You're Dead to Me - Old Norse Literature (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

Greg Jenner is joined by historian Dr Janina Ramirez and comedian Kae Kurd in medieval Iceland to delve into the world of old Norse literature. It's full of elves, giants, trolls, gods, deadly mistletoe and eight-legged horse babies. Anything goes in a world created from the decapitated body of a giant where a squirrel runs communications! But what was the ultimate purpose of these stories? Who wrote them? And what do they teach us about Viking culture?Produced by Greg Jenner and Emma Nagouse

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Hello, Greg here. Just a reminder that our live special about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is next week. March 29th is when you'll get that one. So in the interim, here's a lovely reversion of a previous episode all about old Norse literature or Viking myths. We couldn't quite figure out what to call it, but basically it's good stuff. If you want the full-length one with the quiz and the rude bits, you know where to find it. It's all the way back in the BBC archive on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts. So enjoy this and come back next week for our Mozart Spectacular.

Thank you. Bye. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a Radio 4 history podcast for everyone, for people who don't like history, people who do like history and people who forgot to learn any at school. My name is Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster and today we're grabbing our mythological hammers and setting sail in Viking longboats for medieval Iceland to have an introductory rummage through old Norse myths and literature. And rowing with me are two very special guests. In History Corner she's a cultural historian, broadcaster and author. She's the director in the history of art

at the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. You'll definitely have seen some of her many BBC documentaries about art and medieval history on BBC4, including Secret Knowledge, The Art of the Vikings and The Viking Sagas. It's Dr Janina Ramirez. Hi, Janina, how are you?

Hi, Greg. Absolutely delighted to be talking Vikings with you today. And in Comedy Corner, he's a brilliant stand-up and writer. You may have seen his hilarious debut show on YouTube, Curd Your Enthusiasm, or you definitely would have seen him on Live at the Apollo, Jonathan Ross's Comedy Club, Richard Osman's House of Games, and more importantly, you'll remember him from the Babylonians episode of You're Dead to Me. It's Kay Curd. Hey, Kay. Welcome back.

Thank you. Thank you for having me back it's a pleasure okay last time out we heard that you enjoyed history at school but how are you with like viking history do you know your norse gods all i remember is going to norway and spending 14 quid on a tuna sandwich so like honestly it was just so expensive so yeah no i know absolutely nothing and have you seen any of the marvel movies have you seen thor ragnarok i've seen thor ragnarok that was've seen Thor, Ragnarok. That was quite funny, but that's about it. But I'm assuming Thor doesn't beat up Hulk in actual real life.

Well, you know, not always. There's a lost manuscript somewhere. So, what do you know? That leads us to the first part of the podcast. It's called the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you at home might know about today's subject. And I'm going to bet that you know quite a bit about Norse mythology, maybe through accident.

I mean, you're going to know the names Odin, Thor and Loki, although technically they're pronounced Odin, Thor and Loki. Maybe you read about them in Neil Gaiman's Norse mythology, or perhaps more likely you've stared at a shirtless Chris Hemsworth and gone, phew, yes please, in the Thor movies. But even if you're not into that, maybe you're just into the days of the week. Tuesday is named after Chew, Woden is Wednesday, Thunor, Thor, is Thursday, Friday, Freyja or Frigg.

What else is there to know about Norse mythology and Icelandic literature? Let's crack on, shall we? Dr Nina, when we talk about old Norse literature, we're kind of talking and Icelandic literature, let's crack on, shall we? Dr. Nina, when we talk about old Norse literature, we're kind of talking about Icelandic literature. So why Iceland and when in history are we talking? Well, I was just still reflecting on what Kay said about a £14 tuna sandwich, because there is this Scandinavian world that today has amazing healthcare and schools and very expensive sandwiches. But there's a unified Scandinavian world, if you like, that goes back more than a thousand years. But the

real high point of it is what we call the Viking Age. And technically, it begins in the 8th century with a recorded attack on a monastery in Lindisfarne in England. But these Viking people didn't pop out of nowhere. There's an ancient culture, ancient set of beliefs, ancient languages that come out of what today we call Sweden, Norway, and Iceland, which it's only had humans living in it for 1,100 odd years. So we know that the first people migrated over there from Norway in 870 AD. So it's a really young country. And immediately the first thing they start doing is writing this extraordinary literature. Was it Abba?

There are strands of Abba. So the Icelandic sagas, they come a little bit later on. Written down more in the 1200s. Well, when I was a history student, that's the period of like King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table. I thought you meant that's when you went to uni. Yeah, I went to university with King Arthur. That guy is a boozer. So in the 1200s is the time of chivalric literature in France and England and Germany and Wales. But in Iceland, they've got their own thing going on.

We call it the Eddas and the Sagas. What does that mean? The Eddas are dealing more with the mythological stories. So there's a prose Edda written by a guy called Snorri Sturluson, who's a very impressive person, that tells us these stories that we all get so excited about,

about Ragnarok, about Odin, about all the idea of the world tree and the world serpent. And then there's the sagas. Now, the sagas often take a back seat when people start to dip their toe into the world of the Vikings. But they are amazing. They're really gossipy.

They're really modern. It's a bit like episodes of Coronation Street or Ascenders playing out. They are more like the novels of the last hundred years or so. But they're really, really different stylistically to anything else from the medieval period. So we've got the prose edda and we've got the poetical Edda. These are two different texts. Prose written not as poetry, poetical Edda obviously is. Why do they exist as different things?

There's a sense in the prose Edda that Snorri is trying to create something more like the sagas in terms of family trees, relationships between the gods, the way the stories unfold in this narrative way. You can see time span moving on. Their poetry is, the nearest thing to it is rap music because it's all rhythmical and it's all alliterative. Do they have their own version of like deaf poetry jam or something? I'd love to.

I think they do. I mean, you hear about people being killed for not doing good enough poetry. That's how it should be. And Snorri's, one of the reasons he creates the prose edit is to try and explain some of the myths. It's kind of like the Cliff Notes or sort of Bluffer's Guide to understanding all these really complicated stories.

That text in some ways really helps us as historians, so it's quite handy. I love the idea of there being like some version of like, you know the comic book guy in The Simpsons? Yeah. Yeah, just going, worst saga ever. Like... LAUGHTER

Definitely the guy sort of complaining about plot holes going, oh, that never would have happened actually. Exactly. Snorri Sturluson, who is this great poet who writes one of our texts we're talking about, he's living in the 1200s. He's a law speaker, which is a really important job because he's in charge of knowing all the law and all the history.

He gets embroiled in politics. He's murdered by his sons-in-law, so it doesn't end up that well. But the thing I love most about him, he builds a hot tub in his garden. And that's one of the things we know about him. He built a David Lloyd in his back garden. I love this guy. We've got the prose edit and the poetical edit. And then we've got the sagas. And the sagas are more family stories about real people, actual kings, actual families. And there's loads of them. But I think you've chosen one that you want to talk about, which is the Laxdela saga.

It's amazing. It's telling the story really about the original settlers at Iceland, in Iceland, not the supermarket, the country. Tuna fish sandwich at Iceland is a lot cheaper than in Iceland, is it, presumably? So it starts off with the original settlers. Now, as I mentioned earlier, Iceland as a landmass wasn't occupied by humans. A couple of Irish monks managed to get over there, set up a tent, and I think survived for a short while. They didn't manage to reproduce, surprisingly. So it was only when people were being exiled out of Norway, they were finding new places to set up home. And in Laxdala, it starts with Un the Deep-Minded, which is the seriously coolest name for any woman in literature, Un the Deep-Minded. Seriously, coolest name for any woman in literature on the deep minded. She sets up a generation of families thriving around this fjord in Iceland.

But the real story kicks in about halfway through. And it's a love triangle between Guthrun, who is described as the most beautiful woman ever to have grown up in Iceland and no less clever than she was good looking. I'm using that. That's going to go on my business card. She's beautiful. These two best friends, well, they're foster brothers, are desperate to win her over. She's told by a wise man she'll have four husbands. She does end up having four husbands across her life. And the first one, she doesn't like him very much. So she

divorces him. And the way she divorces him is in Icelandic law, you could divorce a guy if he dressed up in ladies' clothes. So what she does is she takes his shirt and cuts a really low neckline. So when her husband goes out the next day with this low cut neckline, she's like, oh my God, he's dressing as a woman, divorce. So she's divorced by 15. And then she goes on and gets these other partners. Next husband dies drowning through witchcraft and then ultimately it ends up in this horrible clash between these two best friends, Kjotan and Botley, where Botley kills Kjotan. She was like the Kim Kardashian at that age, just getting married to anyone. And the Laxdale saga, what's interesting about it

is as well as featuring some pretty extraordinary women, we think it might have been composed by women. Yeah, it's difficult to know. Various studies have been done to look at word patterns that does it sound more like a woman talks than a man talks? I can't say that. Maybe you can say that. I'm not allowed to say that.

Did you see the way I just moved away from the microphone when that was said? What we can say is that we know from DNA analysis, the first set of people who seem to settle Iceland, the men seem to be your typical Viking men, warriors coming over, big Scandi guys. But the women seem to have come from Ireland and Hebrides and the British Isles. And there's a combining of storytelling techniques between those two cultures. The Celtic people have a really long tradition of telling amazing sort of fantasy stories and spinning yarns. It's usually the women doing the storytelling in that society.

Combine that with the heroic sagas of the Viking men and you've got this unique flowering of storytelling. Nina, in these stories, there are three time periods. There's the mythical past, the mythical present and the mythical future. Let's start with the past, the creation of the universe. What is it? Big Bang? Is it a god that's like, boom, seven days, no worries?

Or is it a bit more Viking-y, a bit more magical and mysterious? It's crazy, but there's so many of these world creation myths are raising you, imagining what comes out of nothing. And the way they imagine it is Odin is there. So there's this space, sort of a void. It's called Yungagap. In order to fill the space in the void, they kill this giant, the first being called Ymir. And then they pull his body apart and they make bits out of his body.

So Earth is made from his skin, the sea's made from his blood, the mountains from his bones. And there you go. There you have existence. It wouldn't make a good Craig David song though, would it? Seven Days is a classic. If you're just singing Space in the Void, it's not the same. So we have nine worlds, but only four of them I think are really important. And they are connected up by a huge world tree, which is an ash tree. It's called Idragzl. You have got the world of men, the human world, which is Mythgard.

You've got the underworld, Niflheim. These are all great furniture in Ikea, by the way. You've got Asgard, or Arsgard, which is the world of the gods. That's connected to the world of men by the Bifrost, or the Bifrost rainbow bridge with Idris Elba on it. He's Heimdall. Then you've got the world of the giants. At the bottom of the tree, there's a serpent. At the top of the tree, there's an eagle.

In the middle of the tree, do you want to guess what animal there is there kay a wolf the squirrel and the squirrel's job is to pass information between all the different worlds that's what you're putting on your coat of arms a squirrel yeah dear bro and then the bottom of the tree there are three norns who are magical women who feed the tree keep it alive and they represent the past the present the future you've got to imagine it in your head as this sort of huge tree with all these different branches, and there's a different world on each branch. And then we've got the gods, Nina. You've mentioned already there are two types. There's the Aesir and the Vanir. So what's going on there? The Vanir are the more earthy gods and goddesses. They're the fertility gods, and they're into magic and mysticism.

Whereas the Aesir, it's like a party on Mount Olympus. They have Odin who's married to Frigg, Thor among their children. It's more of a family tree going on there. But eventually there's one person who crosses between the two and becomes goddess of the Aesir and the Valiant

and that's Freya. It's a bit like boxing where they combine the two belts and they become the undisputed heavyweight champion. She goes from being amateur to pro. So we've got Asgard is the world of the gods, the Aesir are the main gods, Thor, the Odin, the Lorci. We've also got magical dwarves, magical elves, trolls and giants.

Nina, they're the big problem, aren't they? A giant problem, yep. Magic is pretty problematic. People do bad spells on one another. Everybody likes to talk about Thor, but Odin is the really interesting over-god, if you like, because he's a god of wisdom and poetry, which I think, again, going back to what we were saying

about the power of poetry, it was so important to them. They expressed themselves, they expressed their ideas through this poetry. But he also gives up one of his eyes to achieve ultimate wisdom. So he's a one-eyed god. I'll be honest with you, I'm not giving up an eye for all of that. He throws his eye down the magical well of Mimir in order to gain knowledge. He also stabs himself with his own spear, fasts for a week,

and he hangs himself from a tree for nine days. These are all his techniques for acquiring wisdom. I mean, Wikipedia is just there. He's married to Frick. And then there's also Thor, their kid, the god of thunder, god of war, and he's a bit thick, Thor. I think what's also interesting is how Taika Waititi and the Ragnarok film do his dumbness, because you'd think it's played up. You'd think, oh, come on, you wouldn't have a god that's really that dumb. But the story's about Thor.

He is seriously lacking in the brain department and he's constantly being outmaneuvered by Loki, god of mischief, who, while being really bad, is actually really funny and clever. Does he actually have a hammer or was that like a Marvel invention? It's quite a hard thing to say.

Even harder to spell, but Mjolnir is the hammer. Mjolnir, Mjolnir. Yeah, that's right. Sounds like the name of a senator back. Yeah, exactly. Man United have signed him from Brondby. I just want to talk quickly about Freyja or Freyja is the old Norse pronunciation. She is the goddess of sex, fertility, poetry and shamanic magic. What I love about her is she's got a chariot

do you want to guess what it's pulled by what animal k is it a rabbit no good guess it's cats she's got a chariot pulled by cats which i think is a terrible idea because cats they don't go in the same direction a team of cats they wouldn't do anything they'd go nowhere because cats just like after a while they're like well she seems to be going through hard times see you later and ends up like in some another flat one of my favorite stories actually is that thor's hammer is stolen because thor's so thick it gets stolen off him by a giant called thrym the giant blackmails them and says i will give you your hammer back if freya agrees to marry me. Good luck, mate. Okay, do you want to guess how they get out of this predicament? And I'll tell you that Loki, Thor and Freya are all involved in this plan. They lure him into Freya's house. Meanwhile,

Loki takes the hammer. It's a good plan. It's slightly different than the real plan, Nina. So they dress Thor, the macho god of thunder, up as Freya. And this wasn't obvious. Well, it wasn't obvious until at one point they sit down at the bridal feast and then Thor devours chickens and salmon whole and then

proceeds to drink ten vats of beer. This is like getting conor mcgregor to dress up like holly willoughby they get far enough in the plan that they are actually able to take me on their back and as soon as he gets me on there he just smashes through him to smithereens we haven't said much about him so far but loki in the four movies is definitely the most fun obviously because he's a trickster he's naughty but. But he's really, really, really naughty. He's also, that's not the only time he's had to save Freya from getting married to a giant. There's a giant who turns up and says, I can build you a wall around Asgard.

I can do it in record time. And if I do it in record time, I get to marry Freya. And the gods are like, sure, yeah, you'll never do it in record time. And then he turns up with his stallion, this huge, mighty horse that helps him build the wall really fast. And they're panicking because they're like, oh, we're going to have to marry Freya to this giant. He turns himself into a female horse and he seduces the stallion

and then gets pregnant and Loki becomes a mother to an eight-legged horse called Sleipnir that is then Odin's famous eight-legged horse called Sleipnir that is then Odin's famous eight-legged horse. So Loki is a mum. I just love the chaotic wonder of their world. Anything goes. Loki, as well as being a mum to an eight-legged horse, is also a dad to a normal human child with his wife called Sigyn, but he's also a dad to three monsters. Do you want to guess what the monsters are? And one of the monsters you've already actually name-checked and I shot you down, so one of them you were already right,

which is the wolf. Do you know what, bro? Since you said three monsters, all I can remember is that scene from Toy Story. One of us, one of us. Where Mr Potato Head becomes their dad. Given how ridiculous everything sounds, I'm going to say a poodle and a goldfish.

So the poodle, Kay, would be, I guess, the wolf. Goldfish, a little small. It's actually a huge serpent that curls all the way around the world and bites its own tail. And then the third, weirdly, is a sort of human, but a half-dead, half-living human. She's half blue, half pink-coloured,

and she is called Hell. And you can probably guess which kingdom she's given to run. She's given the underworld to look after. Those are the three monsters that are born from Loki and a giant. He has sex with a giant and gets her pregnant three times. And Ragnarok, or Ragnarok as I think it was called in Old Norse, is the end of the world, Nina. It's really intense.

When Ragnarok is going to kick off, there's all these different signs that start. So crows make sounds in each of the different kingdoms. And there's a blood red one down in hell that starts crowing. The wolf Garm that guards the gates of the underworld, rakes free of his chains. And it's all this sort of tension building up but ultimately it's a battle it's a cataclysmic battle and it's between the gods and essentially the giants but you get all sorts of other people joining in you get an army of the dead Loki leads them you have different creatures so the world serpent lets go of its tail. Thor fights the world serpent, both die. Fenrir manages to kill Odin.

So it's sort of wiping the slate clean of the ancient gods and goddesses. A really interesting moment because Christianity has now come to most of Scandinavia. And it is a sort of end of days, but it's also the end of that worldview, that end of that world religion. But it is really, really dark and really intense. And the descriptions of it are like nothing else you'll read. There's a real sense in the way it's written in the different versions as well of the sound and the effects of it, all that. There's flames and the world tree is shaking.

This is like a EastEnders Christmas special. Yes! Way too much going on at once. Ian Beale has been slaughtered by a giant wolf. Frank Butch has come back from the dead. Everyone basically kills everyone else. But there are a couple of gods left over and there is a reincarnation, isn't there, Nina? Yeah.

There's a revisiting of the wonderful baldur that golden boy and he's gonna start the world afresh so a lot of the gods die but there are these few that manage to make it through and create a better world afterwards but as well as the gods there are also other creatures that we haven't mentioned so just very quickly nina who are the valkyrie The Valkyrie actually are women who fly over the battlefield. So they're mentioned a lot in battle poetry because they are the ones that are supposed to select the heroes that have died in battle.

So the only way, hell, as in H-E-L, is almost the opposite of Christian hell. It's not flames and torture. It's very cold and it's very boring it's like an eternal winter so it's like iceland you basically carry on living your same cold life for eternity and anyone who doesn't do anything amazing as a hero ends up there so there's a real sense in which you kind of want to be a warrior and you would quite like to die on the battlefield because then you get a chance to go either to Valhalla, the Hall of Odin, or you get to go to Freya's Hall. And the Valkyries are the ones that sweep around in the battlefield and choose those

people, choose who's going to go to Freya and who's going to go to Odin. I love that. That's like when your flight gets cancelled, isn't it? And the airline gives you an option of two places you could go you could go barcelona in may or you could go to vienna in march which one do you choose so as well as the gods the kind of real hardcore weird myths and as well as the historical documents we've also got a third category which are the sort of fantasy, sort of legendary, but they're humans. So stories like Sigurd, who is the dragon slayer. And as well as Sigurd, there's also Brunnhilde, which brings us on to women in these stories. We're not sure if women were allowed to be warriors in Viking society, but they are allowed to be warriors in the stories they tell, aren't they?

We've mentioned Freyja and the fact that she takes warriors after life. We've mentioned the Valkyries and the fact that they play a role in the battlefield. But recently there's been discoveries made from archaeology that suggests that we could be looking at warrior women being a real thing. It used to be assumed if a skeleton came out of the ground and it was holding a weapon, but it was probably a man. And so there wasn't the DNA analysis being done. But now they're returning to skeletons, returning to bones and having another look and saying,

you know, maybe some of these people that were buried with weapons were in fact women. So it's exciting. It's an exciting time. Discoveries are being made all the time. So the sagas, Nina, are written in Old Icelandic. That's the language, which is pretty similar to modern Icelandic. The language hasn't changed in a thousand years, but they're written late. They're written in the 1200s, after the Viking Age. These people were Christians. They weren't pagans anymore.

How reliable are they as insights into actual Viking mindsets? Well, this is really coming back to the notion of writing and what writing does. Nowadays, we tend to use the word illiterate to suggest someone's a bit thick or ignorant. But actually, in societies that didn't use writing, people were using so much more of their brain to remember information. They had to remember who was married to whom, who owned what, and all their myths and all

their stories. So their capacity to remember, for me, makes them all the more intelligent. But when writing comes along, that is not a Viking thing. They are not using long- form writing to record information. It's Christianity that brings writing. So the only reason these things are written down at all is because they were written down by people who've been Christianized. And that instantly makes you think, whoever this person is, however objective they are, they're writing it as a Christian hundreds of years after the original stories were being recited. So there's going to be some things that don't quite fit. But there's something else going

on here, which is that Iceland were going through a period of such change and independence, but they became really traditional in the light of that. And so they cling on all the more in the 12th and 13th century to their old stories. So in a funny sort of way, I think they're trying really hard to preserve things as accurately as they possibly could at the time that's what for me makes the islamic stuff all the more exciting it was like their version of the guy going let's go back to the good old days that is the reality of it unfortunately because that's the other thing all of these stories because they were part of this oral tradition is it shared information that if they hadn't have actually written it down,

it could have all been lost. So it is amazing that somebody took the time to write them down. And they were popular. They didn't just write it down once. Some of them, like Laxdala Saga, survives in loads of manuscripts, which shows it was really popular. People wanted to read it and carry it on.

The Nuance Window! Well, that brings us on to the last segment of the pod. This is The Nuance Window! Well, that brings us on to the last segment of the pod. This is the Nuance Window. This is where Kay and I, well, we have a little horn of mead, maybe. I don't know. We're both non-drinkers. Is there non-alcoholic mead? Maybe there was. And we allow our expert, Dr Janina, to talk for two uninterrupted minutes

about anything she wants to talk about. And today we're going to talk about the misrepresentation of the Vikings. So without much further ado, Dr Nina Ramirez, some nuance window. Well, hopefully you've got the impression how much I love the Viking world that I've discovered through the literature, through the artefacts, the archaeology. But it is sadly misrepresented and has been for a long time. So the traditional idea of the bearded Viking warrior sailing out on the seas, attacking monks, we're learning constantly now about how that is not

a true representation of the Viking world. It was much more about trade, about travel and about encounter and the elements of the bloodthirsty aspects of the Vikings is just a small part of it. What's much more exciting is learning about how cultured, how civilized, how the women behaved, how their societies were structured. But what's also worrying is how so many of these misrepresentations have just become commonplace. If you're going to go to a party as a Viking, what are you going to go and buy? A horned helmet. And in fact, just that basic symbol of the Vikings

is wrong. There's never been a Viking horned helmet discovered. So why do we have it? We have it because just over 100 years ago, Wagner, the Ring Cycle was being put on. Again, this sort of reclaiming of the Viking identity for nationalists. And the helmets were smooth originally, but they couldn't be seen from the back of the theatre. If they put big horns on the top, they'd be more visible. And it's carried on as this really unfair identifying symbol of the Vikings. But what's even more worrying is how the reputation of the Vikings are now being assumed by the far right.

When we saw the attacks on Congress, we saw people with Viking-inspired tattoos claiming that they were part of this super race, this Aryan race. And if anything, this conversation you'll have been hearing today will tell you quite what a rich, diverse and multiracial place the Viking world was. They traveled everywhere. They got over to the edges of the Americas. They went all the way down into Constantinople. over to the edges of the Americas. They went all the way down into Constantinople. So I want to see an end to this nationalistic hijacking of a period of the past that I love.

All that's left for me now is to say a huge thank you to my guests. In History Corner, we've had the wonderful Dr Yanina Ramirez from the University of Oxford. Thank you, Nina. Thank you. It's been so much fun. And in Comedy Corner, we've had Kay Curd. Thank you very much. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we take another trip on the Rainbow Bifrost Bridge

to a different mythic past with two new heroes. But for now, I'm off to go and round up the neighbourhood cats and try and get them to pull my chariot. It's going to be an absolute nightmare. Thanks very much. Bye! I had just fought one guy and I got jumped by his friends. On a summer's night in Glasgow's city centre, two childhood friends become mortal enemies.

We risked a friendship for one match. I'm Matthew Side and from BBC Radio 4, this is Sideways. In the first episode of the new season, step into the ring to explore the cost of holding grudges sideways. Listen on BBC Sounds. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long.

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