Eleanor Barraclough

They ended up traveling these thousands and thousands of miles across the North Atlantic, heading west, settling in Greenland, reaching the edge of the North American continent.

They end up all the way in the Arctic.

They go east.

They go down the waterways of the Eurasian steppes, all the way to Byzantium, even to Baghdad.

So we've got a huge span in terms of the geography.

We've also got a huge span in terms of the different sorts of people who are living in this world.

So, for example, if you're a trader or a craftsperson in Denmark...

Your experience of life is going to be much more multicultural, but much less centered compared to, say, if you live in an agriculturally prosperous valley somewhere in the lowlands of Norway or Sweden, where generations of your family have farmed.

So we already have to start breaking down this idea that it's just one thing and that we can know what it would be like to live at one time in the Viking Age.

It's much more complex than that.

The word Viking is really interesting.

It does come, at least in one form, from Old Norse and is contemporary with the Viking Age itself.

So there's a version of the word Viking, which is vikingr, which is essentially a raider or a pirate.

There's also a very related form of that word, which is essentially to go on a Viking, to go on a raid.

It's also been suggested that there might be something of a gender imbalance.

So essentially there are fewer women for the men to marry and settle down with and kind of build up a farmstead and raise a family.

It's full of importance.

It's full of, you know, the whole drama of the natural world sort of rises up in concert with these raids.

You know, here there were dreadful sheets of lightning and dragons were seen flying through the air and there was terrible famine.