Vikings vs. Pagans

Matt Lewis (0:02)

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Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest ground breaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.

The sea brave are coming. They ride the furrows of frozen waves on the backs of wooden dragons. They row restless towards sheer cliffs that rise as ramparts, spurred on by the grotesque faces of carved beasts at their prowl. And their prize stands atop this rocky outcrop, washed on all sides by the sundering sea.

It's a spiritual place, a sacred shrine where the ordinary commune with the divine. Where earnest priests pray for harvest and meandering throngs celebrate ritual feasts. The Dragon Riders have come to pillage and raid as they have for hundreds of years on the silver-sanded coasts of England and France.

These men are Vikings, but this time their target is no church. Rather, it's the Temple of the Pagan Gods, Fantevit, chief deity of the Rani, a Slavic tribe who live on the southern shores of the Baltic. The cult of Sfantevit use a white horse as an oracle, conduct divine rituals with beer horns and honeycakes, and revere a giant statue of their god, strung up in the temple's inner sanctum. It has four necks and four heads, and the Vikings have come to destroy it. There's something strange about this scene from the 12th century northern world. These aren't the pagan raiders we usually imagine when we think of the Vikings. Instead, these are Christian warriors, fighting in the name of their new faith against the imagined evils of a paganism they themselves once subscribed to.

Within just a few centuries, the people who once raided the monasteries of Christian Europe were now channelling those destructive impulses elsewhere. On Crusades, against the pagan peoples of the North and East. So how did this extraordinary transformation happen? And what happened when Viking warriors took their faith Eastward, bringing the hammer of Christian Crusade down upon their pagan neighbours? I'm Matt Lewis. This is Gone Medieval. And to help me answer those questions and uncover this forgotten chapter of Viking history, I'm joined by Thomas Williams, author of the new book, God's Hammer, A History of the Viking Crusades. Welcome to Gone Medieval, Thomas. It's great to have you with us.

Thomas Williams (3:46)

Hi, Matt. It's great to be here.

Matt Lewis (3:48)

I think this is a topic I'm really looking forward to because, I mean, the title, the words say it all. We've got Vikings and they're not the pagans for once. And I think the tantalising thing about that for us is that we so often think of the Vikings being the pagans. They're the ones doing the pillaging against Christians. But here you're talking about Vikings versus pagans.

So I was wondering if you could start off by giving us a kind of just a big picture. Who are we talking about? When are we roughly in time and where roughly in the world are we?

Thomas Williams (4:17)

So the word Viking comes with a great deal of baggage attached to it. And one of the main ways that it's thought about, and has been really since the Victorian period, is of this un-reconstructed kind of pagan barbarian who comes out of the north to terrorise monks and loot monasteries and drag people off into slavery. And all the rest of it, we associate them very strongly in pop culture as well with the pagan pantheon, the Norse gods, Odin and Thor, and often attached to that, all sorts of sinister rites and rituals and human sacrifice and all the rest of it, the whole sort of barbarian package really. And of course, that completely overlooks the fact that for a very large proportion of the Viking Age, a very large number of Vikings, as we think of them, or rather Scandinavians, I should say more precisely, were Christians or at least Christian curious, you could say. They were not divorced from the rest of Europe. They were connected with it. They were interacting with it continuously and they were deeply influenced by it. Sometimes that meant adopting Christianity wholesale and becoming Christians, very enthusiastically as we'll probably go on to see. Or whether it was some level of hostility, which is also something we can see from time to time. But it was very much knitted into their world for the whole duration of the Viking period. So the book is looking at the Viking phenomenon from a slightly different angle to the one that's traditionally approached from. So we tend to see it from a Western perspective, particularly a British perspective, where the Vikings are this pagan menace that comes out of the North, despoils monasteries, that carries on for 250 years or so, and then eventually they will go away. And then the normal conquest happens, and everything becomes medieval. After that, knights and castles, and everyone's Christian, and Europe becomes a harmonious Christian family. If you look at it from Scandinavia, the picture is very, very different. What you see instead is a very dynamic outward migration.