Lars Brownworth: Vikings, Ragnar, Berserkers, Valhalla & the Warriors of the Viking Age

Lex Fridman introduces Lars Brownworth as a historian and author whose books include The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings and The Normans: From Raiders to Kings. Brownworth also hosts two history podcast series. The first, 12 Byzantine Rulers: The History of the Byzantine Empire, launched in June 2005, over 20 years ago, and Fridman calls it "one of the first, if not the first ever" history podcast. The second, Norman Centuries, follows the Normans' rise from Viking raiders to rulers of kingdoms stretching from England to Sicily.

Fridman says the conversation focuses mainly on the Vikings, whom he describes as seafaring Norse warriors and explorers who, "over a period of just 300 years," reshaped the medieval world and the course of Western civilization. He sees a thread connecting the Vikings to the rest of Brownworth's work: the Normans, the Crusades, and the collapse of the East Roman, or Byzantine, Empire. So he proposes starting at the beginning, with the Vikings themselves.

The episode opens with excerpts from later in the talk. In them, Brownworth stresses how fast the longships were, says the Valhalla belief turned the afterlife into practice for Ragnarok, and names Tennyson's poem Ulysses as his favourite expression of the Viking spirit. Those themes are covered in the sections below.

Fridman notes that the Viking Age is often dated from 793 AD to 1066 AD, which he calls less than three centuries. Its start is often fixed at June 8th, 793. Brownworth describes what happened that June: a group of Vikings, "probably originating from Norway," arrived at the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, a monastic community. They slaughtered nearly everyone, burned a couple of buildings, took everything of value and left. He calls it the first Viking raid "that came in force." He argues Lindisfarne is a good starting date because its terror "really signified what was to come for the next two to three centuries." The speakers' rough spans differ slightly: "just 300 years," "less than three centuries" and "two to three centuries" all appear. That reflects how loosely the age's length is described, not a substantive disagreement.

Fridman reads from a letter that the monk Alcuin wrote to King Ethelred of Northumbria about the raid:

It is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made.

Brownworth argues that the letter carries weight because of who wrote it. Alcuin was "not just a regular scholar." He was Charlemagne's favourite scholar and, as much as one person can be, responsible for the Carolingian Renaissance. Brownworth adds that the spaces between words we use today are "likely a result of Alcuin’s work." He calls Alcuin an extremely literate man and says "you can hear the terror creeping into" the letter. He adds that Alcuin wrote, as Brownworth recalls it ("I think he writes a little later on"), that the dead were left as dung in the streets. On that image, Brownworth asks: "who would do this to men of God? Inhuman monsters."

Brownworth explains the shock through what a monastic community meant at the time. Everyone in Europe was, as he puts it in qualified terms, "nominally Christian." The Church was a place of safety, "a literal ark from the troubles of the world." To illustrate, he cites, with a hedge ("I believe"), rules in England under which someone who had killed could flee to a church, where civil authorities could not enter for up to 40 days. Violating that sanctuary would have been "the worst possible offense," he says, which is why Thomas Becket's murder is still seen as so horrible in England.

The monks had devoted themselves to studying the Bible, copying scripture, prayer, and literally removing themselves from worldly temptation. So they looked for remote sites, and the most remote were islands in the North Atlantic, because they were so hard to reach. Brownworth draws a distinction here. It was not sailing on the ocean that felt safe, but the islands themselves, which were "literal havens of peace and security and closeness to God." For the Vikings to strike "this place of all places" was, in his words, "the most terrifying kind of offense against medieval sensibilities."

Fridman sums this up as a set of broken assumptions, and Brownworth agrees with each one. First, there was a social contract, a line most societies agree not to cross, such as letting scholars do their work. Second, from a military and mobility standpoint, people assumed no threat could come from the sea, especially from the north. Fridman says the raid shattered that worldview three ways: by its brutality, by proving the sea could bring a threat, and by showing the raiders did not care about the lines a Christian society had set.

Asked who the Vikings were and how they thought about their own violence, Brownworth names "a central problem" in studying them. The story is almost always told from someone else's perspective, "largely from the pens of those they’re attacking." As a result, the Vikings "are not gonna come across well" and are often portrayed as demonic and inhuman.

He describes several limits on the evidence:

The runic alphabet was used mostly for spells, naming swords and cursing people, and "wasn’t really useful for writing long poetry or literature." The only Norse literature we have comes from the end of the age, after the Latin alphabet was adopted, so "you can almost never see the Vikings in their own words as they saw themselves." What can be pieced together comes from archaeology and from stories written later. English, Frankish and Irish writers called them all Danes, Pagans, heathens or Northmen "no matter where they came from," so the sources say little about where specific raiders originated.

Brownworth then makes his "most important" point about who these people were: "Viking was not their day job." Most were merchants and farmers, mostly farmers, who lived in small bays called Viks in Old Norse. He says that is "probably where we get the word Viking from," which keeps the etymology hedged. Old Norse was spoken across all three Scandinavian countries, which also makes it harder to tell groups apart.

Brownworth links Viking character to geography. Living so far north, near the Arctic Circle, was "at the very limit of where technology of the time could allow humans to survive." He thinks that harsh climate "bred, I think, very hard people," and that mercy "was not a quality they seemed to favor or value." Both claims are offered as his interpretation. His illustration is a "very famous story" of a Swedish Viking who put a sword in his newborn son's crib and said:

May you have nothing in this life but what you can gain with this.

Brownworth contrasts this with his own life: putting a gun in one of his children's cribs today would get him "carted away." He says the story underscores how violent a life a Viking could expect, and that "strength was valued more than anything else." Fridman extends the argument with a selection effect. If the world is understood as harsh and strength is how you face it, then the people who chose to get on a boat and face the ocean's uncertainty would produce the brutality seen at places like Lindisfarne. Brownworth answers "I think so" before turning to the ships.

In the cold open, Brownworth says Viking longships "could average 70 to 120 miles a day." That speed let raiders hit a place, take whoever they wanted, and leave before a defending army could arrive, which he calls "just absolutely terrifying." Later he describes how the ships were built. They were clinker built, with overlapping planks, and undecked, so the crews sheltered in tents. He asks listeners to imagine crossing the North Atlantic, with huge waves splashing over the side,

with an inch of oak between you and the ocean

Navigation made the risk worse. With no compass, sailors relied on the sun and stars, birds in the sky, changes in water colour and floating leaves. Over a 2,000-mile voyage, he says, "that’s not great." Brownworth thinks this intrepidness is part of why the Vikings fascinate people living in a "more or less sanitized world." The fascination mixes admiration for their courage with horror at what they did when they arrived. Fridman follows up by asking what is known about the longships' structure that let them also travel on rivers. Brownworth answers that some ships combined ocean-going capability with a draft under two feet and could be carried around obstacles by about twenty men, giving the raiders exceptional mobility.

Brownworth says the Vikings did not view the Christian God in flattering terms. To them, he says, it was "a weak God who won’t protect his adherents," whose churches they could freely plunder. He cites one Viking's famous remark as an example of their pragmatic approach to religion:

On land, I’m a Christian. When I’m on the sea, I worship Thor.

Fridman calls Odin and Thor "pretty hardcore gods" and says the Vikings were probably "some of the toughest humans to have ever lived." Brownworth agrees ("I think so") and calls their gods horrifying. He adds a correction to popular belief: the religion was polytheistic, with "no universally accepted head god," and he thinks "Marvel has also led people astray" on this. Both speakers defer a fuller treatment of the religion to later in the conversation.

In the cold-open excerpts, Brownworth describes the afterlife as he understands it. The brave were taken to Valhalla, which he calls the House of the Dead. There they fought every day, their wounds were magically healed each night, and they fought again the next morning, "essentially practicing for Ragnarok, the final battle." Asked how Alcuin and the monks felt seeing Viking ships on the horizon, he answers that it must have felt like "the end of the world," and he does not think they were wrong. He cites the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's account that the night before Lindisfarne, monks saw sheets of lightning in the shape of dragons, which he says was "obviously meant to foreshadow the dragon ships."

Brownworth's personal touchstone for the Viking spirit is Tennyson's Ulysses, his favourite poem. He points to the closing line, "To seek, to find, and not to yield," and paraphrases the poem's resolve to sail beyond the western stars until death: "We may die, but I’m gonna do this, I’m not gonna yield." This is his own literary comparison, not evidence from Norse sources, and it fits his broader point that the Vikings' courage is part of their lasting appeal.

Lars Brownworth calls the Vikings' ships their "great secret" and says the point is underappreciated. They built different types of ship for different purposes. What he finds most striking is that the same vessels could cross the Atlantic Ocean and also had a draft of less than two feet. That meant they could sail up rivers only two feet deep. When a river was blocked, he says, 20 men could pick up a ship and carry it around the obstacle. Lex Fridman checks that these were the same kind of ship used at sea, and Brownworth confirms it: "Yeah. I mean, it’s insane."

the speed was the most frightening thing about the Vikings.

Fridman frames speed as the main military advantage over the British armies, on top of the surprise the Vikings often had. Brownworth agrees ("That was the big one") and gives rough figures. An English army could average about 10 to 15 miles a day on a good day, and only with a well-maintained Roman road and no large baggage train. He adds that such roads were not plentiful. A cavalry unit that did not have to travel with the army could manage about 20 miles a day. Viking longships, by his account, averaged 70 to 120 miles a day. These are his estimates, and no source for them is cited in this part of the conversation.

They could hit a place, raid it, drag off whoever they wanted, and get away before you could get your army there.

Fridman asks what it felt like for Alcuin and the monks to see Viking ships on the horizon. He notes that people of the time had no full map of the world and only a hazy idea of the oceans. Brownworth answers that it must have felt like the end of the world, and he doesn't think they were wrong to see it that way. He cites the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which says that the night before Lindisfarne the monks saw sheets of lightning in the sky shaped like dragons. He reads this as written to foreshadow the dragon ships. Speaking personally, he says the sight of "these giant men jumping out of their ships with swords raised" would shake his own faith.

Fridman asks whether the Vikings knew about the fear they caused and used it on purpose, as he says the Mongols under Genghis Khan did. Brownworth is clear that they did. He presents this as evidence that the raiders were organized, which he says they get little credit for, against the image of them as "just dumb brutes." He describes the method this way:

They attacked on purpose on high holy days such as Easter and Christmas, when there would be higher-value targets, richer clothing, richer offerings and a lot of money on hand. They gathered intelligence first. Brownworth says raiding "wasn’t their day jobs." They would be traders in, for example, an English port, looking around and learning everyone's schedule. They then sailed away and came back as Vikings, knowing where the money was kept, where the churches were and when to strike. He says they knew the whole Christian calendar, down to when someone's baptism or confirmation would take place. They timed attacks to increase terror.

The Vikings absolutely used terror. It was a main weapon in their arsenal.

Fridman argues that the shortness of the Viking Age is itself a sign of Viking intelligence. In his telling, the explorers and raiders quickly moved from conquest to building states or setting up trade routes. Once they did, they stopped being "Vikings" and became an ordinary nation or civilization. He describes the raiding phase as lasting "a couple of generations at most." That figure is his own characterization, not a sourced claim.