like five spread out throughout them of the articles that i found

03:06:00.720 very beneficial and that i think back too often so i would recommend those if you are interested

03:06:06.680 in that. It's something you might be interested in reading

03:06:08.700 and take a look at.

03:06:12.980 Chris, do you have any thoughts on energy

03:06:14.740 projection that you would like to

03:06:16.280 put to the audience?

03:06:18.120 No, I do not. I apologize.

03:06:22.300 The

03:06:22.740 casting of the hammer that's

03:06:26.640 described in the sagas is what I thought of

03:06:28.540 when that came up, but

03:06:29.700 I'm not into that kind of magic.

03:06:33.640 That's cool.

03:06:34.620 You can let me talk on it

03:06:36.460 because you did your fair share on this show.

03:06:39.820 That's for certain.

03:06:41.060 You did awesome.

03:06:42.500 Everyone looks forward to your shows, including me.

03:06:45.700 They're awesome.

03:06:46.920 Thank you.

03:06:47.300 Thank you.

03:06:47.860 All of our people that love history

03:06:49.380 really like tuning in for what you present.

03:06:54.740 Paul wants to know,

03:06:56.680 is there a Vanir equivalent to Ausatru slash Ausatruar?

03:07:01.820 Vanatruar?

03:07:02.660 I'm wondering because I'm writing a story about the Isir-Vanir war

03:07:08.500 and I need a word to describe the followers of the Vanir.

03:07:14.500 Bro, not because I'm trying to create a schism. 0.92

03:07:19.820 Okay.

03:07:28.680 Sure, and I'll say this, like, linguistically...

03:07:32.660 there were people that just wanted to be different at one time in modern house a true

03:07:43.100 that would try to call themselves vomit true and be specifically like a wicca version of

03:07:50.780 also true and that probably doesn't do everybody who refers to themselves as that justice but it

03:07:57.940 a word and i would suggest using it the way you're trying for the fictional purpose that you're using

03:08:03.780 it for um i would say it becomes a historical because the icr vanir war is before

03:08:16.340 you know the god's interaction with man it's it's so very early on that it's not really

03:08:21.700 something that occurs after there's well at least in the lore after it's been presented that there

03:08:27.140 are you know tribes of men that would worship these gods it's the first war in creation it's

03:08:34.660 very very early on in the existence of our gods and our cosmos

03:08:45.620 harden says i wish we knew more about the vanir they really they're really quite mysterious

03:08:51.700 Are they a unique tribe of Jotun, like the Aesir, or are they even related to the Aesir

03:08:58.580 and Jotuns at all?

03:08:59.800 Where did the Vanir come from?

03:09:02.420 So, I don't think that the lore covers that a lot.

03:09:10.700 i mean i think that we yotnar as swan and i've talked about is a very

03:09:18.380 imprecise descriptor it kind of means you know it means consumers but it also is

03:09:29.980 implies ancient uh wise magically potent beings so

03:09:38.980 there were different kinds of yotnar i would have to guess that yeah they're

03:09:48.580 descended from the yotnar in some form

03:09:50.980 we don't really encounter them until they're in contact with and in interaction with the

03:10:00.820 isir and after the conclusion of the war they are incorporated as you know as the isir one

03:10:10.580 they incorporated the tribe of vanir into their tribe so all of the vanir from that period are

03:10:17.700 icier we see that with new order with uh frayer with freya

03:10:29.140 so yeah i think that's about as much depth on that as i have and i wish i had more and

03:10:34.260 it is kind of fascinating it would be great if we uncovered some

03:10:38.420 you know extra war nuggets on that but i don't think that we have any handy and you know ready at

03:10:44.340 just to throw in complete idle speculation it wouldn't surprise me if in the elder

03:10:54.100 osager period there was a more in-depth kind of classification system within jotnar

03:10:59.200 you know like sartor seems to be like a different kind of thing than like vef through near like

03:11:08.240 there's these jotuns that are clearly not on team odin but odin can also go have like

03:11:13.000 riddle-offs with them.

03:11:15.620 And then there's, like,

03:11:17.400 Loki's Brood and Surtur

03:11:19.120 and these other things that

03:11:20.320 seem more just

03:11:23.060 generally destructive,

03:11:24.980 not really something you can spout

03:11:27.020 poetry at, right?

03:11:30.280 Again,

03:11:31.160 pure idle speculation, but it wouldn't 1.00

03:11:33.120 surprise me if the Vanir were, you know, 1.00

03:11:36.200 Jot-Nar 0.67

03:11:36.860 within that kind of classification system.

03:11:39.340 You know?

03:11:41.720 Yeah.

03:11:43.000 um yeah absolutely um Mary Mitchell would like to know why did the folk in Northwestern and 0.77

03:11:52.960 Northeastern Europe accept Christianity a Middle Eastern Jewish cult so readily

03:12:00.220 we could talk about that for an entire show um broad strokes Chris what would you say to that

03:12:07.540 Particularly in the Germanic world, I feel like because so much of the religiosity of

03:12:17.440 individuals was related to their position in a hierarchy that went up to an actual person

03:12:24.940 who was a political leader, that made the apostasy process relatively easy once those

03:12:33.900 lords could be defeated tricked bribed convinced etc into apostasy and it seems pretty downstream

03:12:44.060 from there um i don't necessarily know if they accepted it that readily though like

03:12:50.380 if you look at medieval christianity it's extremely pagan in a lot of ways

03:12:56.780 i think in a lot of senses it was more a progressive ratcheting effect

03:13:02.440 then because there there is attestation of this weird middle ground of like you keep

03:13:09.120 worshiping odin and thor but then there's also this jesus guy right and you know we don't endorse

03:13:14.600 that in the afa for good reason but it is a possibility that doesn't pan out right i think

03:13:24.880 in terms of simple kind of historical consequence not having an ossature equivalent to the vatican

03:13:33.540 the catholic church etc in the elder ossature period did did not help slow down such a thing

03:13:43.720 the catholic church could afford to have people whose life's work was get that village over there 0.93

03:13:51.280 to apostatize i don't know if there were any gothar who would have conceptualized their life

03:13:56.620 their life's work as get that village over there to go back to worshiping thor i'm not saying there

03:14:04.760 isn't but i know for a i have read off the number of goofy names of missionaries on this program

03:14:12.300 before enough of them to know i i mean just far and priori was created for the purpose of training

03:14:18.900 people to go out and get people to apostatize i don't know if there were similar academies

03:14:26.260 in the elder officer period i think that's a big difference sorry go

03:14:32.340 no you're fine so i would say a number of things first

03:14:39.140 northeastern europe didn't really happen much at all for a very long time outside of

03:14:44.820 like the grand duchy of moscow um it took the latest in europe for the teutonic knights to

03:14:59.540 stomp out old religion in parks in very remote and forested parts the baltic um

03:15:06.500 it took a very long time i think that the ease though came in a number of different things one

03:15:14.540 thing i mean the biggest factor is christianity was very efficient they had a very strong

03:15:23.540 central structure that organization they had ways to mobilize people ways to mobilize ideology

03:15:33.280 and to weaponize it and use it.

03:15:36.400 The decentralized situation with Al-Satrua at the time,

03:15:42.640 their lack of strong Gothic institutions,

03:15:45.780 their lack of centralized religious authority,

03:15:50.100 meant they didn't put up a unified struggle.

03:15:52.460 There wasn't a, you know, they couldn't oppose them as a body.

03:15:56.720 So you were dealing with picking off individual kingdoms 0.93

03:15:59.900 and individual um yarldoms here and there and it's very easy for the might of civilized

03:16:10.860 continental europe to pick off small kingdoms one at a time as mentioned earlier once you convert

03:16:19.160 the ruler everybody else converts piecemeal over time but the nation is de facto christian

03:16:26.160 even if you have holdouts so I think that made it easy I also think that you know you mentioned like 0.94

03:16:33.120 why would they embrace this Middle Eastern Jewish religion because we still see that today we see

03:16:39.600 flowing blonde-haired Jesus they don't present him as Rabbi Yeshua looking Jewish looking other 0.90

03:16:47.700 having Middle Eastern accoutrements no he is a warband leader that looks you know bearded and

03:16:55.140 haired and you know blonde haired uh with his you know 12 warrior things they crafted a jesus that

03:17:04.180 was appealing to europeans and they also um the church had a very specific policy of

03:17:18.020 keep the christianity as pagan as you can while not venerating pagan gods so

03:17:25.140 Replacing their heroes with saints, replacing their gods with Jesus, replacing all of their holidays and celebrations with a identical Jesus version made it all seem less foreign and all seem easier to accept.

03:17:44.080 And I think those are the things that factored in most.

03:17:51.980 So this one is for you, Chris.

03:17:55.860 does chris know about the pictures of bronze age petro runes or sorry proto runes um bronze age

03:18:04.740 proto runes i think they are known by another name too an ancient indo culture they look like

03:18:10.900 uh the source of most european alphabets if this is about the stuff on the sickles i know about that

03:18:19.540 um not that's what that's what i assume yeah yeah um so there's only a few

03:18:30.980 writing systems that realistically at this point there's actually only two um there's the

03:18:38.500 out of hieroglyphics tradition and then there's the out of hansi tradition which i would lump

03:18:43.540 karakana hiragana and uh hangul and even though they don't they're not literally

03:18:48.340 hans uh derived from hansa um what seems to be writing the the idea of a symbolic inventory

03:18:57.460 of ideograms you know this squiggle means dog this squiggle means wheat is not unique it shows up all

03:19:06.100 over the place and quite frankly it wouldn't surprise me if writing has been independently

03:19:12.740 invented this ideographic proto writing has been invented hundreds of times across the world

03:19:21.540 because like okay this sign means dog this sign means cat like eventually these relatively simple

03:19:27.860 symbolic inventories get enough signs to mean everything eventually they start representing

03:19:34.020 the grammar of the language even if they aren't alphabetic um what seems to be the the big thing

03:19:41.620 is though that uh write literary traditions tend to converge based on um what you what you need to

03:19:52.820 read because it's easier to translate something to read something that's been translated than to

03:19:58.340 learn a new writing system you can write english using cyrillic or the greek alphabet it doesn't

03:20:04.740 work 100 but you know it's not like latin works for english all that well either if we're being

03:20:09.140 honest um i i have looked at the evidence for latin and the the squiggle arrangement of lines

03:20:24.020 symbols of the runes not the sacred mysteries to be clear um coming from both latin and the

03:20:31.980 futhark the symbols come from a west greek alphabet this is why uh this is why win looks

03:20:39.800 like a p because in west greek row made the w sound um anyways but it wouldn't surprise me if

03:20:51.220 this early stage of proto writing had been invented by europeans but you know dozens

03:20:56.900 hundreds of other groups of people too many times over um i've seen evidence that even like early

03:21:03.300 like circus 5000 bc farmer cultures had some kind of like you know this symbol means grain

03:21:12.620 this symbol means person kind of stuff it's a bit speculative but it you know they had the

03:21:19.220 same kind of brains as we do i don't see why they couldn't have figured out this squiggle means dog

03:21:24.960 this squiggle means only ladies allowed in here stuff like that you know there you have it um

03:21:34.160 jill this is also primary you question but from jill our amazing folk builder in eastern pennsylvania

03:21:44.720 i have been writing a folk opera for about a year set in pre-viking pre-christian scandinavia

03:21:51.920 there is a king and a queen a peasant girl and villains who are a breakaway tribe choosing strife

03:22:01.520 over frith should the king and queen wear high status vindal dress gold large brooches

03:22:11.360 crested helmets and should the villains look like the same world but coarser darker and more worn

03:22:20.880 uh i hope to stage it at a cough someday and my ambitious hope is broadway jill that's amazing um

03:22:30.720 yeah no good i like it that is fantastic i would love to see a performance of that

03:22:36.320 at any or all of our hops um no i'm just super impressed that that's a project that you would do

03:22:43.680 um chris what are your thoughts on costuming in that instance i would say yes um i know that's

03:22:53.280 not i know that's not helpful but it's like no that's exactly what i would think you would want

03:22:57.360 to do in this kind of situation right um bright clothing gold fine things these are good things

03:23:06.960 and um not to get too like quote the ed is here or anything but these are the things that like

03:23:12.880 the gods have like the gods have good things because the gods are depicted using poetic

03:23:21.600 imagery as good people right um so it would make it makes sense to me the idea of like yeah they're

03:23:29.520 the bad guy is ugly because he's immoral right i think that's entirely in line with

03:23:35.040 the period we're talking about so i agree on all accounts i think making them look warm

03:23:41.200 and tired and unpleasant and unhappy is the way to go.

03:23:46.740 I think focusing materially on things that are not joyous

03:23:53.020 because frith brings about joy.

03:23:58.440 So having the good guys look happy

03:24:01.480 and have implements of happiness,

03:24:05.100 they should certainly look like they're the same group of people

03:24:09.120 and they have the same material culture,

03:24:10.940 But them having, you know, instruments and mead horns and things that celebrate community and joy, whereas those who chose strife over Frith should just have weaponry and armor and should be brutalist in its interpretation of Vandal Age stuff as opposed to ornate and celebratory.

03:24:37.860 they're choosing to be strifeful and there's a lack of joy to that having them looking tired

03:24:45.440 and uh worn out and you know void of love and peace i think is part of it just to throw in

03:24:52.480 here this is again idle speculation my bedtime was several hours ago um the idea of maintenance

03:25:01.000 as being tedious

03:25:03.120 I guess the idea of maintenance

03:25:07.160 and upkeep as not being

03:25:09.260 tedious and burdensome to

03:25:11.120 better people is an interesting idea

03:25:13.480 like of an evil thing

03:25:15.220 not wanting to

03:25:17.320 polish its sword

03:25:18.760 to clean its room

03:25:20.740 to wash its clothes

03:25:22.200 like in part

03:25:24.760 again this is just idle kind of

03:25:27.140 poetic speculation but you know like the gods

03:25:29.220 wear nice clothes because they don't mind washing them almost like so slovenliness yeah being ugly

03:25:37.140 not taking care of yourself not taking care of your stuff those are all

03:25:43.220 signs of not being spiritually well um question does the afa have any plans to create a recommended

03:25:50.260 reading list of some sort it would be extremely helpful to new aussage who are and many questions

03:25:55.300 on here involve favorite books yes remind me and we can do that i don't know where best to have

03:26:03.300 that or put that we can certainly compile that by topic let's do that uh nick and chris please help

03:26:10.020 get with the after program not like later tonight but tomorrow or something let's let's get that

03:26:16.260 going sure i mean not only are we asked about books constantly but we're also asked about

03:26:22.100 are we going to do a book list constantly so one day we definitely probably ought to yeah

03:26:27.380 well let's let's get on that and start cobbling one together yes i think i know i've talked the

03:26:33.940 ulcer ago these year off about this but one thing that is you know an eventuality is us as the afa

03:26:40.980 making literature as opposed to having to provide book lists of like academics not that i don't love

03:26:48.900 a lot of this scholarly stuff but you know what i mean here like that's that's an eventuality too

03:26:56.260 all right then uh matt does the afa hand out pamphlets at universities no but we should it

03:27:02.340 would be great certainly not opposed i was talking about folks today two folks today um

03:27:11.300 very soon when we're all the way on the other side of our payment processing

03:27:15.780 restructuring i would like to create i say create we have the uh material figured out i'd like to

03:27:25.060 get some runs of pamphlets made that are specific to each of our hoffs as a starting point

03:27:31.780 i think distributing those in areas you know within an hour or so of the hoff is the smart

03:27:40.520 way to go with each of our hawks that would certainly include um universities in that and

03:27:46.760 i would love to see those pamphlets getting distributed so i'd like to get on that but

03:27:52.040 we need people that are willing to hand out pamphlets and it sounds like a cool thing for

03:27:56.440 someone else to do but it's often something that individuals aren't very comfortable with so

03:28:04.520 we need we would need to find the individuals that are comfortable

03:28:07.640 handing out said pamphlets and figuring out how to distribute those the best way we would like to do

03:28:12.600 that um are there any current plans for any future huff purchases

03:28:23.000 so no because next up is tiershoff once we pay off phrasehoff and that is going to be on

03:28:29.560 our land at sigerham here in jackson county tennessee so our next hop will be constructed

03:28:36.840 from the ground up we have very clear ideas of what we want to do there and what we want that

03:28:43.960 to look like we are still trying to find an architect to put all of those into a very

03:28:50.440 specific plan but we will move on that after we've paid off phrase off um after that we'd have to

03:29:00.200 reassess where we are what the economics of it look like what the member number of growth needed

03:29:06.360 for a um tiers half would be our sixth half so our seventh half would be braggies half

03:29:15.800 and figuring off out where to put that it's very speculative from where i sit right now

03:29:23.880 i have ideas for you know the front runner but the plans on that really it's premature to have

03:29:30.840 solidified plans on that half although it is our plan to continue to get hops and continue

03:29:37.480 to establish them that we have the order of those figured out for the first 14 of our house

03:29:45.160 um and then last question what would afa marriage counseling look like i think that would depend

03:29:51.000 upon the couple but i think one thing that we would do is have we have a deep enough bench

03:29:58.680 of gothar to have you know possibly separate um you know a gothi talk to the husband and the i

03:30:07.720 guess husband to be and the uh wife to be to talk to agithia to get those things figured out and

03:30:15.400 then even at if we need to have them come together under a different third gothar or under you know

03:30:22.840 go through or under those two and talk about any kind of anything that needs to be better figured

03:30:30.440 out so that's my thoughts but chris actually went through some of it so do you have any insights to

03:30:37.080 share with me so to be clear um i my wife and i went through pre-marital counseling we haven't

03:30:44.680 been through our marriages on the rocks counseling but i think that's what counseling was the question

03:30:51.960 yes oh okay i misunderstood that i'm sorry so i i'll get back to you in a sec chris i want to

03:30:57.880 amend my answer so i'm sorry it's late marital counseling again would be to get each of the

03:31:08.680 parties with their own gothe or githia to advocate for them and for their best interests i hope this

03:31:18.040 okay so i hope this makes sense because we've done quite a bit of this

03:31:33.720 it is a challenge to

03:31:37.480 approach that kind of situation and advocate for everyone

03:31:42.760 so what we would want to do is have a guy talking with the husband and saying hey

03:31:49.380 if what you're telling me is accurate then this is what i would suggest this is how i would advise

03:31:57.740 you to be the most successful with what's in your best interest but simultaneously to have a go see

03:32:05.920 or get yes speak to the wife and say okay well what you're saying is true and i'm to take you

03:32:12.640 at your word on it then here's what i would advise for your best interest and then on a completely

03:32:18.800 third level be able to have those gothar talk amongst themselves and sort out what is the

03:32:28.560 healthiest and best situation for that couple and perhaps the family involved

03:32:32.960 it's never going to be as one-sided as either of those positions but being able to

03:32:40.160 advocate subjectively for each of their best interests and then come together collectively

03:32:50.420 for the best overall outcome is what we would like to do now that presupposes some things

03:32:58.460 that means that both husband and wife are invested in the afa and wanting to receive

03:33:05.340 that counseling in reality very often you will have one member of the marriage that

03:33:12.300 would like to have counseling and you will have the other that

03:33:16.140 for whatever reason will refuse it or not be comfortable with it so that takes a little bit

03:33:20.940 different tact but either way we have a deep enough bench where depending on the situation

03:33:29.260 we can come to a mediation together with both of them we can counsel each of them independently

03:33:35.660 we can work through and have seen a wide variety of different issues that i think we have

03:33:43.180 i don't know advice and certainly a deep commitment to try to help that family work

03:33:48.060 through so that everybody can come out in the healthiest place um do you do you want me to

03:33:55.900 talk about the premier so on the premarital counseling uh what does that look like so um

03:34:03.180 i am uh i i talked to a godly and uh my wife talked to a gydia it was the erickson's you know

03:34:09.500 i don't know where i'm saying that whatever um and it was we we did a uh together couples counseling

03:34:17.260 and then we split off um and it was mostly just kind of like you know tell me about the relationship

03:34:25.400 tell me about the other person I'm sorry it's late and I'm trying to remember really hard about

03:34:29.460 the conversation um I don't think it was I don't for most of it it wasn't um anything that I don't

03:34:38.900 think you would get from any kind of premarital counseling like you know you you know what you're

03:34:43.760 getting into kind of a thing, right? Um, this sounds a little odd, but I'm really glad that

03:34:49.200 Cliff asked me it. And as I understand it, um, my wife was asked the same thing by give you Katie

03:34:54.940 Erickson. Um, he asked me, you know, do you have any, any money or kids or anything you're keeping

03:35:01.780 from her? Like, you don't have to necessarily admit it, but you do have to, is this marriage

03:35:09.220 gonna work like are you hiding something are you keeping a secret and i really not that i i didn't

03:35:16.500 have any i didn't have any secret money or kids or any secrets i was hiding from my wife but i'm

03:35:21.900 really glad that he did ask me a question with that degree of like you are this is going to cause

03:35:30.060 problems if you don't deal with this now i think that was a really very mature kind of thing i say

03:35:36.640 that isn't mature but you know what i mean here it was because marriage is a lot you it's an oath

03:35:44.180 and you do it you maintain the marriage when things aren't fun when it's not romantic when

03:35:50.400 it's when it's hard when you're dealing with the baby that won't sleep when it's 5 a.m

03:35:55.420 and the baby won't sleep and you just want to go to bed and whose turn is it and that kind of stuff

03:35:59.900 You know, and I think having our marital tradition be able to handle the realities of living is important in that regard.

03:36:15.460 Now, having said that, my wife and I were just, you know, a young couple in love.

03:36:20.000 So it might've been easy for all I know,

03:36:22.680 the Ericsons might've had a few tricks to pull out if we admitted to being

03:36:26.940 crazy or like, yeah, we beat each other or something like that. You know,

03:36:31.040 we don't, we're not crazy. We don't beat each other for the record, but

03:36:34.080 I apologize. I'm not super helpful here.

03:36:39.120 No, you're fine. So while we got you though,

03:36:43.320 what's the best way to disseminate the AFA to non-believers without getting

03:36:47.260 slam doors in your faces?

03:36:52.300 I think going to people who are... 0.98

03:36:56.200 I know this sounds kind of silly,

03:36:58.700 but going to people who are in a position

03:37:00.620 to want to listen.

03:37:03.380 I don't think we necessarily have...

03:37:06.940 I don't think we...

03:37:08.980 Some Christian sects believe that

03:37:11.480 Christians are morally required

03:37:13.640 to spread the good word 0.98

03:37:16.880 to the point of being obnoxious and onerous to other members of society and i don't think we 0.98

03:37:23.680 get any points with the icer by being a jerk trying to get people to come home even if it's 0.94

03:37:29.280 what they should do but i do think in just simple pragmatism people people are at points in their 0.97

03:37:39.200 life where they can understand accept internalize act upon things and being there when they are in

03:37:51.920 that position is important not just in like uh spreading the faith sense but in being a good

03:37:57.920 a good friend a good brother a good son etc

03:38:02.880 so i think the most important thing is being there for the person when they are in a position

03:38:10.980 to come home and to understand what that entails the benefits of it the responsibilities of it so

03:38:17.960 on and so forth i know that's not necessarily sexy compared to like go pound the pavement

03:38:23.620 here's some flyers here's a script but i don't i don't think that works that kind of missionary

03:38:30.060 activity per se. I think you have to present it to people and show them what it can do

03:38:37.880 for them earnestly. So it can. It depends on what you are capable of doing. Your question

03:38:46.540 presupposes that you don't want door slamming in your face. I'm not advocating this, but

03:38:53.660 does work if we were willing to go door to door to every house in america knock on the door and

03:39:01.020 ask them if they have time to talk about odin it would drastically increase our ranks

03:39:08.940 none of us including myself want to go do that so then it comes into what's realistic and practical

03:39:17.020 so one thing is to the best of your ability don't be afraid of getting doors slammed in your face

03:39:25.660 i think we have a fear of rejection all the time that we let override opportunities that we have to

03:39:35.660 talk about this with people but realistically what i do think is the best way is kind of what

03:39:41.660 uh chris was talking about but first you've got to look for spots and you've got to be excited

03:39:47.860 enough and proud enough of who you are and who we are to mention it to people

03:39:53.660 wear your hammer and be the billboard for ausitry get people who like you like your family and like

03:40:03.780 the things that you have and talk about your faith whenever there's a chance that it comes up

03:40:10.360 Don't be obnoxious, but do be excited and proud about it.

03:40:16.120 Whenever somebody's like, hey, what are you doing this weekend?

03:40:19.860 I'm just getting together with some of my friends.

03:40:24.880 Works a lot better if you're like, oh, well, yeah, my family and I are going to the Hoff and we're going to celebrate a house float.

03:40:32.700 Huh?

03:40:33.200 Hoff?

03:40:33.580 Yes, it's uncomfortable because they're going to ask like strange questions, but that's the opportunity.

03:40:40.360 Oh, yeah. So house float. That's, you know, our our fall celebration that we do every every September.

03:40:48.480 Hoth is our, you know, that's what we call our temples.

03:40:51.000 What do you mean, Tim? You don't like Jesus? Well, no, we're also true.

03:40:55.320 And, you know, we're going to Thor's Hoth. That's a temple dedicated to Thor.

03:41:01.160 Do take all of those opportunities. We let those pass by out of fear of getting out of our comfort zone.

03:41:08.240 we all do that and the more that we can not do that and take the opportunities

03:41:13.440 i think that's realistically where we could all improve

03:41:16.960 um but yeah you being not being afraid to so i'll say people are afraid to talk about it in general

03:41:27.760 or they're afraid may not be the right word they're uncomfortable talking about it in general

03:41:31.660 and then if they can get over that they are more comfortable talking about it with random people

03:41:40.060 than they are with people whose opinion they care about that's the inverse of what i wish that it

03:41:46.460 was you should share it with your co-workers and your friends and your family and people

03:41:53.540 that you interact with and you care about and be prouder sharing it with randoms that's great

03:42:02.120 But it's a real missed opportunity not to share it with the people that you care about.

03:42:06.280 So we all should get better at that.

03:42:09.600 With that, though, it's late.

03:42:11.760 My back hurts.

03:42:13.440 So we're going to call it an evening.

03:42:15.660 But I'd like to say the next big AFA event is going to be Better Nighter in Ohio at Oden's or at Frasehawk in Austintown, Ohio.

03:42:31.320 It's going to be October 16th through the 18th.

03:42:33.980 I will be there.

03:42:35.560 Many amazing people will be there.

03:42:37.720 It's the big event for Freya's Hoff.

03:42:41.340 So make the effort to come on out.

03:42:44.160 It is spectacular.

03:42:46.140 It's our newest Hoff.

03:42:47.380 It's going to be a very nice event, and I would love to see each and every one of you there.

03:42:52.120 And then the following month in November, here in Jackson County, Tennessee, on the grounds that will become the AFA's capital and will become the home of Tiershoff at Sigurheim, we will be celebrating Einherjablok.

03:43:11.120 That's going to be November 13th through the 15th.

03:43:14.620 Plenty of time for it to be nice and comfortable weather down here.

03:43:18.660 Amazing people.

03:43:19.760 we've got people coming from all around to celebrate so do make that effort we would love to

03:43:24.960 see you um with that i look forward to speaking to you guys next time when swan and i go over

03:43:32.480 the next portion of the skull scopper model until then he'll be i seer he'll the folk he'll be afa

03:43:39.040 Remember, victory never sleeps.

03:44:09.040 Thank you.

03:44:39.040 Thank you.

03:45:09.040 Thank you.

03:45:39.040 Thank you.

03:46:09.040 We'll be right back.

03:46:39.040 Thank you.

Asatru Folk Assembly - September 10, 2026

9⧸9⧸26 Victory Never Sleeps, Ep 218 - From Vendel to Vikings

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