One stormy day, some time in the second half of the ninth century,
a Viking ship was blown off course.
It finally beached up on an uninhabited,
unexplored shore, here on Iceland.
It must have presented a truly terrifying, alien landscape.
But its discovery meant that the Vikings were no longer just raiders and traders.
From that moment onwards, they were explorers and adventurers.
I'm retracing the steps of the Vikings...
..to discover the truth about their lives...
..and their mysterious world.
Even now, this place feels like it's on the edge of everything.
And, as an archaeologist,
I'll be seeking out some of the most telling evidence of all...
..their very remains.
This flamboyant hairstyle just adds to his allure.
MAN SHOUTS
Last time, I travelled east
to discover the far reaches of Viking trade.
These dark lines, etched into the marble, are Viking runes -
ancient Viking writing.
Now, I'm heading west to find out how the Vikings became explorers
and kings,
creators of an entire Viking empire of the north.
By the end of the ninth century, the Viking age was in full swing,
with their territories and influence spreading outwards
from their Scandinavian homelands.
The Swedes travelled east, down the great rivers of Russia.
The Danes crossed the North Sea, raiding and colonising,
and establishing, at York, the hub of a trading network in the west.
For the Norwegians, however, it was a different story.
I'm starting in Bergen, Norway, to see how the people of the north,
the Norsemen, carved out their own slice of the Viking world...
..in the wild, uncharted Atlantic Ocean.
From up here, you can clearly see that between the mountains and the fjords,
there's precious little in the way of available farming land.
So, for an expanding population, many of them ambitious young men,
that absence of available land could have only one outcome.
The most adventurous of them would seek to change their circumstances
and their opportunities, and to do that, they would up and leave.
The secret of the Norsemen's success was their notorious longship.
It's the icon of the entire Viking age.
And here in Bergen, people have built a decent seagoing reconstruction of one.
Rowing one of these, on a day like today, it's actually quite pleasant
if you can get into the rhythm.
Oh, hold on, hold on.
It's all gone terrible.
The Vikings were notorious for their fast and manoeuvrable warships.
But to conquer the ocean, they also needed sturdier vessels.
Shorter, wider and powered by sail.
They were perfect to carry goods,
animals, tools
and people.
Crewed by as few as six men,
ships like these carried the Norse to the end of the known world...
..and far beyond.
Lena Borjesson has spent months at sea, navigating without modern technology
to understand just how the Vikings did it.
They were dependent on the sun.
If they didn't find the sun, they were "hav vill",
they were lost at sea.
Harv ville. Hav vill.
That's a word you don't want to hear on a Viking ship. Right!
From experiments at sea,
Lena has discovered that being so dependent on an unreliable sun,
the Vikings often had to be flexible about exactly where they ended up.
If you don't end up in Shetland, you would end up in Orkney.
And that's not bad, is it? Right.
So you just have to be a bit more open-minded
about where you're going. You've got it.
Their epic voyages are a defining part of the Viking legend.
From coast-hopping raids, it wasn't long before
the Norwegian adventurers started to strike out into the open ocean,
in search of new lands to settle.
Now, I'm following in their footsteps...
..travelling from Bergen to Shetland...
..one of their first stops.
We know that large numbers of them arrived on Orkney
and here in Shetland from around 800 AD onwards,
because virtually all of the place names are Norse in origin.
No Pictish names survive.
We don't know if the local population was enslaved
or exterminated or just driven off.
But knowing how badly the Vikings behaved elsewhere, it was probably all three.
On Shetland, there had already been raiding and pillaging.
But some Vikings who arrived here came to stay.
And relics of their farms still survive.
This ancient site of human habitation is cheek by jowl with the airport.
So if you hear a roaring sound in the background,
that'll be the 3.45 to Bergen.
Over here, there are the foundations for seven long, rectangular buildings,
and these were built and used by the Vikings.
This would have been part of the main family quarters.
Along here, there would have been
wooden-topped benches for sitting on and sleeping on,
on either side, a central hearth.
PLANE ROARS OVERHEAD
That's one of those planes I was talking about.
It would have been quite dark in here, quite smoky.
Then, at the far end, there's a corn-drying room,
where there would have been heat
that would have dried the crop for storage.
And then at the far end, the archaeologists found burnt stone,
so it suggests there might even have been a primitive sauna in use here.
Often across the Viking world, we discovered burials, treasure,
or the remains of warriors.
But on Shetland, there are relics of more ordinary lives,
of Viking farmers and craftsmen.
It's a fantastic piece, as you can see, it's lovely.
It was found in a peat bog.
You'll see there's a hook shape on the handle there.
The reason for that is that the thing was used in a boat,
and you are bailing water
Oh, it's a bailer, right.
Yeah, that's right.
It would be all too easy just to let the thing shoot out of your hand
and it might plop into the sea.
So you want to have a bit of a backstop on it to stop it shooting out.
And you can see here that the wear pattern is on that side. Mm-hm.
It's a right-handed person. A right-handed person.
Wow!
This object was found in the 1970s in Shetland.
It's so fine. Look at the tines, the little rivets,
because its composite, isn't it?
It's been made from multiple parts.
That's gorgeous. Look at that.
Look at the shine on it from being handled,
you know, that patina there of being held and used.
Exactly, that's what brings the past to life.
Handling these simple objects
took me right into the practicalities of Viking daily life.
It's got this little depression there.
That's for your thumb, so you can carry it.
Lamps, whetstones,
loom weights and fishing tackle.
But best of all was one very personal possession.
And it's a piece of a glove, or a mitten.
That's for a thumb? That's a thumb.
For a Viking thumb Yes, yes, a Viking thumb.
It's one thing to talk about Vikings
but that was worn by a Viking hand.
Well, it's been carbon dated to 975 AD.
Oh, wow! How can that be 1,000 years old? Is that knitted?
That's woven, believe it or not.
Gosh.
I think it's just absolutely electrifying to see an item like this
where something as powerful as the human hand
is there to be seen.
Through the 10th and 11th centuries,
Shetland supported a huge community of around 10,000 Vikings.
But these islands settlements were just the first stepping stones
for even greater and far more daring journeys.
While the Swedes were getting rich from trade in the east
and the Danes were establishing a kingdom in England,
the Vikings here plotted a route into the west,
and the lands they revealed were much more than just a day's sail away.
From Shetland, and continuing north and west to Iceland.
Having braved the wild seas,
the Vikings reached here in the late ninth century.
I've been digging in this bank for a very good reason,
because I was told that if I went deep enough,
I would find a very important, significant layer.
Now, if you look down in here,
first of all, ignore that very obvious, thick, grey band.
Down into that deep section,
do you see the quite narrow band of sandy coloured material
in amongst much darker stuff?
Now that, believe it or not, is debris from a volcanic eruption dated to 872 AD.
Now, no evidence of human habitation has been found below that layer,
meaning there was no-one here before 872.
Above that layer, after that date,
we start to get evidence of Viking settlement.
And that's how we know when they arrived.
Iceland was some way north of the Viking homelands.
And although the Norwegians here were well used to surviving
long, dark, cold winters, this place was in a league of its own.
The very first settlements here were on the coast,
where there was easy prey in the water.
Fish, walrus, seals,
even whales.
Today, just outside Reykjavik
there's a Viking-themed restaurant that recreates the delights of a unique diet.
I remember when I was five or six years old,
my father told me you will get strong if you eat it.
And he kept telling me that.
The local Viking speciality? Rotten shark.
And you say rotten, do you mean rotten?
Yes, it is actually rotten.
They cut the best pieces of the shark and put it in a box.
They put the box into the sand and let it be lying there for a couple of weeks.
You just eat it slowly, just let it be in your mouth for a long time.
Enjoy the taste.
OK?
It's a formidable scent.
That is amazing!
Whoa!
It's like...
it's like blue cheese,
but 100 times more.
Wow!
Give him schnapps.
Fortunately, there was something on hand to take the taste away.
That is Black Death.
Black Death and rotten shark. Right.
I can't remember the last time I had those two together.
That's amazing. I like that.
Natural maritime resources led to successful coastal settlements.
But as the population grew on Iceland, new settlers had to forge lives elsewhere,
building farmsteads inland.
I'm standing inside the ruins of a byre for keeping livestock.
These upright stones mark the individual stalls,
there'd maybe be seven or eight animals on this side
and the same again on the other, so maybe 14, 16 head of cattle, maybe sheep.
On other parts of the island, they would have had pigs and goats.
They would have bought up seaweed from the coast to feed the animals,
and the animals would also have grazed
on whatever naturally occurring grasses were all around.
The introduction of domestic animals to Iceland brought a whole new diet,
but not necessarily a better one.
That is what they put in the air, and let it be just...
They put it in the air and when the wind was blowing, the rain was coming in.
So it's not been cooked? Not been cooked at all.
It smells awful but it is OK to eat.
If you eat this... Is this a challenge?
..then I think that you were born in Iceland,
and have been a Viking in the past.
There is something almost... almost like the, um...
Well, to be honest, flowers or fruit that has turned and gone bad.
To survive the winter, the Vikings preserved every single body part.
Nothing went to waste.
These will be the first testicles I've ever had in my mouth. Really?
As far as I remember. OK.
That's a challenging flavour.
That is a taste sensation.
Blood pudding, sheep's brain,
even the head were all consumed.
That is my favourite. Let's try that.
But that is the tongue and that is the best muscle
of the whole lamb.
That's come from the meat that they dry in the wind.
You like it? That's lovely, yes.
It's very soft and... Yes.
I'm always saying to my kids that you've got to try things.
And that don't tell me you don't like it till you've tried it,
so I felt, on that basis, I had to really give these things a go.
I could easily understand why someone like Johannes,
who's actually got a connection to this stuff,
why you'd become addicted to it.
And every now and again,
you would want to remind yourself about the past,
and you get it from something as strong,
you know, the past is strong here.
You can smell it and you can taste it, and I get that.
If unreliable summers and freezing winters weren't bad enough,
the Viking settlers had to contend with another even deadlier threat.
Not from the skies...
but from deep beneath the earth.
Iceland is a volcanic island, and that carries its own risks.
Scattered all across here is this material,
which is pumice, volcanic rock.
Now, that has come originally from Mount Hekla.
You can see the white summit just nosing above the horizon.
Hekla erupted famously in 1104.
It was a catastrophic event.
It scattered ash and debris over half the island.
This farm and many others like it had to be abandoned.
Viking farmers were tough folk, though.
And undaunted by the occasional volcanic eruption,
the early Icelandic communities thrived.
And amazingly, they decided that even this very challenging land
wasn't an end to their endeavours.
Not when there was still a whole lot more ocean to be explored.
And in 1000 AD,
the unforgettably named Erik the Red led a fleet of 25 ships
out into the North Atlantic in hopes of founding a new colony.
They had reliable ships, they were renowned sailors,
but even so, there are references to countless people washed overboard,
ships driven onto rocks, plain old "lost at sea".
Erik the Red's expedition colonised what we now know as Greenland.
But the Viking explorers still weren't done.
Evidence of Viking camps has been found as far west as Newfoundland.
And it's thought they even sailed down the eastern seaboard of America.
The distance from Norway to Newfoundland is 4,500 miles,
and were talking about a time when that land mass was beyond the knowledge,
far less than reach, of any other Europeans.
What those Vikings did, then, was simply staggering.
No permanent colonies were ever established in North America.
And eventually, the harsh extremes of Greenland also proved too much.
But on Iceland, despite all the hazards,
the Vikings went on to build a whole new society.
And, without a king in charge, they had to find a whole new way to govern.
The first settlement of the island was essentially lawless.
But after two generations, 36 of the leading farmers came together
and formed an assembly to govern Iceland.
It was called the Althingi.
It was founded in 930 AD,
and it met once a year for two weeks,
to make laws, to judge disputes, and to appoint a law speaker,
whose responsibility it was to remember and recite the law.
But this being Iceland, a special location was chosen for the Assembly.
And it's here where two of planet Earth's tectonic plates divide.
So the Althingi straddled the old world of Europe in the east
and the new world of the west.
And it seems strangely apt
that those first Icelanders chose this place
to form a new kind of government.
That government met on this site for the next 800 years,
well into the modern era.
But what's incredible to me is that the 36 men who met here, over 1,000 years ago,
unknowingly gave birth to the oldest extant democracy
in the whole world.
Leaving Iceland and its proto-Republicans behind,
I'm returning south to Scandinavia,
and a Viking site close to Denmark's capital.
Because while the Norwegians were busy creating colonies
in the North Atlantic,
back in the old world, things were also changing.
In the middle of the 10th century, the Danes were being ruled by a new dynasty,
that was forging the beginnings of a nation-state.
The new royal house was the Jelling dynasty.
And there's is the most visible legacy of the Viking age,
because towards the end of the 10th century,
they built an enormous amount of infrastructure -
towns were fortified, a huge earthen rampart was built
across the neck of the Jutland peninsula
to protect against invaders from Germany.
They also built numerous bridges and roads,
as well as these huge fortresses.
This fortress is at Trelleborg, around 60 miles west of Copenhagen.
It's an impressive symbol of royal power.
All of the fortresses are built on the same ground plan.
Perfectly circular earthen bank,
each topped with a timber palisade
adding an additional eight metres in height.
There are four entrances,
and in the interior, there were 16 buildings in there,
four in each of the quadrants, and in each case laid out in a square.
But you don't have the try too hard to imagine what those buildings looked like
because there's a perfectly good reconstruction just over there.
It's thought each of these fortresses housed around 500 trained warriors
and their families.
This was centralised power,
and it represented a watershed in Viking history.
These fortresses were much more than just defensive positions -
they were very visible statements of wealth and power and centralised control.
The power was Harald Bluetooth, King of Denmark,
and he exercised total control over the people, the land and its resources.
And his legacy was much more than constructions like this.
He changed his country for ever
and he did that by converting his people
to the modern religion called Christianity.
Since the end of the Roman Empire, Christianity had dominated religious life
right across mainland Europe.
Scandinavia was the last outpost of the old pagan ways.
But not for long.
At one of Denmark's oldest towns, Ribe,
archaeologists are making some startling discoveries.
Graves of some of Scandinavia's very first Christians.
I spent most of my years digging on prehistoric sites,
so it's genuinely remarkable for me to see...
such obvious remains in the ground.
You can see the clear outlines of the graves,
you can even see the remains of the coffins.
What is it about the skeletons that says these are Christians?
They are all, er...
east-west burials, with the skull in the west end
facing east, as the Christian doctrine says.
You should face the upgoing sun on the Judgement Day.
So when the trumpet sounds, Jesus comes back...
And they rise from the grave, facing east.
They're facing the direction he's coming from.
The oldest ones are carbon dated to around 850.
That is actually some of the oldest Christian graves in Scandinavia.
So right early on in the Viking age, you've got Christian Viking burials here.
So, in terms of official Danish history that children learn at school,
these finds here change that quite significantly.
We actually now have a prolonged Christian period,
much longer than we first thought,
meaning that pagans and Christians lived alongside each other
maybe for 200 years until Christianity completely took over.
The Vikings here were some of the very first to adopt the new religion.
But it appears that these first Viking Christians still hung on
to their traditional maritime burial rites.
And then we have all these rivets, set alongside the coffin.
Yes, they are big as well, they're big pieces of metal.
Yes, we hope to find out if this is part of the boat.
So you might have within a Christian burial, the suggestion of a boat burial,
or being buried with part of a boat.
Yes, of course, being Christian in these early stages didn't mean
that you should abandon all your old practices.
So they may still be paying homage to Thor and Odin.
But when it suited, they would just pray to Jesus.
It's amazing to think that these people weren't just Vikings,
and the product of the Viking tradition, but they were Christian at the same time.
Excavating these graves is like turning a bright light
onto a few pages of history.
They illuminate the moment
when the Vikings are no longer just part of their own private Scandinavian world.
They're becoming part of a much bigger picture,
they're joining something more modern, more European,
and the catalyst for that is Christianity.
All over Scandinavia, Vikings began to turn to the new god.
And their conversion would signal the beginning of the end of the Viking age.
This religious revolution was endorsed around 970,
when Denmark's King, Harald Bluetooth,
made Christianity his country's official religion.
From here on in, all Danes were expected to worship Christ.
And to celebrate the moment, Harald Bluetooth installed a huge stone monument.
Today, it's one of Denmark's most precious national treasures.
Because all the tourists have gone,
I've been allowed inside for some privileged access.
The stone once upon a time was brightly painted -
red, white and blue, as it happens.
But 1,000 years of weathering and winter have faded it,
so that it's very indistinct now.
Now, I'll grant you, it's almost impossible to make it out,
but what you are in fact looking at is this image here.
It's Jesus Christ emerging from within a thorn bush.
And it's interpreted as a representation of Christianity itself,
disentangling itself from amongst the thorns of the old pagan beliefs.
This is actually the first page of a modern Danish passport,
so that this image is alive and relevant for Danes even today.
The story goes that before his conversion, King Harald witnessed a divine miracle.
A moment commemorated in some early Christian art.
Here, on these gilded plates, set into the altar.
In this one, you can see a priest performing a miracle.
He can extend his hand into the fire
and then withdraw it, apparently unhurt,
although he does seem to be wearing a giant oven glove.
Then, in this one, we have Harald himself, a fine figure of a man,
being baptised while standing up to his waist in a barrel.
This is all very nice, but you can see it as PR spin,
stories to please the masses,
because Harald's conversion to Christianity, more than anything else,
was a calculated political move.
Christianity wasn't just a belief - it was a social and political institution.
It dominated every other kingdom in Europe.
And Harald Bluetooth knew that joining the club
would give him protection from aggressive neighbours.
Because no other Christian ruler
could now claim a legitimate right to attack him.
The land to the south of Denmark was ruled by Otto the Great,
Duke of Saxony, King of Germany and Italy, and Holy Roman Emperor.
And he wanted to add Denmark to his list of territorial acquisitions.
But Harald's conversion made that impossible, because now the Danes,
like everyone else, were protected by the one true God.
And that wasn't all.
Christianity also helped Harald to rule as a king, and all because of this -
the Bible.
Christianity gave kings a divine right to rule under a single god.
The days when a brave warrior might rise to fight alongside the old gods
through epic earthly adventures was over.
For those being ruled, Christianity would change their lives for ever,
because conversion to the one true God struck at the very heart
of all that it had meant to be a Viking.
Seeing the benefits of Harald's conversion,
other Viking rulers started to follow suit.
Within just 100 years,
most of Scandinavia was officially Christian.
And as their ancient pagan roots were left behind...
..the modern nation-states of Denmark, Norway and Sweden were being born.
Christianity was central to that modern world.
The King was Christian. The trading partners all across Europe were Christian.
Christianity also dictated that the old pagan beliefs were to be stamped out,
not just in Denmark, but all across the Viking world.
In Norway, edicts were issued,
banning the performance of spells to awaken trolls -
strict no-no.
I'll get that, please.
There was also a raft of new laws.
Perfect.
Meat could only be eaten on certain days.
Rules for married life even dictated when you could and couldn't have sex.
The old pagan gods had been like friends.
Provided you made your sacrifices,
then you felt entitled to help from Odin and Thor.
But the new Christian God wasn't like that.
He was more of a judge. If you misbehaved,
he was the injured party and you would be made to suffer in the next life.
So instead of the promise of Valhalla,
now, Vikings learned to live in fear of eternal damnation.
The whole focus of Viking life was shifting,
away from the here and now,
the adventure, the heroic deed, the reputation.
Instead, it became about hoping for life after death.
And there was something about that that feels a little bit sad.
The wild north that had been the backdrop for the entire Viking world
was leaving its mysterious and ancient past behind...
and emerging into a much more European age.
It was all very well becoming Christian and exercising royal power,
but to effectively run a state, you also needed an efficient administration
and effective taxes as well.
And the masters of that operated just across the North Sea -
the Anglo-Saxons.
Now, I'm heading for England...
..because for the ninth-century Danes,
this country was more important than ever...
..as an easy source of cash.
England had been Christian for centuries, and she was also streets ahead
of her Viking counterparts when it came to commerce.
Hiya. Hi. How are you doing?
Not bad. Can I have four of these Braeburns, please?
Thank you.
Manufacturers and farmers ensured a steady flow of goods and currency.
Thank you.
Relatively speaking, this was a rich trading nation.
There was also a huge army of bureaucrats, administrators, to look after the land,
to dispense the justice and to collect the tax.
Thank you, sir. That's £5.
Lovely. 15, 20. Thank you, OK.
To put it mildly, she was rich and well organised.
For nearly 100 years, between 866 AD and 954 AD,
Denmark had had a piece of the action,
controlling the kingdom of the York from the Danish city of Jorvik.
Now though, York was back under Anglo-Saxon control.
So Harald Bluetooth's descendants had to resort
to some very old-fashioned Viking tactics.
Not that that just meant more raiding for slaves or monastic treasure.
By the late 10th century, the Vikings had a new scheme -
to issue threats and demand tribute payments
in cold, hard cash.
England had the most well-organised
and efficient currency anywhere in Western Europe at this time.
They had up to 70 mints active at any one time,
from York down to Exeter and Canterbury.
And each of them would be making silver pennies, much like this one.
So they're all solid silver, that's this unifying feature of them,
they've all got the same worth? Precisely, yes.
England had a sophisticated coinage system and well-organised tax collection.
Denmark had neither.
But King Harald's son and successor, Sweyn Forkbeard,
didn't see the need for improvement.
Not when you had neighbours who did it so well for you.
Sweyn might have been baptised, but his veins ran with Viking blood.
And when he came to the throne,
he crewed up the Danish longships once more and set sail for England.
So it's from around the 980s that the Vikings begin to go and attack
and extract money from England again.
And we see the English coins begin to flow into Scandinavia in massive quantity.
How much money are the Vikings taking out of the country?
A very great deal.
We know from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that more than £200,000
was paid to them overall between 991 and 1018.
Are the English producing coins precisely because they know the Vikings are coming
and will want paying?
Well, the most vivid example we have of this is this coin here.
With all of these other types, you have the bust of the King and a cross.
But in this case, you don't, you have the Lamb of God
and you have the Holy Dove.
This coinage is all about an invitation to God,
trying to get him to send the Vikings away and bring the English to safety.
But, invoking God on their coins didn't help.
The more they paid the Vikings off, like any blackmailer,
the more they came back with new demands.
Realising that England was being bled dry,
the English king decided to hit back.
Now, the English king, Ethelred,
we generally know him as Ethelred the Unready.
He was given that nickname, "Unready", for very a good reason.
In old English, unready means ill-advised,
and the policy of continually buying off the Vikings was a pretty poor plan.
In 1002, he made a ruthless decision
and ordered that all Danish men in England were to be killed.
What happened next is known as the Saint Brice's Day Massacre.
By the 11th century, England was home to thousands of born-and-bred ethnic Danes,
whose families had lived in England for generations.
But they dressed differently and they stood out in society.
Now, every one of them was a target for revenge.
These are the skeletons of three men.
They were excavated in Oxford during work in advance of a building project.
There's three here on display but 38 skeletons were found together.
There are far too many to display here and now,
so the rest are in their carefully numbered and catalogued cardboard boxes.
All men, all, as far as we can tell, aged between 16 and 25,
certainly none of them older than 40.
But what is particularly amazing about them
is that they're all the victims of violent death.
I almost don't know where to start.
This individual here, you can tell that he's a big robust character.
But for all that, he's been felled initially
by a blow to the back of the legs.
Like a sword swung at him from behind and it's cut through the muscles
the flesh, the tendons and finally through the bones themselves.
So he's been felled like a big tree.
But that's not the end of it for this guy.
On this side of the pelvis, do you see that hole?
That puncture wound?
That's where the point of whatever it was, spear or sword, went in
and out the other side.
Huge damage to the skull.
Something like a sword or something sharp and heavy has caused
this massive slicing blow, it's opened his head up like an egg.
There are cut marks on the ribs.
Too much has been done here. Any one of these wounds
would kill the person - this is crazy violence.
These are not the kinds of injuries that are inflicted on people
who are standing up and fighting.
All of these men - the three here and the rest in the boxes -
were killed, butchered, while they were running away.
A particularly grim piece of evidence suggests
that all these men were victims of Ethelred's massacre in 1002.
If you look at this one, you see this burning on the forehead
on the front of the skull?
And then there's more burning here, on the right hand.
He's been in a fire somewhere after death.
And some of the other bodies show evidence of burning as well.
An account of the killings from Oxford, where these skeletons were found,
records that a group of Danes sought sanctuary in a church.
To no avail.
The local Anglo-Saxons simply burnt it to the ground
with everyone inside.
So it's possible, just possible, that this, and they, were some of those
who sought refuge in a church 1,000 years ago,
for all the good it did them.
King Ethelred's desperate action, though, was a failure.
The Viking raids continued unabated.
And soon, England was on its knees.
For the Danish king, it was the chance of a lifetime.
In 1013, Sweyn Forkbeard launched a full-scale invasion of England,
and it worked.
The English king, Ethelred the Unready, simply ran away,
abandoning the English crown to the Dane.
But it turned out to be a very short reign.
Five weeks later, Forkbeard was dead,
but, by his side, was his young son called Canute.
Now there's a name we're all familiar with.
Canute was grandson of Harald Bluetooth and son of Forkbeard -
a continuation of the Jelling royal dynasty.
Canute returned to Denmark,
but he kept his eye firmly on the English crown.
Just two years later, he was back,
with 200 ships and 10,000 men.
And after some bloody fighting,
he became King of all England.
Everyone knows the story about King Canute and the sea -
how he ordered that his throne be taken down onto the beach
and then he sat there, and as the tide came in, he told the waves to turn back.
And of course they didn't.
And his feet got a wet and he ended up looking a bit foolish, a bit arrogant.
But that wasn't what he intended at all.
What happened that day was a pure PR stunt.
His subjects, his followers, were supposed to see that he was just a man
and that only God had the power to control the sun and the moon and the tides.
In conquering England with an axe, Canute had shown his Viking roots.
But he was also determined to prove he was a devout Christian king.
Combining both powerful traditions,
he would go on to become ruler of an empire,
a member of the European royal elite.
And when he died, his tomb was no Viking longship beneath a grassy mound.
Instead, it was a cathedral.
So that, nowadays, we hardly think of him as a Viking at all.
Originally founded by the Anglo-Saxons over 1,000 years ago,
Winchester Cathedral houses tombs of the great and the good,
centuries of England's most worthy.
In medieval England,
a more celebrated, a more Christian location for your mortal remains
could hardly be wished for.
So, for a king who was born Viking, whose heritage was pagan,
and who was viewed as a brutal conqueror of England,
you might think this is an unlikely final resting place.
But the truth is, by Canute's death in 1035,
he was known as Canute the Great.
Canute's invasion of England could be viewed as the ultimate Viking expedition.
A rite of passage for a true hero of the Sagas.
Though tradition had it that after your adventures, you were meant to return home.
For most Vikings, that meant farming a plot of land at the end of a fjord.
But Canute was King.
And his bones are inside that box up there
or possibly that one...
..or that one.
Any of these.
The truth is, we don't actually know where his mortal remains really are,
because during the English Civil War, around 600 years after his death,
parliamentarian Roundhead soldiers used the bones inside these reliquaries
to smash out what they regarded
as the frankly idolatrous stained-glass window
above the cathedral entrance.
A bunch of killjoys.
Soon after, the good people of Winchester collected up the glass
and rebuilt the window.
Although the colourful patchwork ended up more modernist than medieval.
The bones used to smash the windows were collected up too
and returned to the reliquaries.
But, like the window, in a slightly random way.
So although we don't know where his bones actually are,
we hope and suspect he's up there somewhere.
Canute's ambition had extended beyond ruling England.
He was soon King of the Scottish islands, Denmark,
Norway and parts of Sweden too.
He had created a Viking empire.
From England, I've come south to Austria,
right in the heart of Europe.
Because Canute wasn't just a northern ruler,
but an early European statesman.
Canute was smart.
He knew that more trade across Europe meant more taxes to fill his coffers.
So he set about standardising the whole European economy.
Now, you might think of the euro as a modern concept.
But it's not really, and in the 11th century,
it was neither France not Germany that was the centre for monetary union.
It was England.
First of all, Canute standardised Scandinavian and English coins,
so that there was a common currency.
And then, it appears that right across his empire, the ounce,
the weight that was used for measuring gold and silver, was altered to match up
with the ounce of Byzantium, of the Byzantine empire.
And that was at a time when Constantinople was not only the largest,
but also the wealthiest city on Earth.
Canute was carefully integrating his empire
into a medieval single European market.
Canute the Great was a player on the world stage, and here in Vienna,
there's an incredible object that shows us how influential he was.
And how far he had come from his Viking roots.
A decade after becoming King, Canute attended the coronation
of the man who ruled most of central Europe -
the Holy Roman Emperor.
And this glorious object is what he was crowned with.
It's called Die Reichskrone,
the Imperial Crown, and back in 1027,
watching this being placed on the Emperor's head
was the hot ticket of the season.
It's decorated with 144 emeralds,
sapphires and amethysts.
Back then, the technique of cutting facets
into precious stones was unknown.
Instead, they were polished into these smooth shapes.
They look a bit like boiled sweets, to be honest.
Although a lot more expensive.
And they're then mounted to let light shine through them.
The final touch are the four picture plates,
which depict messages from the Old Testament.
And most important, most tellingly for our story,
is this one on the corner.
It shows Jesus Christ enthroned as the Lord of Hosts.
And above his head, in red enamel, are the words in Latin,
"Per me reges regnant" -
"By me, kings rule."
And this idea, this concept of divinely ordained kingship,
was something Canute was very enthusiastic about.
When the Holy Roman Emperor was crowned,
Canute the Great walked as part of the Imperial procession.
And afterwards, the Emperor even arranged for his own son to marry Canute's daughter
to cement a powerful political alliance.
Canute's attendance at that coronation
showed that he was a major European player, he had arrived.
And he clearly believed that he was the equal of the Holy Roman Emperor.
Because when he got home, he had one of these made for himself.
Canute's reign lasted less than two decades.
But in that time, he had utterly changed his Scandinavian world.
He had been born a Viking,
but he died a European.
Canute himself had left four children and his empire was divided.
Norway, Denmark and Sweden soon found their own new rulers.
It was the end for the great Jelling dynasty.
And, with it, the entire Viking age.
But, by then, Scandinavia was no longer a remote, pagan backwater.
The violent, plundering men from the north had become colonisers, Christians,
nation and empire builders.
It had been an incendiary time in European history.
But it had burnt itself out.
Nonetheless, the impact of the Vikings on modern Europe
is inescapable.
The politics, the economics,
the national and religious identities were forged,
at least in part, by their exploits.
The Vikings had raided and pillaged coastlines across northern Europe.
They'd set out on journeys beyond the knowledge of any other Europeans...
..colonised uninhabited lands...
..and traded goods from the distant empires of the Far East.
In little more than two centuries,
the Vikings had expanded the Western world,
voyaging from Newfoundland in the west to Constantinople in the east.
A world far, far bigger than even they could have imagined possible.
And they're still with us today
in our towns and cities,
in our culture,
in our language and in our blood.
And in the very existence of the modern nation-states of northern Europe.
But that's not what we remember, or why.
The truth is, the myth and the legend of them,
the excitement and the adventure,
is all there in the sound of one word -
Vikings.
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