Dr. Eleanor Barraclough
Appearances
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Okay, but here we're talking very specifically about the saga of the Greenlanders because this is one of these really interesting things where we've got oral traditions that end up in these sagas, but her character, it depends on which saga we're looking at. Saga of Greenlanders, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely terrifying.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
She makes a deal with two Norwegian brothers to sail to Vinland, and they're there to gather timber and resources. But she ends up getting her followers, and specifically her husband, to kill all the men on the other boats. And no one will kill... What about them? She gets into an argument with them, and she wants the bigger of Leif's booth here, and she wants all the resources.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
She's just not nice. She knows what she likes. She does. The problem is... She loves herself. And it gets, yeah, she also, so no one, there were women in the other party as well, on the other ship, and no one will kill them. And so she actually, she says, hand me an axe, or literally put an axe in my hand. She finishes them off. And it just says in the saga, and so it was done. It's horrible.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she doesn't lead the expedition in this one, but she's on the expedition. And then there's a violent encounter.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Yeah. So they get into an altercation with the local population that they meet there. And so basically all the men run away and there's a weapon on the floor from one of the people who's been killed. And she picks it up to face the sort of indigenous people who are coming towards them. And
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
By the way, she is heavily pregnant at this point and she bears her breast and she slaps the sword against it. And we're not entirely sure why, but basically the indigenous people are so terrified they then run away. That would scare me. Yeah. Yeah.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Yeah, well, and further south. Yeah, exactly. And this is really interesting because it's possible this is the first time, if we think of the world as a circle, this is the first time you see the two sides culturally meeting. These are the first encounters we've got. And it's sort of pretty typical. So depending on the saga, depending on the episode, sometimes they're trading.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
And they particularly, so the indigenous people particularly like the red cloth and the dairy products and the weapons. But the Norse are like, no, we'll keep hold of the weapons. Thank you. But then they give the Norse, the Norse give them furs and skins. So it's actually very much like what happens later on when you end up with this. Fair trade?
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Not necessarily, because in other encounters, they basically all go horribly wrong. And there's a lot of violence and people get killed, sometimes entirely without provocation. One episode, it's like they just found three people sleeping, so they killed them.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
It's not. It's not great. It's really not. And it's telling. They describe them. The word they use is skrailingar. And skrailing means sort of wretched or puny. So that's how the Norse are looking at these people. And they lump them all together. But we're probably talking about, you know, the Innu of Labrador and the Beotuk of Newfoundland. And then... We've got around the Gulf of St.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Lawrence, which is probably that sort of southern extremity of where they get to. We've got the Algonquins and the Iroquois. So we've got these various groups that the Norse do seem to encounter. But ultimately, when they leave for the last time in the sagas, they say we found a land of fine resources, but we won't be able to settle here. We won't be able to use it.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Basically, those sagas, from what we know of the sagas, he's got to have died somewhere between 1018 and 1025. And that's purely because in one of them, he's there in Greenland and in the next, it's his son and there's no sign of him. So he's probably gone.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
We're not in the right period of history to be really specific.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Well, so this is quite interesting because the first English speaking settlers of the US and Canada want to emphasise their English roots. And we know that Columbus landing on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola takes hold as sort of an alternative origin myth for the US after the War of Independence, particularly. But Columbus also has never actually set foot in North America. Yeah.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Actually, I was always fascinated by England. I don't know, it might have to do with Hugh Grant. Hugh Grant! Yes, it did. Four weddings and a funeral. Iconic.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
So then the story of Leif Erikson gets really popular in the 19th century. And part of that is because Protestant US citizens, they're not, Columbus is a little bit too Catholic for them. So what seems to be happening is Viking gets conflated with the idea of Anglo-Saxons. It implies a sort of ancestral link to modern white Americans. So it's this sort of
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
quite uncomfortable racial myth of white Anglo-Saxon colonisers bringing civilisation to indigenous populations around the globe. You know, it's the classic story.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
We do have that. And basically the Vinland Saga has directed these archaeologists straight to it. So in the 1960s, archaeologists started working on a site in Lancer Meadows in Newfoundland in Canada. And they found the remains of several Norse-style buildings. So it looks like there's some that people can live in temporarily. It looks like there's workshops where people can sort of learn things.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Yeah, it's right by the water. This is temporary. So you can tell no one's really living there permanently because, yeah, essentially you'd expect to see more rubbish. You'd expect to see some graves, all the rest of it. You don't have that. So it looks like what they're doing is essentially using it as a stopping off point, mending their ships, overwintering, and then they can go further south.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
And there's some things that have been found at that site, like butternuts and butternut wood. They don't grow that far north. So we're talking the area further south down the Gulf of St.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So Vinland, in a way, isn't that place. Vinland is the whole area going south from there.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
No? Okay. So this is something that's just been found, which is they know that there was a big cosmic storm. So like big solar flares in the year 993. And you can see that in some of the wood that has been obviously been chopped by the North at this site at Lanza Meadows yesterday. So the way we can know this is we know the date of the solar flare, which is 993.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
This is a story of working-class women trying to get by. This is survival.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
And then we just literally count forward on the tree rings. Every ring is a year. And when we get to the end of the rings, that tells us the year that the tree was cut down.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Yeah, exactly. And so we know that that wood was cut in the year 1021. And so that's the one date that we can say, all right, it looks like the Norse were definitely at this site in this year, which is really specific because usually we're talking, you know, a good flabby hundred years or so. Yeah.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
There's an archaeological site that's not Norse, it's early Inuit. And it's close to the sort of southern most tip of Baffin Island. And there they found this really lovely piece of carved wood. And it's a human figure and it's about five and a half centimetres high. But it looks like it's wearing Norse clothing. So it's got like this very full, yes, it's lovely.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
It's like this full folds of a skirt and then possibly a yoked hood covering the head and the shoulders.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Yes. So we've got a Norse grave, and I can't remember if it's stuck in their ribs or something, but it's an arrowhead. This is not a Norse arrowhead. The only thing they found that is sort of equivalent to that is over in the cultures of people who were living on that edge of the North American continent. And actually, that's how one of Leif's brothers is said to be killed in the saga.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
So an arrow basically hits him. So it could be him. It could be him. Let's say it's him.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
OK, so what I would say is that big names such as Leif the Lucky and Erik the Red are the ones we tend to know about. But I want to make the case for the everyday people who are just bumping along, living their lives through the Viking Age, because they're every bit as interesting, if not more so than the larger than life characters who end up in the sagas and history books.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
We just don't get to hear about them so often, although a book coming out in September called Embers of the Hands, which may be very much about that subject. So it's this idea of looking at the everyday people who slip between the cracks of history and the little bits and pieces of them that survive. And Greenland is actually a really exciting example of this.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
It's my favourite part of the Norse world because its remoteness and that permafrost we talked about means that tons of material from Norse Greenland has actually been frozen in time. And I'll give you two examples, but they give us more names, names of ordinary humans that we wouldn't know about otherwise. Now, one of those comes from a coffin in a graveyard.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
There's no body in that coffin, but there's a rune stick. And carved onto this little piece of wood is an inscription that can be translated as this woman who was called Gulveig was laid overboard in the Greenland Sea. So earlier when we were talking about those great voyages across the ocean...
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
We have to remember how many ordinary people and how many women were there and how many of them may have actually not reached the other side. The other example, again, runes, this time on a stone found high in the Arctic, hidden in a cairn. And these runes refer to three men, Erling Sigvadsson, Bjarni Thordarson and Eindri the Oddson.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
And it says they built these cairns the Saturday before Rogation Day, which is in late April. They were probably hunters. Perhaps they were up there looking for walrus because of that really, really precious ivory. But if they're there that early in the year, they probably got stranded. Maybe they overwintered there. We never know if they got home. But we don't know what happened to them.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
And so that's why I'd say that it's the stories of everyday people that we really need to remember.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Because depending on which bit of Greenland, what time of year you want to go and what you want to get up to while you're there.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
It can actually, well, particularly now, you know, it can get quite hot. I've been there when it's, I want to say 25 degrees, kind of t-shirt weather.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
So if you're looking for tropical, nah, not Greenland. But they did get, I mean, you can go to Istanbul. You can go to all sorts of nice places. Vikings got there too.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
I'm not the useful sort of doctor. If you have a heart attack, you're on your own.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Yeah, well, we can fix ourselves chronologically. If we think of the Viking Age as spanning at least from around 750 CE roughly up to about 1100 CE. And it begins in the Scandinavian homelands. So we're thinking Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It involves violence.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Oh, because actually that's not a Scandinavian country. It's Nordic. They're there, but not quite in the same way. But yeah, there's lots of violence. There's conquest, but there's also trading and exploration and settlement.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
So you end up with this Norse diaspora that encompasses parts of the British Isles and Western Europe, Mediterranean, what's now Russia and Ukraine, and then all the way to Constantinople. They end up in Baghdad. Then in the other direction, they go all the way across the North Atlantic and they settle the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
No, no. There is a place called Vik in Norway, which is sort of might be related to the word, but there's an Old Norse, so that's language that the Vikings spoke. There's an Old Norse version of the word, vikingr, which is someone who's essentially a raider. So it's basically a seaborne raider. But not everyone who lived during the Viking Age in that cultural context is a raider.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
So they're not all Vikings. And even raiders are not always raiding. And sometimes they call their children Viking.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Yeah, mostly farming. You've got to eat before you can go and steal. I'd bully that guy.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Most Vikings aren't Vikings. Yeah, and that idea in the 19th century gets expanded and Viking becomes a sort of catch-all term for that early medieval Nordic diaspora.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
So Leif, he's probably born in, I don't know, something like 975, 980 in Iceland. He's a character mostly in two of these sagas. One's called Greinlendingarsaga, which means the saga of the Greenlanders. And the other one is Erik Saga Roida, which is the saga of Erik the Red.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Now, together, they're known as the Vinland sagas because Vinland is the Old Norse word for that part of North America, the edge of the continent that the Norse, spoiler alert, do reach around the year 1000 or so. And Leif seems to be a very big part of that.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
But Leif, his dad is called Eric the Red, but he's Leif Erikson because of that. The saga's like him. He's described as promising, tall, handsome, moderate in his behaviour, in stark contrast to his father.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Yes. The historian's answer is, depending on your definition of historical.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Yeah, I mean, you're looking for other evidence. So, for example, the Vinland Sagas, these two sagas featuring Leif, they were actually the basis for archaeologists in the 60s, realising that actually the Norse had reached the edge of the North American continent, and then they find the archaeological evidence there. And sometimes you've got to think of them in a different sense.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
So it's not just a case of, OK, let's sift out the history from the fiction. We've got to think of them as essentially a kind of cultural storytelling, remnants of how this particular culture thought about the world and their place within it. And in fact, the word saga comes from an old Norse verb, atseja, to say, to tell.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
So he's born in Norway and then he's forced to leave Norway because of some killings. How they put it in the stock. Okay.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
More than one. I can't remember. It's not good. So he's outlawed and he goes off to Iceland, settles there. And he marries Tjordhildur, his wife, and they have a family. But then it's not long before he's in trouble again. And this is such an embarrassing story. Basically, he gets into a... an argument with his neighbour about some bench boards, which are kind of carved decorative panels.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
And everything goes downhill very fast. And once again, he finds himself outlawed, this time from Iceland, because of some killings.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
So the saga. So we're back with those two Vinland sagas. Yeah. Saga of the Greenlanders, the Saga of the Reds. They give slightly different accounts. According to the Saga of the Greenlanders, the first person to cite land to the west of Greenland is a merchant called Bjarni. He gets blown off course. Often discoveries happen because people have just got lost at sea.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
But he doesn't explore it and the sagas are not very pleased about this. Basically, everyone criticises him because he's shown a lack of curiosity, which is sort of not a Viking thing to do. And then later Leif goes back and finds the land.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
No, he's fine. But it's just like, oh, okay, you didn't set foot on that. All right.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
So the sagas are extremely passive-aggressive, yeah. They'll just say, she slightly changed colour, and that means she's absolutely furious.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Well, I should say, not just he, but his followers and the main discoveries, once again, in both sagas are made by enslaved people. So one is called Tyrkir and the others are two sort of Scottish slaves called Haki and Hekia. And they basically find, so, well, before they get to Vinland, they find other lands.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
And then they come to this region, which they call Vinland because of the sort of the wild grapes there. The weather is fine. The winters are mild. There's salmon. There's all sorts of nice things. And they think, great, this works. And so they build some temporary houses there. How lovely, yeah. Yeah, and they call them Leifsboothier, which means kind of like Leifsbooths, Leifshouses.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
What, like raft with a pig? Well, for a start, they're propelled by sails as well as by oars. And that is very important because when you're in the middle of the North Atlantic, you might need the odd sail. And rather than your raft, you've got to try sort of clinker-built style. So you've got boards, you've got planks. And then you're overlapping them.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
So they make these very supple, beautiful boats with very shallow bottoms, which means if you want to go raiding, you can sail them into very shallow bays. And then if you want to go across the North Atlantic, you're going to need something a bit bigger. And those are boats that then you can fit your family and your followers, your livestock together.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
You can try pigs, but I'd go for goats and sheep. So these are two different types of... Yeah, there's multiple different types of boats, but it's still pretty cold.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Yeah, you're there with you and the furs are probably wet. I mean, there's also, you know, a lot of sun, too much sun and not enough wind, also not great. You can end up just stuck there in the middle.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Yeah, he's got siblings, half siblings, something. Yeah, we're not quite sure. But yeah, exactly. And they, even after Leif comes back to Greenland, then according to the sagas, seem to be making voyages out again to Vinland, as they call it. So there's one led by Leif's brother Thorvald, doesn't end well for him. Another by... Yeah, it's a lovely name, isn't it? Yeah, so Thorvaldr.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
And then he's got another one, Thorstein. Spain, I'm not into. No, but it's like Thorstone. Thorstone, yeah.
You're Dead to Me
Leif Erikson (Radio Edit)
Okay, we'll stick, yeah. And then there's ones led by what was his sister-in-law, Gudrida, with her new husband, Karlsefni. And then there's another one, either led by, or at least she is there, depending on the version, by his sister, half-sister, Freydis.