00:00:00.080Hello and welcome to this interview where I should be talking with returning guest Tom Rousell. How are you?
00:00:04.880Not bad, thanks, Bo. It's good to be back.
00:00:06.500Yeah, no, great to have you back. Last time we talked about sort of much more pre-history of sort of like Bell Beakers and Iron Age and that sort of thing.
00:00:32.720Just sort of a bit of an overview, an hour, an hour and a half on that.
00:00:37.460And hopefully it'll be enjoyable for people out there.
00:00:40.000Yeah, whatever you want to know about, I'll try and talk about it as much as I can.
00:00:44.420It's a topic I love, but I focus on specifically, like my areas of study for the Anglo-Saxons have mostly been to do with like the culture,
00:00:52.260the religions, the like, you know, paganism and Christianity, the social structure and the general like Germanic ways of being,
00:01:03.180like how they treated their lords, how they organized the land and how they made their art, where their art originates and this kind of thing.
00:01:12.760rather than the dates that the different Anglo-Saxon kingdoms went to war with one another or things like that.
00:01:19.900I know a bit about that, but that's like many people who are historians, like that would be their focus.
00:01:25.100And they'd say, oh, yeah, well, when Offa did this and that and whatever.
00:01:28.600But it's not the kind of history that is most interesting to me.
00:01:32.700Okay, cool. Well, I thought I'd go through it sort of vaguely chronologically and just wherever the conversation takes us.
00:01:40.120Yeah, because my understanding is much more that sort of classical, much more classical sort of story.
00:01:47.360What kings, what dates, what kingdoms overtook, what other kings.
00:02:55.240Yeah, I think there's some problem like with what dark ages means.
00:02:58.780Like nowadays, historians don't say dark ages, but because they think, you know, it's misleading.
00:03:04.460It wasn't a dark age in some respects, but, and so it, you know, less popular to use.
00:03:11.560But it was a dark age. Initially, it was called a dark age because we don't have as much insights in this dark period.
00:03:19.340The Romans wrote a lot of things down.
00:03:21.440And then suddenly, as the Roman Empire falls, there's just this period where we don't have much written down until like the monasteries start, you know, writing stuff down a lot again.
00:03:28.960So like the high middle ages is a tie is not really the dark ages, like the high that when we think of knights and shining armor, we're talking about 12th century, 13th century, whatever, 14th century.
00:03:40.760That is completely different. That's that period is a bit more like 1066, but the, the 450 is your, it's an age of, well, it's the darkest dark age because it's not only did like all like we can see production of like the kind of factories of the time, like producing pottery and stuff.
00:04:05.220This is just gone. They're not there anymore. People aren't producing things and distributing like on mass, like things like, you know, basic stuff like pottery and huge cultural turnover happens, turmoil, all different parts of Europe, not just in Britain, but, you know, like Clovis and the Franks, the Franks are like a German, Germanic people take over Roman Gaul.
00:04:33.140And that's like a completely different world from like, you're talking about Gaul was like a very well-established Roman colony with a proper Romanized state and a system of taxation in place in Gaul.
00:04:48.720And suddenly it's completely ruled over by barbarians. And this is like, not like the middle ages at all. You're more, it's more like a kind of the transition away from the classical Europe of the, of ancient Rome into the dark period that leads into the high middle ages.
00:05:10.720After this, this period of what Julius Evola is not a proper historian is a philosopher of it more than that, but he calls it like the Nordic Roman culture, which is the period in which the peripheral barbarians merge with the civilized cultures of the Mediterranean to form the synthesis, which is Europe as we know it today, the Nordic Roman combination.
00:05:40.720Because I, I'm one of those people who won't abandon the term dark age, because I know what I'm talking about there is the literary evidence.
00:05:52.720Because the archeology, yeah, nothing stopped. Life didn't stop. So the archeology is still, there's still tons of archeology. And, but in terms of the literary evidence and the light of history in terms of literary evidence, it goes dark big time.
00:06:10.720So for example, just for, well, quickly to say, cause I quite often do at the beginning, towards the beginning of my videos to talk about the sources. So we're looking at, um, the venerable bead.
00:06:22.720Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Gildas. Um, and even you've got maybe doomsday, I know, doomsday, but I know that's later, that's much, much later, but it is a snapshot essentially of late Anglo-Saxon England, not Norman England.
00:06:35.720I mean, it was 20 odd years after 1066, but, um, it takes a picture of largely an Anglo-Saxon world still.
00:07:56.720I like to compare for that period, maybe France and England to show the difference because Gaul was a Roman colony that was with proper Roman infrastructure and remained.
00:08:07.720So even after the fall of Rome, Britain was not because the Romans literally retreated in the same way Americans retreated from Afghanistan.
00:08:18.720They just left and the Romanized Britons who couldn't go and move somewhere else.
00:08:43.720The, they basically installed themselves as the new Roman elite in France and call it France now.
00:08:52.720Uh, and they were able to tax the people in the same way it was done.
00:08:57.720That's not what happened in Britain at all.
00:08:59.720There was something completely different.
00:09:01.720And Britain, even before when the Romans were here, they were like, Hmm, this place is vulnerable to, from the, from the Saxon shore, as they called it, which is the North Sea.
00:09:13.720They called it the Saxon shore because they knew the Saxons could always attack from that right.
00:09:16.720And the Scotty, as they called them is what we call the Gales, uh, from Ireland.
00:09:21.720And, uh, there was, um, the conspiracy of barbarians in the late fourth century where there was like a way of like Romans were trying to make sure that the barbarians wouldn't invade their British colony.
00:09:32.720The British colony was always vulnerable to that.
00:09:34.720When of course the Romans left, they were proven right because all these barbarian groups, the Picts invade, like started, uh, harassing the, uh, the Britons, the Romanized Britons to the south.
00:09:44.720Um, and according to the semi legendary narratives, which I'm sure you're familiar with by, um, uh, is it, uh, not Beda in, um, I think it's Jeffrey or Gilda says the, um, you know, uh, the King Vortigan was so, uh, fed up with fighting the Picts that he is like, we need help.
00:10:06.720Let's call on the Saxons to come and help.
00:10:08.720And, um, he invited over these, uh, federal, fed, federati or whatever they call them, uh, uh, in Latin, um, to come and help them fight.
00:10:18.720And they didn't go away afterwards, which might have, obviously that can't explain the reality.
00:10:23.720I can talk later about the genetic and archeological evidence, but it might, that might be part of the real story.
00:10:30.720So, I mean, so we mentioned that the Romans just leave, but Honorius needs every last and Stilicho needs every last soldier and legionary back in Rome immediately because of, um, Alaric.
00:10:43.720Uh, so yeah, but it doesn't mean that.
00:11:09.720Um, so, so now we've got this sort of a transitional period between the Romans leaving and, uh, the remaining Romano Britons.
00:11:19.720And the first, the first of many sort of waves of invasion from, uh, the, the continent, whether it's Saxony, Lower Saxony, uh, uh, Frisia, uh,
00:11:34.720This is the period that Pickland gets transformed into Scotland.
00:11:36.720We call it now because of this Gaelic tribe called the Scotty.
00:11:39.720But I mean, I think Romano Briton, you sound like you're a little bit, it's not clear on the term, but I think it's very accurate because these people are not like the Celts that Caesar met.
00:11:55.720Like the, even before like proper Roman, like, you know, overlordship, the Gauls and the Britons had some coinage, you know, they were making coins in the style of Romans.
00:12:06.720The people in Britain after the Romans left didn't even have coins.
00:22:30.720It's only the archaeological record you've got, which is, you know, by its very nature, incomplete.
00:22:36.720But what we also have, and I mean, these are all true statements you're making, but I think sometimes they obscure what a lot of people don't realize is that the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes were just not like unique peoples.
00:22:52.720They were just Germanic tribes, and they were like all the other Germanic tribes.
00:22:56.720They shared common, they could speak to the other Germanic tribes.
00:22:59.720The language, there wasn't an Angle language in the Saxon language.
00:23:02.720They just spoke like, you know, proto-West Germanic or something like that, like an early form of West Germanic, which became, you know, Anglo-Saxon, Frisian, Old High German, like the languages that later derived from them.
00:23:14.720But even then, the North Germanic languages were mutually intelligible with early West Germanic.
00:23:18.720So it wasn't even like they were distinct from the people in Scandinavia that much.
00:23:21.720And the same gods, a lot of the same rituals, and they traveled around and they shared myths.
00:23:26.720Hence the main myth that we got from Anglo-Saxon England, Beowulf, is set in Sweden.
00:23:31.720There's a reason for that, because they had no... these were part of their cultural horizon.
00:23:36.720They talk about the Goths and the Lombards in Beowulf.
00:23:40.720They're talking about these people as known peoples whose activities are relevant to English people because they were kinsmen.
00:23:46.720When St. Boniface from Devon wants to preach to the Saxons in Germany, he does so because he says they are our brethren.
00:23:54.720They're our brothers, and he's not talking about brothers in Christ because they're pagans.
00:23:57.720He said we have to preach to our kingdom. They're the same people.
00:24:02.720So now when you understand the entire Germanic world shared in certain cultures, then you understand that literary sources from other parts of the Germanic world are very instructive to help us understand what the early English were like.
00:24:15.720And we don't have sagas like we do from Iceland for England, but if you read the Icelandic sagas, you'll get a good insight into...
00:24:23.720And even sources, late sources from the Viking Age or earlier sources like Tacitus describing Germanic tribes during the Roman times, you're still getting a good insight into what these people are like.
00:24:33.720Because even in the thousand years between the Viking, like late Viking sources, like, you know, in the Viking Age 1000 years ago and 2000 years ago, Tacitus writing.
00:24:45.720But and between that is the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England.
00:24:49.720But there's some commonalities, even at the far extremes of that millennium.
00:24:53.720So I think reading about Icelandic literature is important.
00:25:00.720I mean, I did a course in Icelandic literature at university as well, even though I was mostly studying Anglo-Saxon stuff, because the culture it depicts is very similar to the one you see in Beowulf or in Anglo-Saxon poetry.
00:25:16.720It's remarkable, isn't it? It's remarkable. It's more homogenous then than now in all sorts of ways.
00:25:23.720Do you think, do you think in a broad sense that the sort of fifth century, sixth century invasions, migrations of the Anglo-Saxons, the Jews, the Frisians,
00:25:36.720well, do we know if there's any evidence that they were forced that way by people more to the east?
00:25:43.720I don't know, like the Swaby or something is forcing them to, because the only reason I think that is that quite often in the east, in like the Eurasian steppe, that people sweep into Hungary and Bulgaria and the Balkans because they're pushed that way by yet more ferocious people further to their east.
00:26:02.720Do you think there's anything in that with the invasions of Britain?
00:26:06.720Yes and no. Yes and no. Yes, I think there were, like, the migration period in general is a time when many peoples are moving around, hence the name, you know, the migration of peoples.
00:26:19.720In Germany and other Germanic countries is literally called the race migration period, or the people's migration period, as in different peoples are moving, specifically not people, but peoples en masse.
00:26:34.720And that includes, you know, the Huns. And the Huns are a big influence on the Germanic world for a long time afterwards. Like those Viking sagas include Huns as characters.
00:26:48.720Attila the Hun is a character in Volsunga Saga, Atli. And the Huns are, you know, they're there in the Germanic world. And I mean, even the Huns were pushing on the Goths.
00:27:00.720But the Goths had invaded Ukraine long ago. The Goths had mixed with Huns and the Ostrogoths disappeared because of that over mixing with, like, the peoples, the steppe peoples, basically, in the east.
00:27:12.720But them encroachments in, and the Avars, and that's causing other westward migrations of Germanics.
00:27:21.720You know, it's not a coincidence that the Lombards and the Goths and all these different people are moving around at that time.
00:27:26.720But it's not recorded in any Germanic source as a catastrophe. It's, in fact, in Beowulf and in the sagas, this era is basically like a golden age.
00:27:41.720It's like the perfect period. It's like when everyone was more heroic and men were better.
00:27:45.720The men in the Viking Age described the Migration Era as being a superior time when everything was better.
00:27:51.720People were stronger and braver and everything was amazing.
00:27:54.720And that's often the case. In the Iliad, Old Man Nestor is saying that on the beaches of Troy.
00:27:59.720Men used to be real men back when I was young, when my grandfather was...
00:28:03.720It's a human trait, but it's there in a narrative context. When they're talking about that age, they're like,
00:28:12.720Oh, in this golden age of Great Maids, the Goths are so respected by all Germanic peoples because they were the ones who went down south
00:28:22.720and took on the Romans. They spread so far and everyone knows about them.
00:28:27.720So I think that other Germanic people were proud to have this kinship connection to the Goths.
00:28:34.720And now genetic evidence has showed the Goths originated in Sweden.
00:28:37.720And that's what some people at the time said, some medieval historians in France.
00:28:41.720I mean, some actual historians living in medieval times referred to Scandinavia as the womb of nations,
00:28:47.720saying that the Franks originated in Scandinavia.
00:28:50.720And that's been vindicated because we know now that basically the Germanic people sort of poured out of Scandinavia
00:28:56.720into the continent and replaced other peoples or mixed with other peoples.
00:30:08.720And then suddenly there's very bad weather.
00:30:11.720And then you get Nordic people just flooding Europe all over the place and causing havoc.
00:30:16.720I think something like that could have happened rather than more people.
00:30:19.720But most of the ones who came to England, though, are not coming directly from Scandinavia.
00:30:24.720In 2022, a study of Anglo-Saxon DNA did speculate that a certain amount, not speculate, sorry.
00:30:30.720It did theorize based on genetic evidence that a certain amount of them came from southern Sweden.
00:30:36.720But I think the subsequent study, which looks at DNA in a different way, in a more detailed way,
00:30:41.720kinship sharing shows that no, actually the majority of the Anglo-Saxons were coming from exactly the places Bede said they were coming from,
00:30:48.720which is the Jutland Peninsula, Jutland, some pronounce it, Jutland in Danish.
00:30:53.720I say Jutland because that's what it should be called.
00:30:56.720But the Jutland Peninsula and the angle of, you know, Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, exactly what you'd expect them to be coming from.
00:31:11.720What's your feelings on Bede, then, in general? Are you, do you think, do you enjoy reading Bede, or is it a slog, or do you put much store in what he says?
00:31:22.720I think a lot of people, Bede can be read by a non-historian.
00:31:25.720You can just pick it up and read it. Like, it's not hard going.
00:31:28.720You just get a Penguin paperback for like $7.99.
00:31:31.720I think, I think that, don't be intimidated by, oh, I'm like looking through some like ancient monks, like impenetrable prose.
00:31:39.720It's just some guy talking about what he thinks happened in this country.
00:31:42.720To give you a context of what kind of a guy he was, he's a Northumbrian raised in a, like, basically like an enclave of Mediterranean Roman culture in barbarian Northumbria.
00:31:55.720At a time when there are still pagans running around England, and most of the old civilized way of life of Roman is gone.
00:32:33.720He's late, end of the 7th century, yeah.
00:32:35.720So there's a few, like, I think there's definitely a few pagans kicking around.
00:32:39.720Certainly, if he didn't know any pagans personally, he definitely would have known people who knew pagans.
00:32:43.720Like, the older people he knew would have known pagans, definitely would have known lots of pagans, probably had seen pagan rituals.
00:32:50.720So when he's talking about paganism in England, he, even if he, let's say, we don't know exactly how much he saw firsthand.
00:32:58.720It's certainly possible he's seen pagan stuff firsthand, but even if he hasn't, it's not very far removed from it.
00:33:05.720Like, other monks who he knew personally or people who traded with the monasteries would have seen and known pagans in that country.
00:33:12.720So he's writing about the history of England, but he's calling it the ecclesiastical history of England.
00:33:17.720He wants to talk about England as a Christian people.
00:33:21.720And he's inventing England in that way, because England was not yet fully a Christian people.
00:33:26.720It was almost, and it certainly wasn't really a people in a united political sense yet.
00:33:32.720But he's planting the seeds that would allow Alfred and Adelred to make England a nation.
00:33:38.720Yeah, definitely. He's long before there's a single kingdom, whether you want to say Alfred or Afghanistan or whatever.
00:33:44.720He's quite a long time before that, hundreds of years before that.
00:33:48.720So we owe him a debt for inventing, like, coherently saying the gentis anglorum exist, meaning the English race are a thing.
00:33:57.720And he fully admits that they were pagan. He's probably a bit embarrassed about that.
00:34:01.720But he glosses over, doesn't give us a great insight into the pagan religion, but he talks, you know, some of the gods from him.
00:34:08.720And he's talking a bit about the settlement process and how it happened.
00:34:12.720But that is how trustworthy is he? I'd say as long as you look at him for what he is, then you can read his biases.
00:34:20.720He is a man who is a Christian who wants to define the English as a people in opposition to the Celtic Christians.
00:34:31.720So the problem is that he simultaneously believes in the prestige of Christianity.
00:34:37.720And he wants to make sure that people, the English people are recognized as not being like the Celtic people who were Christian for longer.
00:34:44.720So it's like a bit embarrassing for him because he has loyal to Rome, you mean, is what he was saying.
00:34:50.720I think this is a misguided as well. Some people think that like there was this thing called Celtic Christianity.
00:34:55.720That was this like separate version of Christianity that existed in Britain.
00:34:59.720But I don't think that ever really existed. I don't think I don't think that the Christianity of the Celts was as distinct from any other kind of Christianity in Western Europe at the time, as people sometimes say there was a disagreement on the placement of Easter.
00:35:15.720Other than that, there's not that much difference. It's pretty much the same. And there's, you know, this Roman, they're both Roman.
00:35:22.720Yeah, right. I mean, so let's talk a little bit about Christianity, then get it get out of the way.
00:35:28.720Because you're pagan, right? I'm not Christian.
00:35:34.720But nonetheless, fascinated by it. When you read Bede, I mean, it goes back to St. Augustine of Canterbury.
00:35:40.720Right. So, you know, we've had Christianity here since near the beginning of of Christianity being the main religion in the Roman world in one way or another.
00:35:52.720Yeah, it's been here because there were soldiers, but it doesn't mean it was dominant or anything.
00:35:56.720So it's not like it's just absolutely not the case that the the Angles and the Saxons and the Jews bought Christianity.
00:36:04.720No, and he doesn't. He wouldn't make that claim. He doesn't try to make that claim either.
00:36:07.720Right. Which would be per Djangoism if he did like.
00:36:10.720But so then there's this idea that the the perhaps the the Vikings or just the Norsemen push out push out Christianity to some degree in the areas that they come.
00:36:26.720I'm getting a bit later in time now. But nonetheless, there's this sort of this outpost of, yeah, well, Celtic Christianity.
00:36:33.720Sort of this narrative of it's holding on, clinging on by its fingernails in places like Skellig St. Michael.
00:36:40.720So some some some some really obscure places like out in Ireland and stuff.
00:36:45.720Well, Ireland remained Christian all of the time. Yeah. Ireland was Christian.
00:36:48.720And then when when Rome, when yeah, when Rome reasserts itself, there's some sort of this what you're talking about, that there's some sort of schism might not be the right word, but two two different forms of Christianity sort of battling for supremacy in these islands.
00:37:09.720You know, just saying that that's you don't think there was there's much to it, really.
00:37:13.720No, I don't think that's true. I think that what you're seeing was an ethnic conflict.
00:37:17.720But that narrative, sorry, before you go, that narrative, you will see that in quite a lot of books.
00:37:21.720Yeah, I know, especially older ones. I'm not saying you're wrong or they're right.
00:37:24.720I mean, first off, I'm not a theologian, so I can't talk too much about like the schism.
00:37:28.720But it's not it doesn't seem like anyone at the time is talking very much about a schism.
00:37:33.720It does seem like that's a bit strong for me. Yeah, it's like it's just they have a different dating of Easter.
00:37:39.720Right. Other than that. OK, yes, they have the Celtic Christians had a kind of monastic tradition in the in the in the in the in the.
00:37:47.720same way as St Anthony is based on St Anthony's.
00:37:50.720You know, he secludes himself into the desert and just go.
00:37:54.720You know, they their desert was these little monasteries on the Celtic islands or whatever.
00:37:58.720There's no theological reason that the church would oppose that the English were converted by two missions.
00:38:10.720One of them was from the Gaelic Monastery of Columba on Iona, which also sent missions to Pictland to convert the Picts and to the Gaels in Britain, because the Gaels who invaded some of the Gaels, the Scotty who invaded Britain were still pagan, whereas all the Gaels in Ireland had converted.
00:38:34.720So the Christian Gaels sent missions to their Gaelic brothers in Britain to make them convert.
00:38:38.720They sent missions to the Picts to make them convert some of the last Celtic pagans then gone.
00:38:43.720And they sent a mission to Northumbria to convert the ancestors of Bede.
00:38:48.720So Bede's part of England was converted by the Celts.
00:38:51.720The south of England was not converted by a Celtic missionary.
00:38:54.720It was converted directly by the Gregorian mission.
00:39:05.720And St. Augustine had a pretty, for the accounts we have, a pretty receptive audience, because the pagan king said, look, we're not going to take your religion.
00:39:17.720Sounds very nice, but we've got our own religion.
00:39:34.720And then, so they pushed really hard on the mission because there was, they refused to convert initially, but they didn't ban him from like the Japanese.
00:39:44.720They didn't ban missionaries, which would have been if they'd recognized.
00:40:06.720It's classic sort of polytheism, really.
00:40:09.720It's like, yeah, we're not, we, there isn't just one God and there's one word and it's the only way and anything else is heresy that must be burnt out.
00:41:04.720Saying, give him, at least give him an audience.
00:41:06.720Well, they were actually keen for Anglo-Saxon, they wanted queens, Christian women to marry.
00:41:16.720You'd think like the church would tell Christian women, don't marry pagan men, but they didn't.
00:41:20.720They said they were very happy when Christian queens would marry a pagan king because then they've got one in his court, whispering in his ear, saying, oh, you know how women can be.
00:41:31.720And then also his children who, I mean, the king doesn't have time to, you know, give religious instruction to his own children.
00:42:07.720And it was like, how can we get how can we win minds?
00:42:11.720And what is the process by which we, you know, get access to the children and the women and, you know, and the power centers and then force them to disseminate our preferred rules and laws.
00:42:21.720So it was very systematic and very effective in its takeover.
00:42:25.720Well, Christianity in that period, we might be used to sort of an extremely weak wristed, wishy washy church of England.
00:42:33.720But that's not what they, that's not what they were doing.
00:43:19.720You've got to completely prevent anyone from worshipping the old religions.
00:43:23.720And you've got to kill them if they try and do it.
00:43:25.720One last thing between the, before we move on from Christianity entirely, between the Celtic form of Christianity and the Roman Gregory mission form of it.
00:43:36.720Their artistic aesthetic was different though, right?
00:43:50.720It's a really interesting question because, well, I mean, I can't give a yes or no because it's a bit complicated, but like the, the wrote the late Roman artwork is in the British Isles.
00:44:06.720It's like, um, there's not a lot of stuff artifacts there, but like, it's not always explicitly Christian, uh, in its context.
00:44:15.720And like, um, the, the definitive art style that most people call Celtic not work or Celtic wrongly and associated with insular Christianity everywhere from Ireland to Cornwall to England, all across the British Isles comes from Anglo-Saxon pagans.
00:44:34.720And that style is because the North, the monks who went to, I mean, the, the mission, the aid and mission to Northumbria, they adopted these Gaelic Christians adopted the pagan style of art from the Northumbrian Anglo-Saxons of these interlocking serpents and things not work.
00:44:54.720And they produced their own version of it in manuscript forms.
00:44:59.720And that, that style of art in those manuscripts became the, uh, the, the defining insular, what we call insular art style.
00:45:08.720Some people call it Celtic not work or whatever, and they call it Celtic because it's seen all over Ireland and Scotland, wherever, but it, it comes from English pagans.
00:45:15.720And it becomes also definitive of Christianity in these are because the first manuscripts and the first Christian crosses all have this artwork on it, but it didn't exist in Celtic art.
00:45:26.720It didn't exist except in Scandinavia among Odin worshipers because all these intertwined serpents and things are so, it's basically like two parts of pagan theology.
00:45:37.720Like one, they believe that all reality fate is actually an interwoven web of threads, which is controlled by the Norns.
00:45:48.720It's where we get the word weird from.
00:45:50.720And also they believe that when you die, the underworld is full of snakes and serpents.
00:45:55.720So seeing all these interwoven threads and snakes and things reminds you of death and of fate and of being the entire totality of existence.
00:46:03.720And that comes into, is adopted very cleverly by the Gaelic monks and becomes something very Christian instead.
00:46:09.720And we can say it's certainly not Rome, Roman.
00:46:13.720And when I say Roman, I don't mean ancient Rome.
00:46:15.720I mean, I mean Catholic, where the Popes is what I'm talking about.
00:46:25.720And the first example you can see of it is in Scandinavia and Northern Germany, where it's called Sarlin style one.
00:46:32.720And it's believed that the Germanic pagans at that time, they didn't have until the migration era.
00:46:37.720Germanic people invented it in the migration era and they believe it is called zoomorphic animal style based on art from the steppe.
00:46:49.720So it's got some precedent in Scythian art in the first millennium BC, but it doesn't appear in continental Germanic Europe until like the 300th or 4th century or something like that.
00:47:02.720And there's a few hundred years gap there.
00:47:05.720And I think that the transmission from Iranic Scythian barbarians to Germanic barbarians was facilitated probably via Hunnic and Turkic peoples,
00:47:16.720with whom I've already said during the migration era, the Germanic people had close contact.
00:47:20.720So they would have taken this style of art, changed it because it's not the same as steppe art, changed it to integrate all these knots.
00:47:27.720That's the main thing. The animal style, the zoomorphic animal style of the steppe was then turned into all these strange knotwork and then taken up by Gaelic monks to become what we call like Christian Celtic art.
00:47:39.720And you just don't see it in Byzantium in Greece, the Balkans, Italy, Spain, North Africa.
00:47:44.720Well, you know, what you do get there is vine scroll where you have like you can have like often at the side of margins or manuscript or on like on a sarcophagus or something.
00:47:55.720Vines are like grapevines like tangled up, but it's very clearly grapevines and the knots are not like they're more elegant.
00:48:02.720Whereas what you see, like that Celtic style is like this dense, like in, in that impenetrable, like so complicated and almost like that.
00:48:13.720You look at them in a completely different way that like elegant sort of vine scroll in, in ancient classical art that transferred into early Christian art is something just like quite harmonic harmonious rather.
00:48:24.720I mean, and it's sort of, you know, just like a pleasant border, whereas the Celtic or Germanic knotwork is something else.
00:48:31.720It's very intricate and it's something you stare at like a magic eye puzzle and you can look at it for ages.
00:48:36.720You're like, wow, there's so much, it's so complicated.
00:48:39.720And I think that's what you were, how you were intended to look at it.
00:48:41.720You were supposed to stare at it like a psychedelic sort of experience or something like that.
00:48:45.720Yeah. Or like those incredible manuscripts of stained glass.
00:48:48.720Stained glass is sort of for the illiterate.
00:50:31.720It shows that the king, the preachers who brought Christianity to the king, didn't impress upon him the actual nature of Christianity.
00:50:38.720So that he completely misunderstood it.
00:50:40.720And obviously, none of his advisors or anyone were able to communicate to him what Christianity really was well enough that he would not do this thing.
00:50:52.720Eventually, someone obviously did explain to him.
00:50:54.720And then he was like, I don't want it anymore.
00:51:09.720And then the grave is an unambiguously pagan barrow, ship burial, very Scandinavian-specific type, because actually most of West Germanic peoples don't have ship burials.
00:51:23.720It's almost exclusively North Germanic.
00:51:25.720It's this style of helmet and this ship burial is found a lot in Eastern Sweden.
00:51:31.720So it actually made people at first think that this was somehow a Swedish connection, but it's not from Sweden.
00:52:06.720And then all these, the pressplex are impressed with pictures of horned Odin dancers who have these two ravens crest and dance with spears.
00:52:15.720Odin, or Woden, was the spear god and the raven god.
00:52:18.720And he had these two ravens representing thought and memory.
00:52:21.720It's very much, this is the helmet of a Woden worshipper.
00:52:24.720And there's loads of other very clearly Woden artifacts depicting two ravens within it.
00:52:29.720But there's also Byzantine Christian artifacts in it with saints' names engraved and crosses and stuff, imported all the way from probably Constantinople or somewhere like that.
00:52:41.720I think some of the garnets are from India or the Indus Valley.
00:52:44.720Yeah, the garnets, that's another matter because the garnets are probably from Sri Lanka or something like that.
00:52:49.720But they're not, that doesn't show a cultural connection to Sri Lanka.
00:52:56.720The trading, Germanic art always used these red garnets that come from South Asia.
00:53:00.720There was a trade route, they probably had no idea where these garnets were coming from.
00:53:04.720That's not the case with the Byzantine silverware.
00:53:07.720They knew that this was Christian silverware and they knew it was coming from there and he didn't acquire it randomly like along a trade route.
00:53:13.720It's possible, some one theory is that this, the people who got these were because they actually were serving as federati in the emperor's army and they were given these as presents.
00:53:41.720And then he goes home and he's like, now I'm back to going to Woden.
00:53:44.720Or, or it could just be that he had men in his retinue who had served over there and then they get gifted as the cycle of wealth in Germanic society is such that the king or is the Lord is surrounded by his best men.
00:54:00.720And they go out, acquire gold, which is give them all to their king.
00:54:04.720Who's the, in, in Germanic cultures, they would refer to the king or as a ring breaker, which means someone who distributes wealth because all you give him a gold ring.
00:54:13.720He'd break it up and give it out to everyone or his best guys.
00:54:16.720If you ask the more, the more you do for him, the more he gets back to you.
00:54:19.720And also he looks after the people who don't have anything.
00:54:22.720It's like kind of, it's a very managed economy, you know, with a centralized managed economy, everything goes through him.
00:54:29.720And, um, but he's expected to be very open handed and, uh, a river to his people.
00:54:34.720You know, this is what they call a good cuning in, uh, you know, someone who really helps all the people, but also rewards loyalty.
00:54:43.720And the whole culture was so centered around military loyalty to their leader.
00:54:49.720Like they were happy to die for him passionately.
00:54:52.720Whereas the Roman military had previously had, you know, dispassionate regimented, highly trained warriors.
00:54:59.720The Germanic war system was based on the extremely passionate desire of the soldier to protect his Lord and, uh, who would go into battle with them.
00:55:09.720So, uh, they would, you know, want to win glory that way.
00:55:13.720And they would not never want to return from a battle where he had died would be a very great shame to them.
00:55:18.720So this guy, Radwald, he's got these Christian stuff in his burial.
01:18:45.720So, and I think like getting too hung up on whether that was based on a real person denies the 800 years or so of very important history that is real of us enjoying Arthurian stories.
01:34:05.720They're not, like, you know, impressive warships.
01:34:07.720But the ones from, like, an Oslo museum are ones like Sutton Hoo that are taken from Barrows.
01:34:12.720So these were prestige ships and they're just beautifully made and exquisitely crafted vessels.
01:34:19.720So, yeah, the ones that came to England probably could have been a little bit not as nice as that, but they're probably pretty impressive as well.
01:34:26.720I mean, not that I think the Viking attacks were particularly any more brutal than stuff that's been going on since time immemorial, since the Sea Peoples or whatever.
01:34:40.720But nonetheless, nonetheless, still brutal if he's on the receiving end of it, I think this idea, this revisionism, that it wasn't all that bad and it's exaggerated and it was all Anglo-Saxon propaganda.
01:35:06.720They're bragging about that they bounced over, butchered everyone, raped a load of women, got everything they could get their hands on and came back.
01:35:39.720For them it was the same business as normal.
01:35:41.720And previously there were more, the Swedes particularly were hitting Estonia.
01:35:44.720And they basically, a bunch of Swedes had this really like, well, a big war band of Swedes hit Estonia but hit the wrong part and got their asses handed to them basically.
01:35:54.720And had to do a very quick impromptu funeral for a lot of Swedish guys near the beach in Estonia before running.
01:36:02.720And yeah, that's what's been discovered in 2008, this huge burial.
01:36:19.720So everyone was like, this is a good place to do this.
01:36:22.720So they keep doing it again, especially if you've got like, in the winter is like, not much to do except like huddle around the fire and plan the next summer because they only raided in summer.
01:36:30.720So the summer, the summer is like your raiding time.
01:36:33.720And they get ready every spring, like start kitting out the vessels, like how many people, who's the best guys, who's going to come on this raid.
01:36:39.720And then if you come back, you can be a big shot in town because you came back with a bunch of gold and you give it to the king and the king gives back to you.
01:36:47.720And you're like, your social position is in their culture is based on like, you know, your performance in these kind of things like fighting abroad is brave.
01:36:55.720That is all pretty much exactly what the monks in England describe it as.
01:37:01.720It's like you're getting hit by a sort of semi professional military force.
01:37:06.720Like they're not like proper soldiers because they're probably farmers half the year, but they're certainly better trained than monks fighting.
01:37:14.720And they will burn and destroy everything.
01:37:25.720And men have always sort of done more or less.
01:37:29.720The difference is, I guess, like if when Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were warring with each other or they would not hit monasteries because they would have some kind of respect for the same religious taboos.
01:37:41.720Just like when pagan heathen Germanic groups were warring against each other, they didn't touch the temple.
01:37:47.720They don't want to be incur the wrath of the gods.
01:37:50.720But when you have two different religions, then suddenly there's no more.
01:37:53.720There's a lot less respect for each other.
01:37:56.720Right. So to the Vikings, the gold in a church or a monastery is just up for grabs.
01:38:02.720It has no religious sacred value. It's just there to take.
01:38:05.720Hmm. So I suppose if we unfortunately, God, I could talk to you for hours and hours and hours.
01:38:11.720I thought you've got to start joining it to close. But so there's a few things I want to.
01:38:15.720OK, so if we start talking about the end, basically, if we if we're dating Hastings as the end.
01:38:21.720Yeah, that's traditionally the day that Stamford Hill is the last defeat of the Vikings and Stamford Bridge.