The Orkneyinga Saga

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Hello, around the turn of the 13th century an unknown Icelander created the Orkneyinga Saga. The story of arguably the most important strategically of all the islands in the British Viking world. This was a time when those of Orkne, Controlled Shetland, Orkne and Katnuss from which they could raid the Irish-Hine British coasts from Dublin around to Lindisfar.

And the Saga mixes myth with history, bringing life to places on those islands where Vikings met, drank, made treaties, told stories, became saints and murdered or were murdered. With me to discuss the Orkneyinga Saga and Julia Hiech, professor of Viking studies at the University of Nottingham, Jane Harrison, archaeologist and research associate at Oxford and Newcastle Universities and Alex Wolfe, senior lecturer in history at the University of St Andrews.

Alex, can you give us an idea of what the Saga covers in which period? Well, Saga, as you say, written in Iceland in the early 13th century, but apart from a very brief mythological beginning, which basically is part of the mythological origin of the Norwegians, it covers the history of Orkneying from about 900 to about 1200.

And it focuses particularly on the intonation strife between the different members of the family of Orls, how they betray each other, ally with each other, go to the Scottish and Norwegian kings to get help in this struggle. And it focuses very much on that internal struggle within the family. The bulk of the land is a single large island, which is called slightly confusingly mainland, and nowadays, I was called for Orsay and the Viking Age, the horse island.

And it lies within sight of the North Coast to the mainland of Scotland. And then beyond that, you have the Shetlands, which are out of sight, though fair are lies between them and is intervisible between the north of Orkne and the south of Shetland. And Shetland was part of the Oldenham of Orkneying, the most of the political action of the Saga takes place on the main archipelago and in Kateness, the immediately adjacent bit of Scotland.

And we've said that an islander wrote this. What do we know about him and the origins of the Saga? We don't know anything specific about the Icelander. What we can tell is that he's working in the same milieu as other Saga writers, particularly the ones who wrote the accounts of the Norwegian kings. They seem to be familiar with each other's work to some extent, or the different scholars argue about whether there's direct copying and so on.

But he obviously had some very good sources. Some of them were written, but he probably had spoken to people and perhaps himself even visited Orkneying and Kateness. Kateness in particular is very well described in the latter part of the Saga. So although he was an Icelander and there's no doubt about that, he was closely connected with some people who were involved with Orkneying, perhaps a visitor or himself. Why did he take an Icelander to do this? And not to tell me from the Orkneying.

Iceland generally seems to be the main place where most of the Saga's about the ancient Scandinavian history were written down. This might be partly a problem of recovery and survival, but it's not just that, because as early as the time the Saga was being written around about 1200, we have other Scandinavian writers like the Danish Latin writer, Saxo Gromaticus, who tells us he's reliant on Iceland as sources for his own history.

I sometimes tell my students that because there's nothing else to do in Iceland in the winter, they were very good at telling stories. And I think that may not be too far from the truth. There are other people who may disagree. What prompted him to write this? If you were a decent country, you wanted to have a target, didn't you? Yes. And I think Orkneying was perceived as being in important places. You said in the introduction, it was a kind of stopping off place.

One of the first places that Icelanders might reach, they either sailed to Western Norway or to Orkneying before going further afield. And the Orknears and some of the other great families in Orkneying were intermarried with some of the Icelandic chieftains families. There was a long tradition of service by Icelandic poets in the retusable Orkneels. And there's a connection. It's one of the places that connects them to the wider world.

You speak of Orkneers in the plural. There are a lot of Orkneers in this story, aren't there? There are. And one of the curious things about the Orkneers, unlike most other Orkneers, it seems to be divided and shared. So at times you might have three people claiming to be Orkneer simultaneously and sometimes they're in conflict and sometimes they're sharing it together.

For example, Paul and Ellen in the period after 1066, I said to have kept the same court and their brothers who simply are both Orls. And that's unusual, although it's quite similar to what was happening in the Norwegian kingdom with Norwegian kings at the time. It's not something you usually see with Orls. Thank you. All right. Jane, Jane, how is it? Why were they especially important strategically at this time?

Well, you've hinted in the introduction that Alex has picked up on its location geographically because you have that. It's a maritime hub effectively because you come over from Norway and you first you reach Shetland and then you're coming down into Orknean from there. You can go down into Scotland and round east coast down into England. There are mentions of voyages from Orkne down the east coast.

They mention the mud of Grimsby and then also from Orknean round the west coast and to the Hebrides of Scotland, to the Hebrides, I love man that whole Irish sea literal and opening up the places in Ireland that the Vikings became so closely associated with. So it's a really good place.

Initially, if you're a if you're a raiding Viking, it's a place where on your way to places on the west coast of England, you can stop, you can perhaps pick up more menu, you can you can restock, you can draw breath and then head off. And then I suspect what happened is that they then realised how fertile Orknean is and how what a range of resources there are there. There are a great many islands and a good deal of very good beaching points, very good harbours.

So you've got good places to lay up. There are little islands which can be the layers of a major Vikings. There are lovely bays where you can have your farm with all the resources of the sea and the land available. So I think that's when you think, okay, we might not just stop off here on our way to a raid. We're going to settle here as well because it's not just strategic, it's fertile as well. The sea was obviously central to all this. Can you describe that more fully than my sentence?

Yes, I mean obviously because of its location in terms of seaways, but also I think ships, of course, are absolutely crucial and central because it ships and the mastery of sail that drives the Vikings out to settle and to raid. And we get a sense in the saga of a whole range of those ships from the fine, fully fitted warships, long ships, the classic Viking ship that the Norwegian kings tend to gift to the islands they've decided they're going to support.

When you say classic about how big are they? How many men do they carry? They vary, but I think 60 to 70 men. They're light and fast and they can be contrasted with the big, high broad cargo ships that are used to take heavy goods, grain, dried fish, timber because Orkney has no trees. That's a crucial thing as well. And you get a mention of cargo ships when one of the islands is off on pilgrimage. Part of the pilgrimage seems to be raiding and they take a big cargo ship.

And you come across smaller cargo ships that are being used both for trading, but also for opportunistic raids and fishing boats because of course fishing is vital. I suspect all of the farmers of Orkney were equally comfortable on land and sea and were fischer people as well as farmers. So it weaves its way through the saga. And there were a few, as people, the men was always men, wasn't it often slept on them?

Yes, there are mentions in the saga, especially when things are tense, when one of those occasions, when there's more than one Earl and there's a lot of tension and fighting, then the safe place to be overnight is on board your ships roped together. But then there's one of the... No, we never. So they're roped together like a sort of little settlement.

There's often ships sound almost like a household and almost like a hall and they're all roped together and that's where you go with watch, you know, watch men on overnight. And one of the Earl's is careless, gets careless and despite being on board his ship is captured and killed. So it didn't always work, but that was supposed to be the safest place. Thank you. Judith, it comes to you to have the honour to read some of the sectioner too to give us a flavour of the saga.

Thank you. I've got two short extracts I'd like to read and they both pick up on a point Alex already made is that a lot of the saga is about... men killing their brothers, health brothers, nephews and cousins in order to become the soul Earl of Orkney. The first one is a bit of poetry and then the second one will be a little bit of prose. The poetry I'll read in Old Norse.

Bjørt, ver sol at svartri, sök fold i mardök van, bresdr ervidi övstra, allr glimers jaur av fjölum, avratt aum fridri, indrotar, Thorfinni, same healthy guth gamey, göðingar, minifördask. Now that is... In English, the bright sun will become black, the earth will sink into the dark ocean. Ostris burden will break. All the sea will resound on the mountains. Before a more glorious noblemen than Thorfinner will be born for the islands. God help that keeper of a whole troop.

That's really good, isn't it? I think that would go second, Chris. No, no, I want to tell you a little bit about what it is. It's a stanza from a memorial poem for an ero-called Thorfinner mighti who died in the 1060s. He was a warrior, the successful warrior. He killed his nephew in order to become solar Earl of Orkney, but then he went to Rome and was absolved of his sins by the pope himself.

Then he came back and concentrated on governing and making laws and building churches and doing good things. This is an Icelandic poet saying basically that there will never be a better Earl than Thorfinner. My second extract, I won't read in the Old Norse I'll just read in English translation, it is a part of the story of the martyrdom of St Magnus in the 12th century, the early 12th century.

Magnus actually ruled, you were talking about co-werels earlier, that he and his cousin, Halcon Palson, managed to get on for quite a few years together and they went raiding together and did stuff like that. But eventually Halcon was too ambitious and he lured Magnus to an ostensible peace meeting and treacherously had him executed there. And this extract features Magnus' mother, Thoda.

Thoda, the mother of Earl Magnus, had invited both the urls to a feast after the meeting and now Earl Halcon came to the feast after the killing of the holy Earl Magnus. Thoda did the serving herself and carried drink to the Earl and those of his men who had been at the killing of her son. And when the drink had affected the Earl, then Thoda went before him and spoke, now you have come here alone, sir, but I expected both of you.

You will now want to gladden me before God and men. Be now in place of a son to me and I will be in place of a mother to you. I now have great need of your mercy and that you allow me to have my son carried to church. Be as good to me in answering my prayers as he want God to be to you on the day of judgment. The Earl falls silent and thinks over the matter and felt guilty of his misdeeds when she begged so softly weeping that she could carry her son to church.

He looked at her and shed a tear and spoke to her, burry her son where you like. Graf's own thin thar earther leekar. How difficult is it to translate? Different parts of it are more difficult than others so it's long so it takes time. I think you have gathered from the prose reading that it's actually a fairly very specific style. It makes use of a paratactic style.

Everything is end and it switches between tenses between past and present tense. That's something that other translators have eliminated from their English translations. Whereas I think it's so much a characteristic of this saga style that I think it should be kept. But the real difficulty comes with the poetry because it's a very strict meter.

The very strict rules about illiteration and rhyme. There's a very special diction you have to use. You have to use kettings and because old Norse is an inflected language the word order in these stanzas is not normal word order. So speakers of the language would understand it but you can't turn it into English and make it sound like poetry. It sounds like poetry in the original. It doesn't really sound like poetry in English. Thank you very much. What are the main themes of this saga?

Well we've touched on some there. It's the internecid strife between the earls. And usually one of the ways you see this arising is, as Judith just said, to begin with often groups of earls go raiding together, they govern together happily. But they're immediate personal friends and supporters. Egg them on to say, well you could have it all if you wanted.

You're much better man than him. And that internecid strife and the way that these relationships break down and the way that supporters change sides quite regularly is one major theme. And the other major theme is really the relationship with the kings of Norway into a much less extent the kings of Scotland.

The earls will frequently go to the kings of Norway to get support against their rival or perhaps someone who's not yet an earl but who thinks he has a claim will go to Norway first and be given ships as Jane mentioned and maybe men by the Norwegian earl by the Norwegian king rather and said to cross.

And one of the earls who we hear most about in the twelfth century section, Earl Londwald Kauley is in fact a Norwegian who is the grandson of an earl. He's the son of the murdered earl magnus sister.

And he's sort of given the title of Earl as a whim by the Norwegian king as a favor to him because he's one of his retainers whom he's he's become particularly enamored with and then subsequently he's given several attempts at taking fleets across and eventually does make himself establish yourself in the islands.

So it's that kind of relationship in yet at the same time once they're in power, the earls try and distance themselves from the Norwegians. So on one hand, they want to be independent rulers almost like kings themselves, but they require the help of the Norwegian kings and tied in with that is their relation with the farmers and there's rather a complicated element that recurs in the saga, which an awful lot of ink has been spilt by modern academics trying to understand what's going on.

Which is talking about what's called the Oathlites, the freehold rights of the farmers, which various earls grant back to the farmers or take away from the farmers. And this seems to be somehow also about the relationship with the earls to the king. If you think about the freeholders having a direct relationship to the king, is that relationship mediated through the earl or is the earl simply a civil servant, if you like.

And so those are the major themes that run through the saga. Jane, can you other places you can stand with the saga in hand now and say it's the hall because there were great halls, scars, though, aren't there? Yes. The hall is over there, the church is over there, the mound is over there, you can do that now. Absolutely, you can. I mean, this is one of the extraordinary things about the combination of Orkney and Gassaga and Orkney as it is today.

And there are a range of places that you can go to of different sorts across the, I think it's nearly 70 islands, if you can call the tiny little scurries and uninhabited bits, but 12 sort of main islands. And there are the big, olden sites. There's the Brockabasset and the land connected to it, which is the northwest corner of the biggest island, which Alex mentioned.

And that's an extraordinary offshore island, which is sort of counter-dramatically, someone has stamped on the inland edge and is as splashed by the Atlantic on its cliff edges. And on that island now are the ruins of a church and the grass-covered outlines of Viking halls and buildings. And so you can cross at low tide to the island and you can stand there.

And this is the place that Judith mentioned. This is Thorfinn's centre in the 11th century. It's where he goes and he builds his cathedral after he's been absolved. And it's where he's supposed to have settled and turned into a great lawmaker and ruler of all his people. And you can stand there and you can look back at the mainland and see the acres of fertile land and the little locks. And you can see why that would be a great place to set up if you were the Earl.

And there's another old-em site just down the coast where again there are the ruins of a church and you can imagine the big hall which features a number of the more dramatic stories in the saga. Two of the murders, one is the accidental killing of an Earl and the other is the murder by the great last Viking, Svein-Asliefsen, of another Svein.

They get into an acrimonious drinking fight and there's a wonderful description of Svein hiding behind the stone uprights that hide the alevats and jumping out with his axe and getting rid of the rival Svein. And so you can stand there and imagine this story because the church is described as just paces from where this happened. But then you can go to any of the sandy bays on any of the main islands and you can imagine being one of the chieftains in your Scali Hall.

And they're always up on a mounds with great views looking out over the sea and over the land that they control. And you can think, okay, the Earl's coming. And I've got to get myself sorted, I've got to be able to house and feed him and his retinue and I've got to call in all the favors from my farmers and get that all set up. So it's really vivid and all those places you are there from the big places to the landing places to the hall sites. Thank you. Judith.

I wanted to add to what Jane was saying because the most obvious place that's mentioned in the Sargues, of course, the Cathedral of St. Magnus in Kirkwall, a beautiful, one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Britain in my opinion, a beautiful red and gold sandstone, a kind of miniature Durham.

And it's to what Alex was saying because it was built by Rurgenwalder Kali Kohlson who was not a very effective politician and his father persuaded him that if he invoked the power of his uncle, the St. Magnus, then he would become Earl of Orkney. And in order to do that, he had to build the church, the cathedral in memory of St. Magnus. And he had to build the occasions when he taxes people in order to be able to fund it. So what values do they seem to hold? Are there Christian values?

It depends what you mean by Christian values. There is a Viking theme running through the saga, but it's important to remember there are 112 chapters in the saga and Christianity is introduced in chapter 12. So the vast majority of the saga takes place in Christian times. These are Christian people killing each other regularly. I think my way of reading the saga is that the narrative voice is often non-judgmental. It's just this is what happened and this is what had to happen.

And it's interesting, certain of the characters are said to be handsome and intelligent and so on. And as soon as someone is said to be popular, you know they're going to come to a sticky end, having been killed by their cousin or whatever. At the same time, Magnus is of course, he's a saint. He has all kinds of virtues. But basically, by being killed by his cousin. It's what happened in a lot of countries in northern Europe at the time.

There are a relatively recently converted to Christianity, the ruling dynasty and the church found it useful to make an alliance. And they'd make one of the people, somebody who was killed for political reasons, into a martyr in order to strengthen the power of the church and the state over the population. It worked. It seems to have done. Ryan Reynolds here from InMobil. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down.

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It's not history quite, is it? But historians use it. Can you unpick some of that? Well, it varies. As Judith said, it goes on for a very long time, and the early bits of it are terrible from a historical perspective. What do you mean by terrible? They're probably largely imaginative. They might have a sense of the pedigree that lists their ancestry of the earls of one or two broad brush events, but a lot of the detail seems more like it's drawn from folklore, or maybe even just made up.

But as it goes on, it becomes more historical, and the section set in the 12th century, and the very beginning of the 30th century, ends, some of them are probably as good as most historical sources. It's also historical value varies according to what it's dealing with. The author is very well grounded in Scandinavian society and history, so things to do with Orkney itself, and with Norway are often things that we can sort of verify from other sources and seem plausible.

The further they go away from there, down into the Irish Sea World, or in the case of Old Lonevalds Pilgrim, to Jerusalem, into the Mediterranean, you get the feeling that they've not really got a very clear sense of the geography or of the political background.

So, Lundy, for example, almost appears to be regarded as one of the hebrides, rather than an island off the north of Devon. And their understanding of Scottish history has moments where it seems to link to what we understand from Scottish sources and English sources.

But at other times, they seem to throw in names which are just stereotypically Scottish. So, for example, when we're told that Magnus Bareleg, the Norwegian King, sails to Orkney and then down the west coast, we're told he makes a treaty with the Scottish King Malcolm, but at that point in time, there wasn't a Scottish King called Malcolm, but it's a nice stereotypical Scottish name.

So, perhaps added for very similar to the Icelandic author. And there are other things that are puzzlingly missing. So, for example, Thorfin the mighty who we've talked about, who the poem that you'd read out relates to, is an almost exact contemporary of Macbeth, who originated in the north of Scotland in Maryshire, or that sort of region.

And yet Macbeth isn't mentioned in the Sava at all. And yet, we're told that Thorfin controlled nine oldams in Scotland, which must be pretty much all of Scotland, and ravaged far and wide and so on. And he went on pilgrimage to Rome, as we've heard from Jane. And Dorothy, done it, the historical novelist, actually tried to solve this dilemma by suggesting that Thorfin Macbeth were the same person, which I think very few scholars would believe.

But it is a puzzle that certain people you would expect to be present and not present. And whether that's done deliberately because they perhaps would have put the earls in shadow, or whether it's done because they really don't have much understanding of non-Scanonavian non-norspeaking communities is unclear. Thank you very much, Jane. The circus party about who holds power over whom and on what authority? How do we find out what's going on?

Yes, and there are all sorts of levels of authority that are mentioned in the Saga, and Alex and Judith already referred to relationships with the kings of Norway and Scotland. And those are clearly key for the earls.

But we get a sense of how the rest of the structures of authority work as well, because the earls have a group of a retinue, a group of leading men who are their supporters, and as well as the strife between cousins and brothers and earls, you see them trying to keep allegiance of leading people.

And farmers and chieftains are mentioned. And it's a really interesting sort of bond that is reflected in that whole culture. We've mentioned the big halls where they had the feasts, where they declaimed the poetry, where they took oaths, where they gave gifts. And it's all a very personal and present face-to-face authority, where you have to meet the people, you have to see them. And so it's also very parapetetic. So the earls moves around a lot, and goes and visits.

It's spoken about as being a visselouer, as being visiting one of their chief people. There's someone called Sigurd of Wessness, who is one of the chieftains. And Earl Paul is mentioned as feasting with him on a couple of occasions, on one of which he's then kidnapped by Sven Asleysen, the Maurelding and Viking, who seems to be able to have allegiance with a number of people over his career.

It's a very personal sort of authority. And then the other group who Alex mentioned are these farmers. And of course they're the people who in effect are supporting it all, because they are the group who are producing the taxes in kind, the renders that support the chiefs in being able to house and feed these roving earls, and to do the fishing, and to produce everything that is supporting those,

that the chiefs in the earl, but they also have a role. And they're mentioned a number of times in the saga, as firstly is a kind of grumbling chorus. There are moments when they pop up and say, look, you're asking too much of us. And they ask one of the leading men called Thorkel, who's the fosterer, foster father of Thorfin the mighty to intervene and ask for less, less of an imposition.

But they also help to reconcile occasionally. They're obviously find the times of trouble and strife harder. They're a more demands made on them. They're probably asked to crew boats and taken away from their everyday roles. And so they intervene and they want to reconcile and to try and bring the oles together. So they pop up. And by the 12th century, they're actually being called to regular assemblies in Kirkwell by Orgonvald.

So far, you haven't mentioned one woman. No, but they run through as an important thread and Judith can probably say more Judith. Well, how long have you got? They don't play huge role, but they really pack a punch when they do get involved in the saga. We can start with the dog and hilder, who's actually the daughter of Eric Bloodax, who was Viking King in York.

And she manages to marry three of the sons of Earl Thorfinne Skullsblitter and causes the death of two of them and two nephews causes her to do this out of polite way of saying what? Well, she promises marriage to various men on the grounds that if they kill the person she wants killed, she will marry them. Of course, then the promise doesn't really come to anything.

But then there's an Irish mother of Earl Sigurd, who made a magic banner for him so that when he went into battle, it would bring victory to the man before whom it was carried, but death to the man who carried it. So it brings him a victory at first, but then he runs out of banner carriers. And then he dies. He has to carry his own banner and dies.

And as Thor, you've already heard about, as a rather different kind of woman, then there's a Ragnar who actually has a bit of authority because she seems to have been a widow or at least there's no mention of a husband. She has a son. She has two estates. She gives advice to Earl Paul. And he basically mansplains her and says, oh, no, I'm not going to take your advice.

I'm the one in charge here. It doesn't end well for him. She also stands up to Earl the Ragnar who doesn't want to let a visiting Icelander join his court. Then we're convinced. I think we're convinced. We mentioned St Magnus earlier. Were there many more persons who were almost saints, and was it was that hierarchy there? The interestingly previously mentioned Earl Ragnar Kalikolson, who was the nephew of St Magnus, his father was an origin. He grew up in Norway.

He was also considered a saint in Orkney, although he was never officially canonized by the church. But when they found a skeleton, which is almost certainly that of St Magnus in Kirkwell Cathedral in 1919, they also found another one that quite possibly was his. We don't know what he did to become a saint other than build the cathedral, I think. Quite something very different. Alex, what would a neighbouring people think of these elves going around murdering each other and taking over?

Well, the interesting thing is that we don't have very many notices of them in neighbouring sources. We have a rich from the Scottish King David I, which is said to Earl Harold and the other Earl. He, that's all he's called, telling them to leave the monks at dawn or alone and not to bother them. That would date to probably the late 1130s or 1140s.

There are occasional references to them involved with piracy. The first one to be mentioned in any contemporary source is Earl Sigurd the fat, who's the one with the Ravenbanner that Judith mentioned, who fights at the Battle of Klontalf in Ireland in 1014. That's where he's killed. That's the first contemporary reference to the old and then we don't hear about it for a while.

In Norwegian sources, they seem to be present in Scandinavian sources, mostly Icelandic effect. They seem to be presented as rulers who are admirable in several other Icelandic sagas like Nielsaga, young men will go and spend some time in their retinue going off-riding and making their fortune. That's what establishes them as heroic when they return to farming life in Iceland. They were admired in the Scandinavian world, but there's very little notice of them further south.

Thank you. Jane, you know about artifacts on the islands. Life-study being artifacts. What do you want to tell us about them? I think that you get less of a sense in the saga of objects than you're doing some of the other sagas actually. Why is that? I think because it's focused so much on the politicking of the islands. But one of the extraordinary things about Orkney is the quality and the preservation of the archaeology.

We do actually have a lot of objects associated with sites that are in the saga. And the important thing, I think, really is that in an essentially non-literate and very sensory and a physical visual culture, all these objects are very potent and very meaningful. And I think you can tell you things about someone's social position, their affiliations, and they can speak in a way that perhaps we have lost a sense of. And for example?

Yes. So, for example, there are in Orkney a number of hordes where precious things have been buried in the ground. And there's a lot of dispute about whether these are always done for safe keeping to be recovered later and then forgotten about whether they're done deliberately as some kind of offering. And there's an extraordinary one on one of those bays where you have a long house, a big stone hall long house.

And the beautiful silver, big silver broaches, there must have been so heavy and difficult to wear and twisted neck rings and armlets. And there are very high status, beautiful things, but then you have very ordinary things like combs that you also find in burials and buried in the foundations of houses, which again are much more mundane, but carry a lot of meaning because they can perhaps associate with your affiliation and your belonging.

So, there are a whole range of different objects that... Are there still to be dug up or are you dug them all up? There's a surprising... I mean, we've done a number of excavations, but there's still a lot out there that we could discover waiting to be. And I think so. Where's the writer of this song on the thermos ground?

He's on the thermos ground in the later part of the period, probably from about the middle of the 12th century onwards, which is presumably within living memory, either of his own generation or of the older generation, who he relied on. And particularly, his understanding of the geography of parts of caveness seemed to be extremely good, so that some of the events, such as the killing of El, Ronville Cullic Olsen, are a farm called Forsey, you can actually plot it out.

You can get the ordnance of him out and you can follow almost step by step the route that's being taken. And it's hard to believe that didn't come from an eyewitness account, and that maybe the author himself had been there, or he was sitting down with someone telling him over his shoulder as he wrote.

So, and there are other accounts, such as the killing of a frack-hawk, one of the powerful women who lives in Helm'sdale, where again, you get a sense that the geography is really clearly understood by the author. So that's always struck people as interesting and suggesting either that the author has been to caveness, or that perhaps his main informants are from the caveness branch of the various noble families that are associated with the Earls.

And then there are one or two places that Jane talked about, the description of Orphia, where the hall and the church are adjacent to each other, where it seems to be a very direct understanding of the geography. So you get moments of place like that, perhaps also, westness, where the relationship between Sigurd and westness is farmed, and the narrow straight between Rouse and the island of mainland, which St. Azlephus and takes his boat into when he's going to Kidnapper or Paul.

There are moments where you get a real sense that the geography is real, and then there are other places where you get a sense that there isn't. And in the early part of the saga, it's very noticeable, I know it's just where we read the saga, just before Christmas, that before the 12th century, individual farms are very rarely named, the saga will say things like, and then they went to the farm where the Earls was.

But from about 1,100 onwards, you're always told the name of the farm often where it's near, and the people, and you're given quite a lot of genealogical information about the farmer and who he's related to, and suddenly it all comes alive. So that 12th century section is very alive, and you feel you could almost reconstruct society. You could use it as the basis of some kind of soap opera, I think, probably.

Just to come back to you for a moment, Jack. What evidence is that a peaceful existence in the artifacts? When you excavate one of those big long houses with the hall space, what you normally find are a lot of animal bones, cattle, pigs, sheep, deer, otters, whale, seal, with the evidence for the fishing and the farming.

Also, lots of bits of stear-tight bowls. Stear-tight is a soft stone that the Vikings used instead of pottery. And you find lots of ironed art bolts and nails and roves from ships, because timber is scarce, you use it in the roofs. So you get the everyday things from farming and fishing, spindle wells and fishing weights.

I just wanted to say the saga itself acknowledges that there was occasionally peace. It will often say, yes, there was peace for a few years, and it's obviously not interested in telling us about the peaceful times. The other bits make a better story. We get two sentences, Daniel. We come into the end now, unfortunately, but what do we gain from reading the saga today? Everything. I think that's a starter.

Certainly for British readers, it's quite a good way into the saga genre, because it's set in Britain and in a landscape that many people are familiar with. So you can get used to the style. It is an important part of the history of these islands. I mean, for 500 years, a part of what is today, the United Kingdom was not a part of even Scotland, little only a United Kingdom.

It's a part of Norway and subsequently Denmark. Orkney is a great tourist destination, and as we've said several times already, you can go there and take the saga with you and see all the places in it. So I think there are many reasons to want to read the saga. Is it a final word from what? It's quite interesting also in the way in which geopolitical situations can change. From being that strategic nodal island, it then becomes a quiet, that port of far off the North and coast of Scotland.

And then it's briefly during World Wars becomes again a strategically important. But it's a good example of the way in which things come in and out of focus. Finally, I think also particularly that 12th century section gives you a huge amount of information about how ordinary people live, the interaction between the farmers and each other as well as the farmers and the ULS.

It gives you a sense of what a a agrarian society with no towns, very little cash and a sort of consensual forms of government operated. And that's probably how much of Britain operated in this period. But further south, the focus is on high politics only. And we don't see that level of the wealthy farmers who make up the backdrop for the 12th century section of Auckland South.

Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Judith Yosch, Jane Harrison and Alex Wolf. And to our studio engineer Emma Hath, next week, it's Henry Fielding's comic novel from 1749, Tom Jones. Thanks for listening. And the in our time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melbourne and his guests. So to start from the beginning here, what did you not say that you would like to have said starting with the Alex?

Well, I think that one of the things that he's storing can use it for is the social historical detail, which is often things that you miss if you're focusing on the plot. So for example, there's one episode, which is actually set in Western Norway when a servant named Ring Yolfe is sent from one farm to a neighboring farm to pick up his mistress and take her home.

And we're told when he arrives that she brings out her clothes. And while he's putting the clothes on the pack pony, she goes back into the house to kiss the maid servant scubae. And we're also told that while he's putting the clothes on the pack pony, he's put his weapons down. So this gives us this kind of intimate relationship between the women, the mistress and the maid servants who kind of hug and kiss when they say goodbye.

But also it tells us that even on a relatively minor errand from one farm to another neighboring farm, a servant was carrying weapons. And there are dozens, if not hundreds of little moments like that in the saga, which if you focus too much on the plot, you can miss, but which tells us a huge amount about society. Do you do, do you want to come in?

Yeah, I have a very similar comment actually, because you did say in the beginning that the arrows of Orkney ruled over a Shatland and Shatland plays very relatively little part in the saga. But there are some wonderful episodes in Shatland, including a Rogenwalder being shipwrecked there. And that's also again where you get a glimpse of serving women, two serving women go out.

It's cold and it's winter to bring water back and one of them falls into the well and the other one comes running back and complaining that she's frozen and everyone else is sitting in front of the fire.

And also in the miracles of St. Magnus, because we mustn't forget he was a saint, so there were miracles. Most of the miracles seem to take place in Shatland and you get an idea of the things that ale people you can fall off a haystack or you can have leprosy or you can just have a very bad headache and going to the shrine of St. Magnus in Kirkwall will cure you.

But the most amazing miracle really is the English guys with the dice. They're playing dice and one of them throws two sixes. So the other one thinks that's the end of it. I can't win over two sixes, but he prays to St. Magnus and one of the dice breaks in two. So he gets a six and a one as well as the other six. So he wins.

I think just to pick up on the values running through and think about their Vikings, because there's a great character, this Faenas Leifson, who he's mentioned, who's talked about as the last Viking. And there's a sort of theme where once the elves settle down, had been on their pilgrimages and start being lawgivers, then they stopped the raiding, they've moved on from being Vikings.

Faenas Leifson is the man who has the huge drinking hall where over winter he has 80 men there and it is own expense. He feeds them and feasts them. But then when he goes on his final Viking trip and is killed in Ireland, after having a lifestyle where he planted his crops in spring, went off on his spring raid, came back and harvested his crops in summer and goes off on his autumn raid.

He finally meets his end and his sons, what they do is they divide up his becall and that's a kind of symbolic end of the great Viking age. And we've gone into the sort of 12th century Christian Latinate, more sort of feudal society. So there's that sort of running through as well. The two things I'd like to bring up for the first is Lindespan. It seems a bit of a talk about this without mentioning Lindespan. Was anybody liked and volunteered or three comments about Lindespan?

Well, I think we can see that the raid on Lindespan at the end of the 8th century, the beginnings of Scandinavian contact in Orkney are around the same time. And I think you can picture that the raids that brought Vikings to Lindespan may well have brought them from Shetling through to Orkney. And that's that first contact where Scandinavians begin to see the point of Orkney, not just as a raiding base, but also as a place to settle.

But also that they must have known about Lindespan. If they're getting as far south as Grimsby and it's muddy, it's mud. And then Lindespan is part of that world. It's not specifically mentioned, but they go off raiding down these coast of England. We know that. When you were excavating, did you find anything that might have come from Lindespan?

No, no. I don't think we ever did. But we found things that could have come from that sort of milieu. I mean, when you're digging on a site in Orkney, you find imported pottery, and jewelry, and things that could have come from all over the Viking diaspora, from all over the places that Scandinavians are coming to and fro. It's that sense of mobility. You get a real sense of the from the Orkney and Gasagra, I think, of that mobility and of the Cummings and Goings.

One occasion when Spain has left us in the late 12th century has to flee Orkney because he's fallen out yet again with yet another Earl. He stops at the Isle of May, which is a monastic island in the mouth of the Firth of Fourth, between 5 and Lodian, from which you can see Lindespan. It's indivisible with Lindespan. And there are abbots there, and the abbot Baldwin takes to be made and they can make up some story about them being storm-belieged merchants.

But we're told in the saga that the monks think they might be pirates, so they send a message to the mainland to get help. And when Sven discovers this, he decides he's got to leave pretty quickly, so he takes everything he can from the monastery and sails off anyway. But a final, final question. I mean, this is for the Pondka. How many of them set off for and got to the Holy Land in those boats? Do we know?

Well, a king of Norway had also been there before him. They went down the Atlantic route and into the Mediterranean. It took a long time. How long? I think they were away for two or three years for the whole journey. And with a number of ships. Yeah, a large number of ships. They come back overland by horse. They came back overland. They sailed to the Holy Land and then they go to Constantinople and then they switched to horses and ride back through New Zealand.

Just for a ride, I suppose. And it's not really explained, but it seems to be the way it is. It's called the Rome Road, so that would have been a route that was already well established by then. And at least two of the elves went to Pilgrimage to Rome, for El Thorfin, the mighty in the 11th century, and Alchopuls when he's appeasing God for killing St. Magnus. They both go and Pilgrimage to Rome and come back. Well, thank you very much. And here's the producer. Who'd like to go to your coffee?

Tea, please. Thank you all very much. You're very good stuff there. I could do another three hours. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tilletson and it's a BBC studio's audio production. Do you know how it's? I did a bit of hiking there a few years ago. A village called Dly, it's not on the Thorist Trail. The specialist by Matthew Broden. For the local GP has died unexpectedly. We need someone to fill the gap while we find a replacement.

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