387. The Vikings Invade Britain (Ep 5)

Hordes of tall bearded men in horned helmets arriving on the British shores and pillaging the coast. This is the Viking stereotype. Many of us were fed as children and we loved it. And we know that the helmets actually had no horns, but what else have we got wrong? In this episode of Empire, we are joined by our wonderful friend Elena Barraclough to discuss the arrival of the dragon ships. Who were the Vikings? What gold bling did they steal from the monasteries like Iona? And how Did they not only invade? But settled.

The British Isles. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me. William Durymple. I think this has become so much of our cultural consciousness. It's basically it's a cartoon stereotype, isn't it? Raiders coming from across the North Sea, hitting up the monasteries around the coastlines of the British Isles and Ireland. You know, and you've we've got it in our head. It's it's blokes with Beards and boats and battle axes. You know, it's it's very much every every child at primary school can paint that image. You have two two splendid boys who are at primary school at the moment with Viking haircuts, I seem to remember. Yeah, there there is a whole long plat thing going on right now because of the heat. Yeah, exactly. But even they know And this is important to say, you do not draw your Viking stereotype cartoons with horned helmets. Although having said that, my signature actually has exactly that in it. I get into trouble sometimes. Um children come up to me and say, nope, no helmets. But I mean what's interesting is that Norway though, um, you know, some of Scandinavia embraces that stereotype themselves. I mean we we are recording this just after

England's fabulous victory over Norway, by the way. And the number of Norwegian fans with horned helmets on. Uh it it it's sitting in the stands was extraordinary. I am absolutely living for these Norwegian fans, even though Norway's technically out of the World Cup, as far as I'm concerned, they've won. And we've got these images of yeah even down to little Toddlers up to all the all the fans in the stands doing their roo roo and they're rowing their boats. But there's one fan in the in one of the games who was refusing to row. He was just sitting there with his arms folded and someone asked him why. And he explained, because they didn't row, they had square sails. They were sailing Oh But you know they did have

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (45 minutes, 8,301 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.