Stories of Vikings ...... today on the wireless*

The Vikings have never done much for me.

Silly Viking helmet

In my league table of all time favourite bits of history they sit somewhere around the bottom of the list.

Now I know much work has been done to rehabilitate them over the last 50 years and today we have a much more rounded view of them.

It starts with a critical reinterpretation of the early English accounts which presented the Vikings as just vicious marauding pirates and  encompasses the on going archaeological discoveries which offer up a fascinating glimpse into their social life, and their trading activities.

All of which are there to see at the Jorvick Museum in York which holds many of the finds from the digs undertaken in the old Viking quarter of the city.***  

So I will put my prejudice in  my pocket and listen to The Orkneyinga Saga, today on Radio 4.

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Saga of the Earls of Orkney, as told in the 13th Century by an unknown Icelander. 

Marauders

This was the story of arguably the most important, strategically, of all the islands in the British Viking world, when the Earls controlled Shetland, Orkney and Caithness from which they could raid the Irish and British coasts, from Dublin round to Lindisfarne. 

The Saga combines myth with history, bringing to life the places on those islands where Vikings met, drank, made treaties, told stories, became saints, plotted and fought.

With, Judith Jesch, Professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham, Jane Harrison, Archaeologist and Research Associate at Oxford and Newcastle Universities, and Alex Woolf, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of St Andrews

Producer: Simon Tillotson

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production"*

And while I am listening to the story of the saga, I shall get down my own little bit of Viking history in the form of an oyster shell which was uncovered during the Jorvik dig in the 1970s.  

The archaeologists uncovered so many that they were offering them up for sale at 10p a shell, which was an offer I couldn't refuse.  

Leaving me just to say that the conventional image of a Viking warrior with helmet festooned with horns or wings is pure invention, a travesty of historical accuracy I visited years ago I visited years ago.***

Picture; drawings  from People in History, Volume one, From Caractacus to Alfred 1955 and Looking at History, 1956, R.J. Unstead, and that oyster shell, date unknown, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*The Orkneyinga Saga, In Our Time Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001zvvp

**Jorvik Viking Centre, https://www.jorvikvikingcentre.co.uk/ https://www.jorvikvikingcentre.co.uk/

***Viking helmets, a Zapata moustache, and some fierce looking chariots …… the silly story,  https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2020/10/viking-helmets-zapata-moustache-and.html