Vikings, Ragnar, Berserkers, Valhalla & the Warriors of the Viking Age | Lex Fridman Podcast #495

The Viking longships could average 70 to 120 miles a day. They could hit a place, raid it, drag off whoever they wanted, and get away before you could get your army there. That's absolutely terrifying.

What do you think it felt like for Alcuin and the monks to see the Viking ships on the horizon?

Honestly, I think it's the end of the world, and I don't think they were wrong to think that. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that the night before Lindisfarne, the monks saw sheets of lightning in the sky in the shape of dragons, and this obviously meant to foreshadow the dragon ships coming up.

But if you were brave, then you got taken to the House of the Dead, which was Valhalla. Every day you would fight, and whatever wounds you got would be magically healed that night. Then the next morning, you'd get up and do it again, so you're essentially practicing for Ragnarök, the final battle.

There's this poem by Tennyson, “Ulysses,” my favorite poem. I think it captures the Viking spirit. The last line of it is, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” I think that's very much like the Viking: “My purpose holds, to sail beyond the baths of all the Western stars until I die.” We may die, but I'm going to do this. I'm not going to yield.

The following is a conversation with Lars Brownworth, a historian and author of many excellent history books, including The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings and The Normans: From Raiders to Kings. He's also the host of two history podcast series. The first called 12 Byzantine Rulers: The History of the Byzantine Empire is one of the first, if not the first ever, history podcasts launched over 20 years ago in June, 2005. His second series, Norman Centuries, explores the remarkable rise of the Normans from Viking raiders to the rulers of kingdoms stretching from England to Sicily. In this conversation, we focus primarily on the Vikings, the seafaring Norse warriors and explorers who, over a period of just 300 years, reshaped the medieval world and the trajectory of Western civilization as we know it. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Lars Brownworth.

Your writing and podcasts take us from the Vikings to the Normans, to the Crusades, to the collapse of the East Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire. There's a thread that connects the Vikings through all of it, so let's start at the beginning. Let's start with the Vikings.

The age of the Vikings was intense and violent, as you write about, often dated from 793 AD to 1066 AD. It lasted less than 3 centuries. The start is often dated to June 8, 793. What happened on June 8, 793?

In June of 793, a group of Vikings, probably originating from Norway, arrived at the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, which was a monastic community. They essentially slaughtered everyone, burned a couple of buildings, grabbed everything that had any value, and left. That was the first Viking raid that came in force, and I do think Lindisfarne is a good beginning date because the terror that it brought really signified what was to come for the next 2 to 3 centuries.

So word of it spread. There are a bunch of accounts, like the one by the monk Alcuin, who wrote about this event in a letter to King Æthelred of Northumbria:

“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.”

What made this race so psychologically devastating to this monk, to the many other monks on the island, and then to all of Britain?

That's a great quote. Alcuin was not just a regular scholar; he was Charlemagne's favorite scholar, and he's largely responsible, as much as one person can be, for the Carolingian Renaissance that had done so much to elevate the early medieval world. In fact, the spaces and punctuation we have, including spaces between words, are likely a result of Alcuin's work.

He was an extremely literate man, and you can hear the terror creeping into that. Part of that has to do with monastic communities, the Church, and what they thought a monastic community was. The Church was viewed as a sacred place. Everyone in Europe—in quotes—was nominally Christian, and the Church was an area of safety. It was a literal ark from the troubles of the world that you could flee to.

I believe there were even rules in England, for example, that if you had killed someone, you could flee to a church, and the civil authorities were not allowed to enter for up to 40 days. You could have sanctuary there. To violate this would have been the worst possible offense you could have given, which is why Thomas Becket's murder is so horrible in England.

The monks had dedicated themselves to a life of studying the Bible, copying scriptures, prayer, and removing themselves literally from the temptations of the world. They would seek monasteries that were remote, and the most remote locations you could find were islands in the North Atlantic because it's so difficult to get there.

The ocean was considered a place of safety. Not sailing on the ocean, but these islands were literal havens of peace and security and closeness to God. The fact that the Vikings hit this place, of all places you could hit, was the worst, most terrifying kind of offense against medieval sensibilities.

So there's a kind of line that you understand you don't cross. Everybody agrees. It's the kind of thing that there's a social contract that most societies, most civilizations, sign. There's a line that we don't cross. Let the scholars do their scholarly work. That's one line.

The other line is, from a military and mobility perspective, you just assume the sea is not a place from which a threat could come, especially from the north. Your conception of the world is shattered by the brutality that can come, the fact that the sea can bring a threat, and the fact that you don't give a damn about any of the lines that we, as a society, as a Christian society, have established.

That's exactly right. Even Alcuin, I think, writes a little later on that the dead were left as dung in the streets. He's describing dead monks as literal dung in the streets. Who would do this to men of God? Inhuman monsters.

So who were they, the Vikings, coming from the north? How did they think of the violence that they were doing?

That's a very good question because it brings up a central problem of looking at the Vikings, which is that the story is almost always told from somebody else's perspective, largely from the pens of those they're attacking. They're not going to come across well. They're often portrayed as demonic and inhuman.

The Vikings themselves, though, as much as we can piece together from archaeology and from the stories they wrote later—but that was another problem—used the written alphabet, the runes, mostly for spells, naming your sword, cursing someone, and things like that. It wasn't really useful for writing long poetry or literature. The only Norse literature we have comes at the end of the age, when they had adopted the Latin alphabet. So you can almost never see the Vikings in their own words as they saw themselves.

But we can piece certain things together. Most importantly, being a Viking was not their day job. They were mostly merchants and farmers—mostly farmers—who lived in little bays called víks in Old Norse, which is probably where we get the word “Viking” from.

One other note about how hard it is to tease apart what's happening here is that the English, Frankish, and Irish writers all call them Danes, no matter where they came from. They didn't stop to ask, “Excuse me, are you from Norway?” They're all called Danes, or pagans, heathens, or Northmen. This is not very helpful in figuring out where they came from.

The language was interchangeable. Old Norse was spoken in all 3 of those Scandinavian countries. Living in the north, so far up near the Arctic Circle, was at the very limit of where the technology of the time could allow humans to survive. That kind of harsh climate bred, I think, very hard people. Mercy was not a quality they seemed to favor or value.

There's a very famous story of a Swedish Viking putting a sword in the crib of his newborn son and saying, “May you have nothing in this life but what you can gain with this.” I can't imagine doing that to any of my children—putting a gun in the crib—or I'd be carted away. But I think that underscores the kind of violent life that you could expect as a Viking. Strength was valued more than anything else.

So the understanding of the world is harsh, and strength is the way you must face that world. When you have those people, especially the ones who self-select to get on a boat and face the ocean with all its uncertainty, that results in the kind of brutality that we got to see.

I think so. The way they would build their ships, they were clinker-built, with planks overlapping. They were undecked as well, and they would have tents. Can you imagine crossing the North Atlantic with these huge waves splashing over, with an inch of oak between you and the ocean? The amount of bravery that must have taken to undertake is astounding.

They didn't have a compass. They navigated by asking, “Where's the sun? Where are the stars? Are there birds in the sky? Do I see a different color of water? Do I see leaves floating?” It's terrible.

If you're traveling 2,000 miles, that's not great. So it's kind of an intrepidness to them that I think is part of the reason why they're so fascinating to us in our sanitized, more or less sanitized world. There's this incredible courage to do this, and some horror at what they did on the other end when they arrived.

We'll talk a little bit more about their religion, but they do not view the Christian God in particularly flattering terms. I mean, to them, he's a weak God who won't protect his adherents, and they can just come in and plunder as they please. One Viking famously says, "On land, I'm a Christian. When I'm on the sea, I worship Thor." It was very much the kind of pragmatic take that the Vikings had.

I think so. Yeah. Their gods are horrifying. They're polytheistic, and there was no universally accepted head god. I think Marvel has also led people astray in this.

Yeah. There are gods, and they have many, but Odin and Thor are pretty hardcore gods. So everything, their whole philosophy on life, is pretty hardcore. They're probably some of the toughest humans to have ever lived.

But we'll talk more about religion. Since you mentioned the boats, what do we understand about the technology that they were using? Can you speak a little bit more to this 1 inch of oak idea? These were longships that were also able to travel on rivers, so what do we know structurally about the boats that allowed them to be so flexible in terms of where they could travel?

Yeah. This was the Vikings' great secret, and I think it's underappreciated. They built different types of ships, obviously for different purposes, but the thing that blows my mind is that they built these ships that could cross an ocean, cross the Atlantic Ocean, and at the same time have a draft of less than 2 feet, so they could sail up rivers that were 2 feet deep. If they came to an obstacle or something, 20 men could pick up the ship and portage it around. They were incredibly portable, and their speed—the speed was the most frightening thing about the Vikings.

These are the same kind of ships that they sailed the ocean on?

Yeah. It's insane.

So they're sufficiently robust to handle the ocean and sufficiently mobile to travel on rivers and do so really fast. You mentioned speed. That seems to be, from a military perspective, the great advantage of the Vikings, because they could move much faster than the land armies. Not just the element of surprise, which they often had, but the element of speed was the thing that gave them such an extreme advantage against the British armies.

That was the big one. An English army, if it had access to a good Roman road that was well maintained—which, frankly, there weren't tons of—but they could average something like 10 to 15 miles per day on a good day, if they didn't have a large baggage train to slow them down. If you had a cavalry unit that didn't have to travel with the army, they could average about 20 miles a day. The Viking longships could average 70 to 120 miles a day.

So they're just moving in super-fast motion. They could hit a place, raid it, drag off whoever they wanted, and get away before you could get your army there. That's absolutely terrifying.

What do you think it felt like for Alcuin and the monks to see the Viking ships on the horizon? Do you ever think about trying to put yourself in the mind of those people and imagining it? In that time, you don't have a full map of the world, right? The oceans aren't mapped, and you have a hazy conception of the world. Out of the darkness of the ocean, where you thought nothing could come, comes this terrifying, brutal force. What do you think that felt like?

Honestly, I think it's the end of the world, and I don't think they were wrong to think that. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that the night before Lindisfarne, the monks saw sheets of lightning in the sky in the shape of dragons. This was obviously meant to foreshadow the dragon ships coming up.

I can't imagine the horror. I'm sure it would shake my faith to have these giant men jumping out of their ships with swords raised. And you're thinking, what do you have? Your cross?

Were the Vikings aware of the fear that they had caused? Did they use fear as a kind of weapon, or was this just a side consequence of their actions? Did they understand and use it, like the Mongols? Genghis Khan and the Mongols used fear and terror on purpose to increase the chance that they wouldn't have to fight, basically.

Yeah, the Vikings absolutely used terror. It was a main weapon in their arsenal. They would attack specifically on high holy days like Easter and Christmas because they knew there would be higher-value targets there, with richer clothing and richer offerings. There would be a lot of money available.

They were rather sophisticated, which I think is something they don't get much credit for. It's as if they were just dumb brutes attacking and destroying, but it was very sophisticated. Being a Viking wasn't their day job. They would be traders in, say, an English port, looking around. They'd get everyone's schedule, then sail away and come back as Vikings, and they knew exactly where to go.

They knew where all the money was held. They knew where all the churches were and when to attack. They knew the entire Christian calendar. They knew when someone's baptism was, when someone's confirmation was. They were aware of all of this, and they would definitely attack to increase terror.

One of the signs of the intelligence of the Vikings is that the Viking Age is so short. These explorers and rough men who conducted the raids very quickly became good at conquering and then started state-building, or conquering and then establishing trade routes, and stopped being the so-called "Vikings."

Basically, they just conquer, and then they start doing the usual thing: build the institutions, start a state, and now they're a normal kind of nation, civilization kind of thing. So this force of conquering, raiding, violence, and intense exploration is a short-lasting thing—a couple of generations at most.

Yeah, that's right. The Vikings were ultimately a pragmatic people who, if something worked, would keep it, which is frustrating because they disappear so quickly because of that.

With very little trace in the records.

Neil Price

With very little trace. That's right.

With very little writing.

Neil Price

That's right.

No time for writing it down.

Neil Price

No. Yes. Not doing that.

Why were monasteries such good targets for these early raids?

This is where I imagine myself as a Viking, perhaps one of my ancestors, sailing in. They must have thought they had won the lottery. You got these rich buildings, rich gold everywhere, decorated books, and jewels, all guarded by old men who don't know how to fight. You just take it.

We should make clear that the monasteries were used almost like storage for gold.

Yeah. This goes all the way back to the Roman Empire. Think of, for example, Emperor Augustus. When he was writing his will, he put it in the Temple of the Vestal Virgins, as did Mark Antony and Cleopatra. They'd all done that because there's this additional protection of religion and this taboo against violating it.

The same thing happened when Europe was Christianized. Rich people's faith had to be an active faith. They couldn't just say their prayers and go to church on Sunday. They would have to do something to publicly show that they were worthy of forgiveness, or whatever, and so they would donate huge sums to the church.

By the time of the French Revolution, which is obviously way in the future, the Church was the largest single landowner in France. The monasteries—these monasteries filled with monks who had taken vows of poverty—were some of the richest places in Europe. It's kind of a strange dichotomy.

We should also say that the Vikings were pragmatic people, so a lot of them would eventually convert to Christianity.

That's right.

So you integrate yourself into the system.

That's right.

In some sense, religion creates this backbone of a society that stabilizes it, and then you create a bunch of rules about behavior, how you're supposed to behave. One of the rules is that you don't mess with the church buildings and religious institutions.

Neil Price

That's right.

Therefore, they become great storage places for gold.

That's right.

And then the Vikings here just test the system. I mean, it's the fortune of geography for them, and the fortune of their way of life, to be able to raid, to become extremely rich. This spreads the terror across England and the message across Scandinavia that there's a lot of riches to be had. That's why there's an explosion of raids.

That's right. I don't think it's a coincidence that it happens when it does. You have two main theories about why the Viking Age starts. Will Durant puts the first one, I think, the best. He says, "The fertility of the Viking women outstripped the fertility of the Viking land." It's basically overpopulation, and then they're searching for food.

The second is this technological breakthrough with the keel, and maybe pressure put on Charlemagne's consolidation, and worries like that. I don't see why both can't be true. I also think Europe—Charlemagne puts together this vast empire that fairly approximates the Western Roman Empire.

If you squint, it looks like the Western Roman Empire. He's calling himself the new Roman emperor. This will eventually mutate into the Holy Roman Empire. But it's very much this idea that it's back: the Roman Empire is back.

He's crowned on Christmas Day in the year 800, and the empire is back. Unfortunately, it was sprawling. It hadn't been thought through. The communication was terrible. You just couldn't do it. And so it was wealthy and weak, and that kind of attracts predators.

By the time the Vikings crash into it, you also have the added bonus for them of really feckless rulers.

And we should say, going to Perplexity here, that Charlemagne, also known as Charles the Great, is the Frankish king who became emperor in 800 and ruled much of Western and Central Europe in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. There's a theory that the Viking Age was also a reaction to the South expanding north, as you're talking about.

You tell the story of Charlemagne weeping because he foresaw the evil his descendants would suffer. Did the Franks accidentally wake the sleeping giant by crushing the Saxons and removing the buffer zone between them and the Vikings?

Neil Price

I'm sure that had something to do with it. But as power was consolidated throughout specifically Central Europe, it did put a little pressure on the areas of Denmark. Norway and Denmark contribute most of the early Vikings that hit the Franks.

The Frankish Empire is the wealthiest state in Europe. It's poured money into religious houses for the reasons you outlined. It's all sitting there, easy pickings for people who've just developed the keel.

And so the word of the raids sent terror through England and through Europe. How much of the raids were reconnaissance, how much was it just raids, and how much was it preparing for greater scale?

Neil Price

That's a really good question. I think a lot of the early raids are probing raids, to see what's there. Definitely when Ragnar Lothbrok, for example, sacks Paris in 845, that results in waves of Viking attacks throughout the 860s, trying to copy that. He actually is the template which everyone wants to follow.

And so that provokes large-scale invasions. They hit England, they switch off. When France is pretty much exhausted, they switch over to England, and then when England is pretty much conquered, they switch back to France.

I think a lot of these are just probing raids at first, but they're proof of concept, and then they come in force. For example, there was one king in England. His name was Æthelred the Unready, which is a pretty funny pun on his name. But he paid, in one year, 7.5 million silver pennies to the Vikings to get them to go away, which is a bit like someone's mugging you, so you pay them more money so they'll go away.

That's not going to work, is it?

Neil Price

It's not going to work, but it will bring more muggers. So he paid the equivalent of 50 adult elephants, 48,000 pounds of silver, to get the muggers to go away. And it's unsurprising that throughout the course of his reign, he paid something like 20 tons of gold and silver, which he had to tax his people for.

The Vikings are not the kind of people that you would make go away, right?

Neil Price

Nope. That's not going to happen.

Yeah, they would just come back in force.

Neil Price

Yeah, they trust silver to do the work of swords.

You mentioned Ragnar Lothbrok. Who was Ragnar Lothbrok? Did he actually exist? Some people believe he's a composite from several real ninth-century Viking leaders versus an actual singular human.

I'm a romantic. I would like to believe he existed. I think probably he's a compilation of a lot of different people. There probably is a seed of truth there. There probably was someone named Ragnar.

The last name's a little suspicious. Lothbrok means hairy breeches. He supposedly had magic pants that would prevent him from being poisoned by dragons or snakes. That's maybe a clue that we're dealing with myth here.

But he is really the template for Vikings. If you want to figure out what the Vikings wanted, who's their success story, it's Ragnar Lothbrok. He's born in Norway or Denmark—countries argue over that. Maybe Sweden. Some sagas say he's in Uppsala.

Anyway, he is penniless, and when he is in his late teens or early 20s, he decides to invade and sail up the Seine. There is a well-known city on the Seine, and he raids it. Supposedly, he takes the hinge of one of the gates from Paris to prove that he's been there.

The Frankish king—I love the Frankish kings because their citizens give them names based on how much they hate them. So you have Charles the Great, right? Charles the Great, Charlemagne. He's followed by Louis the Pious. That's probably the best one.

And Louis the Pious is followed by Charles the Fat, who's followed by Charles the Bald, who's followed by Charles the Simple or Stupid.

Nice. So you can trust the names—

Neil Price

You can trust—

—to give you the TL;DR of how good of a ruler they were.

Neil Price

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

So Charles the Great, widely acknowledged as one of the great leaders of the Frankish Empire, also known as Charlemagne. What else do we know about him?

Going to Perplexity: “Ragnar is portrayed as a Scandinavian warlord, often called a Danish or Swedish king,” like you mentioned. He was active in the ninth century during the height of the Viking raids. There are descriptions of the raids and the exploits.

“Medieval traditions link Ragnar to famous raids on the Frankish realms, especially the attack on Paris in 845, where he reputedly sails up the Seine and extorts a huge ransom from King Charles the Bald.” He's also associated with repeated attacks on Anglo-Saxon England, embodying the archetypal Viking chieftain: charismatic, brutal, and focused on wealth, fame, and honor in battle.

So those are the ideals of the Vikings: charisma, brutality, and focusing on wealth, fame, and honor, especially honor in battle.

Then also, what does he do with it, right? What does he do with it? He gets about 7,000 pounds of silver from Charles the Bald, which essentially destroys Charles the Bald's kingship.

But he goes back home to Denmark, and the Danish king doesn't want him around because he's too powerful and too rich. He's a ring-giver. Think Beowulf here, right? He's got this large personal army that wants to join him. They'll follow him, and he is a threat, and so he's encouraged to go elsewhere.

He ends up raiding England for something like 15 years, and then there's probably the most famous bit of the story: he's shipwrecked, and King Ælla of Northumbria captures him and decides to kill him by throwing him into a pit with vipers.

They throw him in, and the snakes are biting him, but he's got his hairy breeches on, so it's not working. He's singing a hymn to Odin, and he gets pulled out and asked why he's not dying. He explains, rather foolishly, that he has these hairy breeches.

So they take the pants off and throw him back, and his last words are, “When the boar bleats, the piglets come,” by which he means, “I have sons.” He had 12 of them, and they will avenge me. And they do. They lead the Great Heathen Army to invade and eventually conquer England.

Ælla—fun fact, not so fun for him—was supposedly captured by the son of Ragnar. His name is Ivar the Boneless, which is somewhat terrifying of a name. And he is the first person that a blood eagle was performed on.

What's the blood eagle?

Neil Price

It's when they remove the lungs. While you're still alive, they cut you open and remove the lungs and put them on your back. Then when you try to breathe, they flutter like wings, so it's called the blood eagle.

That is horrible.

Neil Price

It's disgusting, yes. And this is what Ælla deserves, according to Björn Ironside and Ivar the Boneless, the sons of Ragnar. This is what they get.

Offense.

Neil Price

This is the piglets coming to their own boar, you know?

One last thing about Ragnar is that his wife is also an important part. He had something like 12 sons—the accounts differ—and probably three marriages. But his most famous wife was named Aslaug, and she fell in love with him.

He was on a ship, passing through, kind of a glamorous sea king, right? He's living the dream. She sees him and wants to be married to him, and he says no because he wants a clever wife. So he says, “If you can accomplish these 3 things, you can marry me. Tomorrow, I'll be here tonight, and then tomorrow I want you to come to my ship. I want you to have no clothes on but not be naked. I want you to have not eaten a meal but not have fasted. And I want you to come without a companion but not alone.”

And so she shows up with a dog. She doesn't have a companion, but she's not alone. She's taken a bite out of an onion, so she's eaten, but she hasn't fasted. She hasn't had a meal. And then she has very long hair, so she's using her hair to cover herself. She has no clothes—

Oh, she shows up naked, but she's—

Neil Price

—but clothed.

Right. Wow.

Neil Price

Yeah. So this is the cleverness that would be expected of a Viking woman. They're well matched. They're the ideal couple. And then they have 12 kids—12 sons. Not just 12 kids, 12 sons.

And many of them end up—

Neil Price

Many of them end up almost as famous as their father.

Ivar the Boneless, Björn Ironside, and many others. These sons later appear as leaders of major Viking forces in England, particularly the so-called Great Heathen Army that invades in 865.

And they are historical. I mean, there's no question these were the names of Vikings who attacked and conquered England. They end up attacking Islamic Spain.

They go all over Europe.

Well, for them, it sounds like glory in battle is really important.

That’s right, yeah.

And so it’s not even—it’s just part of the culture. It’s part of the honor culture.

Neil Price

That’s right. Men die, but names live forever.

As a small aside, since Ragnar is the star of the Vikings TV series, I don’t know if you’ve gotten a chance to watch any of it. Is there any accuracy to it?

I think it’s well done. My one quibble is that Ragnar’s brother is Rollo in the show, right? They weren’t brothers. In fact, by some accounts, they were born 80 years apart. But as a storytelling device, I applaud that.

Yeah, they basically take all the main Vikings and put them all together, just so it’s a—

Neil Price

I mean, I get it. I get it; it’s confusing. Honestly, in writing a book about it, the hardest part was coming up with an organizational scheme. What’s the overarching thing that links them together?

Well, there’s certainly an overarching thing, but we don’t have information about it. The problem is, we get to see just slivers of the information from the raids. There might be this rich history that we know nothing about. Where did this warrior culture come from? What was the evolution of these ideas of honor and battle? Maybe it’s overly romantic, but you can imagine the ideals of battle from the Roman Empire, from the Roman Republic and the early imperial period, coming up north to Scandinavia. We just know very little traces about that.

Neil Price

Yeah. Even the name Scandinavia is from a Roman author. They thought it was an island. They thought Scandinavia was an island with one tribe, the Scandia tribe, but close enough.

Who was in the Great Heathen Army that invaded England in 865? What can we say about that?

There’s this famous scene in the Viking siege of Paris in 845, which is really the Europeans’ introduction—or Europe as a whole’s introduction—to a Viking army, not just a raid and what it could do. The king, the emperor Charles, said, “Let’s find out what they want and how much I have to pay to get them to leave.” His ambassador went to a Viking and said, “Who is your king?” The Viking looked at him, didn’t understand, and said, “We have no king. We are all kings.”

They’re very decentralized and tough. They only valued leaders who could prove that they had won—who could give out the rings.

So, a flat organization, very meritocratic.

Yes.

If you’re good at what you do, you demonstrate that skill in battle. That means you get to have maybe a leadership position.

That’s right.

And the moment you’re no longer effective, you don’t get to have this leadership position. We’re all kings. That’s gangster. Throughout history, the Mongols—Genghis Khan was famous for this meritocracy. That’s one of the components of an extremely effective military force: meritocracy is prized. The same is true for who gets to rule. How do you determine the succession? If you’re just giving it to your oldest son, that’s going to be a problem.

Yeah, I could not agree more. There are some problems with meritocracy in civil war. The only way you can find out, like Alexander the Great, right, is by asking, “Who does your empire belong to?” To the strongest. That kind of guarantees the civil war.

At least with giving it to your older son, there’s an element of stability there, although you may end up with a Caligula. More likely than not, you’re going to end up with a Caligula, I would say, human nature being what it is.

Yeah, it always converges to the asshole, and the asshole holds power—a crazy asshole. So, yeah, the Great Heathen Army, 865.

The Great Heathen Army consisted of war bands. Each followed this guy or that guy: “I’m going to sit you down in this room. I’m going to tell you my plan. You’re going to listen or you’re going to push back. I’m going to push back, and we’ll just have this kind of creative discussion and come up with a plan we all agree on.”

So it used to be relatively small Viking groups that were doing raids, and then the Great Heathen Army is this large coalition of Viking groups—

That’s right.

—without a real leader that was able to somehow stabilize enough to have something like governance. Basically, there seems to be a very rapid evolution of Viking culture in every part of the world they touch.

That’s right.

You go explore, raid, conquer, establish states and trade routes, always maintaining a grand ambition, but no longer doing the violence, and always being sufficiently programmatic and flexible that you can accept a conversion to Christianity, for example, if it’s useful.

That’s right.

And then they accept the culture and accept the language. So that’s why they integrate, and the thing that we think of as Viking-ness kind of dissipates and disappears pretty quickly.

Yeah, and I think the best example of this is France. The Vikings—which we’ll talk about more, probably with Rollo—settle in France, in the Northmen’s duchy, which is shortened to Normandy. Within a generation, I mean, Rollo, whose real name is Hrolf, names his son William. That’s not a Viking name.

Within a generation, the language is gone. The Viking names are gone. The worship of Odin is, as far as we can tell, gone. The Normans are building churches and marrying into the local aristocracy. Essentially, their Viking-ness is gone except for one thing: their incredible vitality. The Normans essentially conquer kingdoms at both ends of Europe, Sicily and England, and found 2 of the most powerful states in medieval Europe.

Yeah, so the ambition is there.

It is.

The vitality is there, but—

The methods have changed.

Yeah, and they change rapidly, which is fascinating. You have a book and a podcast series on The Normans, so let’s talk about Rollo. Who was Rollo, the famous Viking war leader who became the first ruler of Normandy in northern France?

Well, first I should say, as someone of Norwegian descent, I’m going to fall down on the Norwegian side of the argument here, because Norway and Denmark almost came to blows over which was the birthplace of Rollo. But the consensus seems to be Norway.

Not just biased.

So he was—the only glimpse we get of Rollo as a young man is that he was very tall. He’s called Hrolf the Walker, Hrolf Ganger, because he was so tall he couldn’t ride the little Viking ponies. He had to walk everywhere.

Probably raised on stories of Ragnar and the other Viking lords, he goes out. He may have participated in some of the earlier raids, like the raids in the 860s that the Vikings did on Paris or along the Seine. Then he eventually ends up plundering what will become the Norman coast.

In 911, he makes a treaty—the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte—with the Frankish king, Charles the Simple, which doesn’t mean stupid. It’s more like straightforward; there’s no guile in how he talks. Charles makes a really interesting deal with Rollo: “Why don’t you settle here, integrate into the local aristocracy and defend the French coast against the Vikings?” I don’t know. It’s like putting a burglar in charge of your security or something, but it works.

Rollo, by the time he makes that deal, is probably in his mid-50s to mid-60s. It’s unclear when he was born, but the point is, he’s lived the Viking life. He has something like 20 or 30 tons of silver, if you add up all the sagas. They say that they gave him this many coins or whatever. He probably acquired the silver and then gave it out to whoever.

So, yeah, he’s done the full—

He’s done the thing. Yeah.

—and then the conquering and then—

And then the king says, “Can you settle here?” “Can I give you legitimacy?”

So he does the diplomacy of a treaty, then the good statecraft and state building, and then becomes, I mean, European. In 1 life, he goes through the full journey.

Yeah. And then his son, William Longsword, succeeded him.

He gets assassinated, but he does enlarge Normandy. Basically, every ruler after Rollo enlarges Normandy until it essentially becomes more powerful than the king—

By far. There’s a wonderful scene when Rollo signs the treaty. He becomes a liege lord of the French king, and there’s this great scene because Rollo has to bend down and kiss the foot of the king.

Rollo is probably a Norwegian Viking, probably 6 feet tall. Charles, this little Frank, is probably 5 feet 10 inches, so Rollo is towering over him. There are both armies watching, and there are a bunch of people who have come in from the countryside. They’ve heard something is going on.

An important part of this feudal ceremony is that you have to kiss your lord’s foot to be in a subservient role. Rollo says, “I’m not going to do that.” So he turns to one of his guards and says, “You kiss the foot.” The guard is probably taller than he is, so he bends down and picks the king’s foot up to his mouth—

That’s the way to do it.

—which sends Charles falling onto his back. I mean, I can’t think of a better example of the relationship between the Norman dukes and the French kings. It’s perfect. It’s perfect.

Oh God, I love the Vikings. As you’ve covered—and maybe you could speak to that a bit more—for a long time to come, the Normans have influence on Europe and beyond.

Yeah, it’s hard to overstate Normandy’s impact on Europe in the Middle Ages. Of course, they will go on to conquer England as well. But Rollo, when he signs the treaty, it’s an ambiguous treaty. He’s given a title which is rather ambiguous. He’s not a duke, and it’s not clear.

He's not an earl. He's not a duke. He's just subservient to the king, which means Normandy is not a duchy. It's not a principality. It's this ambiguous thing; no one really knows what it is.

And so Rollo, being a good Viking, and his descendants being good Vikings, despite becoming French, they just call themselves dukes. They essentially seize whatever power they want.

There's one Norman duke, I think he's the grandson of Rollo, who's kidnapped by the French king when he's 14. He escapes captivity and kidnaps the king. As a 14-year-old, these guys are crazy.

How far geographically and in time does the influence of the Normans and Normandy go? What should we understand about the impact of the Normans in history?

I'm a romantic, so when I read history, I usually end up rooting for the losers. I want Harold Godwinson to beat William the Conqueror. I want Hector to beat Achilles. It never works, no matter how many times I read it.

But I was always interested in the Normans because of the Norman conquest of England. I have a twin brother, and when we were taking a walk, he asked me, as I was reading about the Dark Ages at the time, the early Middle Ages, "How did Europe, this kind of backwards place, become the dominant force in the world?"

I started thinking about that, and my answer really is the Normans. The Normans—that's the great change between Europe as a backwards, inward-looking place and Europe as a confident, outward-looking place. That change happens under the Normans.

The Normans, it's not a coincidence that they lead the charge in the First Crusade. They create the state of England. If you look at England before the Vikings arrive, there are 7 kingdoms in England—the Heptarchy—and the Vikings destroyed all but 1. Only Wessex is preserved, and the Vikings have conquered about half of Wessex. There's a young king. What's he going to do? But that king is Alfred the Great, and he conquers the rest.

Then his grandson, Athelstan, is the first man called King of England, king of all Angles. They do the same thing almost wherever they go. They help create modern France by ripping apart Charlemagne's empire, which was unwieldy. It looked good on paper, but it was unwieldy. It was replaced by this leaner, meaner, compact thing.

They figure out how to deal with the Vikings by essentially building fortified bridges, making changes to their army, and so forth. I like to call it creative destruction. By destroying the things they destroyed, the Vikings cleared the ground for something stronger to grow.

That's brilliant. The creative destruction engine that created Europe was the Normans and the Vikings. You also have another book that talks about the Byzantine Empire, so you have the creative destruction that resulted in Europe, and Europe led to this Western, quote-unquote, civilization that we think of now.

The thing that protected Europe for centuries was the existence of the Byzantine Empire, the East Roman Empire, because of all the threats that came towards Europe. This strong, stable empire protected Europe from everything that came from the east. They were a buffer.

They were a buffer, giving Europe this vital time to develop the way it needed to develop.

So it's interesting to think that the world as we see it now was the result of a sequence of quite lucky geographical and leadership decisions in history. It really does pivot on a few points of geography and a few special leaders that conquer.

Yeah. Had Constantine chosen his side a little less wisely, the world would be very different.

Yeah, so Constantine is the guy who moved the capital of the empire from Rome to Constantinople. He thereby gave a lot more focus to the east, thereby protecting Europe from the gigantic threats that loomed in the east.

That's right.

That's right. And the Islamic invasions of the 7th century couldn't get past that choke point of Constantinople. They had to take the long way across Africa. By the time they get to Spain and conquer Spain and move into Europe, that's the Battle of Tours. Charles Martel is able to stop them, and they're massively overextended. I think it's a very different story if they can come in through the Black Sea.

And all the times the East Roman Empire almost died from all the invasions, all of those invaders would have just conquered the entirety of Europe.

Yeah, I don't think they would have met much resistance.

Rewinding back, what was the religion—the religious beliefs, the gods—that the Vikings believed in, which we've mentioned a little bit? Thor and Odin. How did they see this world and the universe?

The Viking gods have been sanitized, but they're quite terrifying. Their basic conception of the universe is an eternal struggle between chaos and order, which chaos will eventually win.

I think the best view of their cosmology is of concentric circles, with Útgarðr, or Utgard, as the outer realm. That's where the chaos is. That's where the frost giants are, along with all the monsters that seek to destroy. The gods represent order and stability, and the monsters represent chaos. It's an eternal war between the two of them.

There are different categories of gods depending on which circle you come from. The gods don't all like each other. Sometimes they engage in wars. Some of the most famous Norse gods, Loki and Freya, come from outside the Aesir, the main gods. So it was a fluid thing.

It's more a way to understand the world.

I think so, yeah. The thunder is Thor fighting the ice giants, and that's what that is.

Going to Perplexity: Vikings followed a polytheistic, ritual-heavy religion centered on a pantheon of gods and spirits, with no single holy book or unified church, and practices varied a lot by region and family.

The major gods were Odin, Thor, and Freya. Odin's domains were war, kingship, wisdom, and death. Thor's domains were protection, thunder, and fertility. Freya's domains were love, magic, and the battle dead.

Typical worshipers of Odin were chieftains, elite warriors, and poets. Typical worshipers of Thor were farmers and “ordinary people.” Typical worshipers of Freya were women, magic practitioners, and lovers.

Yeah, yeah. I've heard it. I think you can break it down by saying Odin was the elite. He's more aristocratic, right?

Yes.

He's the god of poetry; you need to read, et cetera. Only the elite would know how to do that. A farmer wouldn't really care about that, whereas Thor is a more earthy god. You want the waves to be less rough, you pray to Thor.

I find Odin the most disturbing. He's the god of madness and the god of poetry, which I guess are related. But in battle, the berserkers, probably the most famous type of Viking warriors, were considered to be Odin's chosen warriors. They would show no pain and just run at the enemy and attack with their nails and their teeth. Even if they had their arms hacked off, they would still keep going. They would attack other Vikings. They were berserk. That's where we get the word from.

What do we understand about the mindset that leads to that? It wasn't religious in nature. There's not this kind of ideology. It's just the way of life, and then the prized honor and intensity in battle.

One of Odin's names is the Raven Feeder. By creating corpses, which ravens feed on, you are doing the work of Odin.

The Viking view of the afterlife was unique. There weren't really punishments for doing bad things, unless you did something really bad. Then you ended up as basically an evil spirit haunting your grave.

But if you were brave, you got taken to the house of the dead, which was Valhalla, and you were resurrected. Every day you would fight, and whatever wounds you got would be magically healed that night. Then the next morning you'd get up and do it again. So you're essentially practicing for Ragnarok, the final battle, which you would lose. I'm not sure. It seems rather pessimistic.

The battle is what matters. It sounds like losing is not a thing; the battle itself is what matters, so Valhalla is a place where you fight a battle every day.

Every day.

Unlimited food—there's a boar or whatever.

Yeah, that's right.

There's unlimited wine.

Yep.

And you can die as much as you want—

As much as you want, yeah.

—and you'll be born again. This is the idea of the highest form. If there's such a thing as heaven in this kind of construction of the universe, this is heaven.

This is heaven, yeah.

This is the highest form. This is the highest place you can go to, Valhalla: you fight every day, eat as much as you want, drink as much as you want, die, and are reborn the next day. This is forever, preparing yourself for the final battle of Ragnarok.

Ragnarok.

This is the end of the world. This is the cataclysm.

Mm-hmm. That's right. Odin's going to die, and Thor will die. He'll get killed by one of Loki's children, the Midgard Serpent. Odin will be devoured by a wolf. The sun and moon, which are being chased by monsters, by giants, will be caught and swallowed by the giants, plunging the world into eternal darkness.

Essentially, all the gods will die, and darkness and chaos will then ensue. This account comes mostly from a guy named Snorri Sturluson, who was living right at the end of the Viking Age and writing this. He was, I believe, a Christian, so I think we're fusing things here.

So then there would be a new Earth and a new heaven and a new god who's all-powerful.

Yeah, if you think of religion as a kind of technology—a social technology that stabilizes or helps guide the evolution of a society—it's interesting to see what the Vikings came up with. Do you ever think, from the grand view of history, about how effective these different technologies of religion have been?

I'm thinking of the Viking rituals. Hospitality is very important in a northern climate where food is scarce and winters are long and harsh. If you don't share your hearth with someone knocking on your door, then someone else might not share it with you, and you could be facing death.

The idea was that Odin would travel incognito, knocking on people's doors, and he would remember whether you let him in or not. If you were hospitable, he would bless you, and if you were inhospitable, he would murder you. I think these rituals are obviously intended to answer the question, “How do we survive this winter?”

Yeah, how do we effectively spread the message that hospitality is a pretty good thing? That's characteristic of religion. If you do a good thing, you'll be rewarded. If you do a bad thing, you'll be punished. Different religions have different ways of communicating that.

I think religion also gives you a worldview. It gives you a morality, and these are core parts of society.

The beautiful thing about religion is that it interplays with human nature and guides humans. But then, of course, human nature and humans project themselves onto religion. Sometimes they use their religions to accomplish goals in a pragmatic sense, a political sense, a geopolitical sense, a military sense, or a social sense.

There's that dance of how religion invigorates and guides peoples, and then how peoples use religion to guide the direction of the world. That's certainly true of the history of Christianity, which has a big role to play in the history of Europe, the Byzantine Empire, and that part of the world. It was an incredibly effective religion. Once Constantine converted, it spread extremely quickly, relatively speaking, across a couple of centuries.

Just to linger on the Viking views of the world and the afterlife, we mentioned Valhalla. There's the Norns, which are the 3 spirits that represent the past, the present, and the future. They spin the fates of all men and gods at the roots of Yggdrasil.

Yeah. Yggdrasil.

Yggdrasil. So there's a notion of determinism and fate to the Viking life. There's Valhalla, Hel, and Niflheim. This was the destination for the vast majority of people. If you don't make it to Valhalla, this is where you go.

That's where you go.

Unless you're a really bad person, then there's some punishment for the truly wicked.

We should point out that Hel, spelled with 1 L, was a daughter of Loki—

—and was not the same as the—

Hel with 2 Ls.

Hel with the 2 Ls. Very different. It's more like a purgatory-type situation.

Yeah, so it's the house of the dead. It's like the house of the underworld.

A colorless twilight, not necessarily a place of punishment, but simply the inevitable end for most, unless you end up in Valhalla, which means you're a great warrior who died in battle.

It reminds me of the Greek view of the afterlife, where you essentially get amnesia and forget who you are unless someone makes a sacrifice and says your name. Only then will you remember it. Your destiny is ultimately just to become gray and fade away. So you might as well be brave. You might as well run at that spear.

That was the engine of the warrior culture that was core to their society.

I think probably. I have to ask about Vikings as explorers. They were truly one of the greatest exploring peoples in history. What can you say about what it is in their spirit that motivated them?

They sailed and reached North America 500 years before Columbus. They sailed, obviously, to England, Spain, Italy, Russia, North Africa, the Middle East, and Paris. I'm showing here a map of the ocean routes and the river systems that they connected to and sailed. What do you think drove them to explore the unknown?

This boggles my mind. This map just messes with me because they didn't have a compass. Can you imagine shoving off from some fjord in Norway, heading west? That's your only direction: west.

There was a Viking named Naddod. He's actually the first Norseman to reach Iceland, though it was a total accident. Here's the mind-blowing part: he decides to land and explore, and he gets off and sees 2 humans. They're monks from Ireland. They got there in a canoe, a skin boat.

You look at Ireland and look at Iceland, and that's even more impressive. They got in a canoe, a skin boat, and just went north because they were trying to get away from the world. They found Iceland, and in a very excellent move on their part, they ran away as soon as the Vikings arrived, which is pretty smart.

I don't know if you know about this video of the deranged penguin from a Werner Herzog documentary, where Werner Herzog is overdubbing and explaining the thinking of the penguin. The penguin leaves the tribe and just goes out into the mountains. I have to show you this video. This is my favorite video of all time.

There's this low-key documentary where they're talking about penguins, and then there's 1 penguin that leaves the tribe and just goes toward the mountains, and as Werner Herzog says, “Toward certain death.”

I'm out.

There's something about 1 human or a small group of humans who simply decide to go.

Just go, yeah.

And not look back. Are there sea monsters out there? Maybe. Is there any land? Are we going to fall off the edge of the Earth? Maybe.

Werner Herzog says, “There's certain death.” He doesn't romanticize it. He says the penguin is just deranged and crazy. But look, the penguin did look back briefly.

Right.

He did think about this. There are multiple ways to explore, but you just highlighted 2 ways. One is that you're this hardcore person who's looking to raid and just goes and goes, with the resilience and the will to keep going. And then there are the monks who just want to leave.

Escape, yeah. Yeah.

They just go toward the unknown. They want to leave far away so they could be closer to God, closer to themselves, and—

And away from sin. Yeah. You know, there's this poem by Tennyson, “Ulysses,” my favorite poem. I think it captures the Viking spirit. The last line of it is, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” I think that's very much like the Viking spirit: “My purpose holds, to sail beyond the baths of all the Western stars until I die.” You may die, but I'm going to do this, and I'm not going to yield.

That spirit is 1 of my favorite aspects of human beings.

I think that's why the Vikings remain so popular today. We name our satellites, our football teams, and our cruise ships after them. There's a romantic hook of a people who did not yield.

Yeah, they embodied the flame that burns in all of us, the quality we admire most about human beings: that unyielding focus on going out there, taking a leap into the unknown, into the scary, and never stopping.

That's right. It's not too late to seek a newer world.

I have to ask you about, speaking of a newer world, America. And Leif Ericson. But first, a quick bathroom break if it's okay. Quick 30-second thank you to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors. We got Larridin, for measuring AI adoption in your business, BetterHelp, for mental health, LMNT, for electrolytes, Fin, for customer service AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, and Perplexity, for curiosity-driven knowledge exploration. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, back to my conversation with Lars Brownworth.

All right, we're back. Let's talk about this incredible fact: Leif Erikson, a Viking explorer, was the first European to reach North America around the year 1000, 5 centuries before Columbus reached North America. Tell the story of his journey. What do we know about him?

Let's begin with his dad. His dad's name was Erik the Red, who was forced to flee Norway when he was probably 10 years old because his dad had killed some people. It's kind of hilarious. In the saga it says, “For a few killings...” Okay, I guess that's a thing.

He went to Iceland and got a farm there, but Iceland was already starting to become overpopulated. They had cut down all the trees. There were problems with deforestation and farms just blowing away, so the population was essentially beginning to crash in Iceland.

He got into a fight with his neighbor and ended up killing him, so he was exiled from Iceland. He was exiled from the place his father had been exiled from.

So it runs in the family, this whole outlaw thing.

What also apparently ran in the family was this courageous streak. He had heard that there had been people—

The Norwegian Vikings were aiming for England, and they hit the Hebrides, which are these treeless islands above Scotland. They found they were good for refueling because they could pick up water or whatever, and then continue on their way to Scotland to raid. A Viking had missed the Hebrides and discovered Iceland, and then another Viking had aimed for Iceland, missed, and hit Greenland.

A fun fact about Greenland: it is both north, south, east, and west of Iceland. So in any direction, you're going to hit Greenland.

It's hard to miss, which is not to take away anything from the extraordinary danger, the certain death, of going further west. But by this time, there was this idea that enough people had become famous by sailing west into the unknown and discovering things. I think there was a general idea that there was more out there to the west. He had talked to someone who had seen Greenland and reported that there was good land further west.

He hired that Viking's ship's crew. The deck was loaded, and he went to Greenland, where he was able to settle 2 different colonies. One was called the Western Settlement in the west, and one was called the Eastern Settlement in essentially the extreme south. That was essentially the edge of where Viking technology could be used.

A cool factoid is that the Vikings practiced husbandry and raised animals, and obviously this is not an option in Greenland, although they couldn't have known it at the time. But they brought plants with them, and then they were able to trade with the native Inuit for walrus blubber and things like that. They made a go of it.

But what's obvious to anyone who's seen Greenland is that there are no trees. It's almost impossible to survive by practicing husbandry. It is impossible to survive, as it turns out, just practicing husbandry. By this point, I think this extraordinary Viking pragmatism is beginning to be played out. One of the reasons the Greenland experiment ultimately fails in 300 years is that they fail to adapt. Clearly, they should focus more on fishing and other sources than just raising pigs and cows.

So we hit the limit of Viking adaptability, which they have demonstrated throughout the world, I'd say. Interesting.

Erik the Red makes his name by exploring, and once he discovers Greenland, he calls it green. He says there are so many salmon in the fjords that you can just scoop them out with your hands. You don't even have to fish.

Was this real?

It's a lie. That's not true at all.

So he's doing propaganda. Is this story true—that he called it green just so he could attract people?

It is. The greatest real estate scam in history.

Okay, genius. I mean, it has stuck to this day.

Yeah. It's the most misnamed place in the world. But in the Europe of the time, even in Iceland, the dream was to have land. Land equaled wealth in Europe. Here he says there's enough land for the taking, anyone who wants it, which is true. It's the largest island on Earth. It's unusable, but it should be called Iceland, Glacier Land, or something.

He took 500 men with him from Iceland. That's got to be a significant chunk of the population, but there were enough people who were land-hungry. There was no more room in Iceland. It was too restrictive. They were going to go further west.

He took 25 ships, and 14 made it, which is pretty good. Those 14 ships, with their 300 or so people, started the Western Settlement. Word got back to Norway, but Norway's 2,000-plus miles away. They're having to get resupplied.

In the first winter, all their cattle died. That's not a great start for people who practice husbandry. They've got to get resupplied from Norway, but the chances of making it to Norway and back are actually not that great if you're sailing without a compass. You're just hoping. But they do it.

The colonies survive until the 1400s, when they just go silent.

So let's talk about Erik the Red's son, Leif Erikson. How does the journey continue west?

Erik is getting a little older. The Greenland settlements are becoming filled up. Erik is happy where he is. He's been kicked out of enough places. He's made his home here, and this is where he wants to be.

They're running out of resources. There's no wood. There's limited food. So his son proposes going west because he's heard stories that there are other lands. Another Viking had gotten lost, aimed for Greenland and missed, and had seen something. He said he saw clouds and mountains and that there was land there. Then he had turned around.

Leif did the same thing. He hired the man's crew. He asked his dad to come, but his dad wouldn't. He went with his half-sister Freydis, who was a whole other story by herself, and a bunch of other colonists. They went and landed in a place he called Vinland because he found things that he could ferment.

Of course, the Vikings made wine, or a wine-like alcohol. Leif Erikson has landed. He doesn't know this, but he's landed on a new continent with essentially inexhaustible stores of food and timber and everything he needs. It's the perfect place.

Unfortunately for him, it's also inhabited by some natives, probably an Algonquian tribe. He calls them the Skraelings, which is just Norse for “screechers,” because he can't understand their language. They just yell at them and attack immediately.

They stay there for 3 years and then give up and go back home. Ultimately, they really don't tell anyone about it. They just keep it in their northern sagas.

Why do you think they left? Why do you think they didn't stick around longer?

I think there are a number of things working against them. Of course, I would like to believe there's an alternate history where the Vikings successfully make it down, maybe down to Maryland or something, and there's an alternate history of the US and Canada here. But I think there are a number of things working against them.

The first is that they stubbornly refused to give up husbandry, so they're trying to make this work. L'Anse aux Meadows, I think, is where they were, in Newfoundland. It doesn't work. The climate's too cold. The grasses aren't appropriate. It's just not going to work, and they do not adapt. That's number 1.

Number 2, they're 2,000-plus miles away from Norway and getting resupplied. Although they are extremely good sailors, explorers, and traders, I think this is a little too far. Thirdly is the native resistance. It's just too incessant. They are outnumbered, millions to 1. The Algonquian do not want them there. It's clear, and they're not going to stop attacking.

It's so fascinating because they really didn't understand the full scale of the land they'd encountered, right?

Had they known what they had found, maybe their intuition was that there was nothing but northern land, that it was void of resources, and that they couldn't do the whole husbandry thing. But you would think they could go down the coast.

If they could have gotten enough people from Norway or Iceland, a sizable enough colony, and built some kind of defenses to fight off the incessant attacks, then I think that's the difference there, because certainly the resources are all there.

Or just keep staying in the water, keep going down the coast, not necessarily camp out until you get further south. It is fascinating to think about that alternate history where they would have discovered America and settled there.

This is 500 years before Columbus. First of all, they could have done a lot of the things we think about the European nations doing, including brutality toward the natives. But there could have been a coexistence, too, and some of the diseases that came with them could have done the damage that they did 500 years later.

That would have stabilized the populations, so when the Europeans—the French, the Spanish, and so on—came, the natives would be more ready. Europe would then encounter a sizable population of Viking descendants and natives, so the two could hold onto the land and bring a different kind of civilization there.

Ultimately, Europe, with the European ways of Western civilization, expanded into North America, but there could have been this whole Scandinavian vibe that would have taken over.

Just a hair's breadth. My favorite museum in New York is called The Cloisters. It's part of the Met, and in The Cloisters, there's an ivory cross. The ivory cross has been richly carved with Christian scenes. It was carved in England, but it's made of walrus ivory, and they got it from the New World via Viking traders.

It represents the great arc of the northern trade. It's walrus ivory from the New World, via Norway, to England, to New York. It's a great symbol of that trade.

This whole period of thousands of years of exploration that we no longer can do—geographic exploration of the world—is fascinating. It takes true courage. It takes true wander.

The kind of exploration we could do now is more in the scientific realm and the realm of ideas, and then maybe, in terms of geography, out into space and exploring the universe.

Yeah, I think the closest analog is probably Mars. What would it take for you to be like, “All right, I'm going to leave and I'm going to go to Mars”? You're never coming back. There's nothing there, as far as you know. All the accoutrements of civilization are not there. That's the kind of courage you would have needed.

Yeah, but on top of that, with Greenland, with Iceland, with Finland, there's just so much uncertainty—literally, what's beyond this hill? With Mars, everything is mapped. So you understand the full harshness of the situation.

Of what you're going to face, yeah. So that's more akin to, all right, I'm running an ultramarathon. I understand the challenge. I think more akin would be traveling out into the Oort Cloud, beyond the solar system.

What's scarier, the known or the unknown?

I think that, deeply, human nature pulls us toward the unknown.

No, it's true. Yeah. All right. Speaking of which, going to the east. So, like we mentioned, the Vikings really went all over. One of the directions they went that ended up touching the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople was east. What can you say about the 8th-century journey east through the river networks that the Vikings did—the Swedish Vikings, the Varangians—as they began to explore the river systems of Russia?

This was the most surprising part for me when I was first thinking about writing the book and discovering where the Vikings went. In a million years, it never would have occurred to me that the Vikings went east. But a good way to think of this is that the Vikings launched themselves in whatever direction their country was facing. Sweden goes to the east, Denmark goes down toward Germany, and Norway goes to England and the New World.

There's a Viking named Rorik who goes east and manages to set up an encampment on a lake called Staraya Ladoga.

Which is a launchpad to both the Volga River and the Dnieper River.

Neil Price

Yeah, and these are major river systems in the east that take you all the way down to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. Because the Vikings were such sea-born people, they could sail up rivers. This allowed them access to the caliphates in the east and to the Byzantine Empire, where they, being Vikings, immediately decided to attack the city.

The Byzantines essentially set the Sea of Marmara, outside of Constantinople, on fire and burned up all the Viking ships. So then the Vikings decided, “Okay, we can’t take Constantinople, so we might as well join them if we can’t beat them.” They ended up as probably the most famous guard in Byzantine history: the Varangian Guard.

Varangian means “the men of the oath,” or the men who’ve sworn an oath. This is an analog of the Praetorian Guard in ancient Rome. They were famously loyal to the throne, but not necessarily to the person sitting on the throne. They were major power players.

The last of the great Byzantine emperors, Basil the Bulgar Slayer, formed them in the late 900s. They were there throughout its history, all the way up until the end of it. In fact, many of our famous Vikings, including Harald Hardrada, served in the Varangian Guard.

If you go to Constantinople today, inside the Hagia Sophia, on the second floor, there’s a marble balcony. On the railings, you can find Norse runes carved by Varangian Guards who were bored during a particularly long sermon in a language they didn’t understand, but they had to stand there.

So that’s a fascinating thing: the Varangian Guard, guarding the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, was made up initially, and for quite a bit of time, of Vikings. I mean, speaking of pragmatism, they just integrated into everything. Eventually, the Varangian Guard became less and less Viking over time.

This whole story was fast-forwarded, but we should mention that Staraya Ladoga, in 753 AD, was established, opening the connection to the 2 rivers. They began trading on the rivers and establishing more stable states along them, including the Kievan Rus' in 862 and 882. The Varangians—the Swedish Vikings—took Novgorod, took Kiev, and established the Kievan Rus' there.

That led to the connection to the Byzantine Empire. Again, the Vikings went from being Vikings through this process of trading and then establishing a state. Now they’re doing treaties of different kinds, and they’re also waging, or trying to wage, war. They went all the way to Constantinople and developed a deep admiration for it—enough to then begin to dream of sacking Constantinople.

Yeah. I mean, once they’re alerted to the wealth that’s there, Vikings being Vikings, they show up.

Can you speak to Greek fire? This was in 941 and 944, when they tried to attack, and Greek fire was this technology developed by the Romans.

We don’t really know what Greek fire was. It was a form of napalm, obviously. We have the ingredients that made it up—naphtha and oil and things like that. But it was this very flammable material that would ignite on contact.

The Byzantines would fill it into clay pots and then throw the clay pots. As soon as it was exposed to oxygen, it would start burning. They also had siphons. They would carry flamethrowers on their backs and just spray it at enemies.

The real devious thing about it is that if you launched this clay pot at a ship and the material pooled across the wood and then dripped off into the water, being oil, it would float on top of the water and continue to burn. If you were a sailor and jumped off the ship because it was on fire into this oil patch that was on fire, you’d be coated with it and burn underneath the water. It was a horrible way to go.

This was a closely guarded state secret. It was so closely guarded that it remains a mystery to this day what exactly it was.

Which is incredible, right?

Yeah. But in the 944 attack on Constantinople, the Vikings were coming on their ships. They brought these ships from Sweden. I mean, that’s crazy. They were in the Black Sea, had sailed there, and swarmed the Byzantines.

The Byzantines launched a bunch of decrepit old ships toward them that had Greek fire on them, and that turned the tide. But the Byzantine emperor so appreciated the strength of these horrifying Vikings that he formed a bodyguard of them.

And hence, a few years later, they tried to sack Constantinople again and then joined them.

Joined them, yep.

The Varangian Guard, in 988, with Basil II and Vladimir, made the Varangian Guard into an institution. Word of mouth then spread that this was a real career path for the Viking: to join the guard.

Yeah, that’s right. Because not only do you get paid very well—you’re compensated very well, obviously, for defending the emperor, particularly if you do a good job—but you also have opportunities. The emperor sends you, “Let’s go attack this tribe,” and you get to keep whatever you take. So there are tremendous amounts of war profiteering you can accomplish.

The other great river system, the Volga, brings you to the great enemy of the Byzantines, the Abbasid Caliphate. They had a lot of trading links with the north. So you get things like fur and amber, lots of slaves from the Islamic world going up. You even have, in a Swedish coin hoard, a Buddha that’s been found. I mean, it’s Sweden.

Yeah. So these networks of trade—just how incredible are they with geography, right? You can transform your understanding of land from the geography of the land to the geography of the river networks, because the way they raided, invaded, and conquered England was through the rivers. It’s an incredibly different way of seeing the world.

Yeah. And if you look at the kingdoms the Vikings created, I’m thinking particularly of Eric Bloodaxe in York. He was controlling parts of Ireland, parts of Scotland, Wales, and England. That doesn’t make sense unless you’re a Viking.

That also added tremendously to the terror that the Vikings brought, because you should probably be a little careful with absolute statements here, but I can’t think of a major European city that’s not on a river. With the Vikings able to travel up shallow rivers and carry their boats whenever necessary, everything was on the table. Even hundreds of miles inland was on the table.

And at an incredible speed, much faster than the land armies. It’s terrifying.

It’s terrifying.

So you’re living in a constant state of fear.

A constant state of fear.

We’ve talked about this transition in several different contexts, but you’ve written about this. It’s really interesting. Is a Viking like Ragnar going from this mode of sea kings, with no territory, to the mode of land kings?

Do you have somebody like Harald Bluetooth, a 10th-century Viking king of Denmark? You go from being these grand explorers who are free to being state builders. Was this always inevitable for all of these Vikings? Could we speak to the different transitions, maybe in England?

I think in one way, it’s inevitable. There are so many examples of destroyers who just wreck civilizations. The builders are much rarer. So I think that’s one of the reasons I think Augustus is a much more interesting person than Julius Caesar. Augustus was a builder, and I like to see that. I like to see not just, can you pull down, but can you build up?

Just to take Ireland as an example, Dublin, Limerick—almost every major city in Ireland was founded by the Vikings. So I don’t think it’s a given that it would have happened. I think there’s something about the Vikings, and it’s probably tied to their pragmatism, this pragmatic streak of, “We’re going to use whatever. Oh, this system of kings works. This taxation system is pretty good; let’s keep it. Oh, this doesn’t work. Let’s ditch it.”

Yeah, they went from destroyer to builder very naturally and very quickly.

Yeah. There’s a natural process from conquering to building, but it does take talent and it does take a certain something.

Can we talk about one of the great Vikings, Canute the Great?

I love Canute. I love Canute. I think he doesn’t get his due. He’s one of those unsung heroes, I think, of the Viking world.

He had a reputation. He was called the Emperor of the North. He had this massive empire: England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. I mean, he was just tying it all together. He was an extremely effective English king. I believe he introduced the penny, sadly discontinued.

Oh, wait, really? Discontinued?

Discontinued. They're no longer making it.

The penny is discontinued.

2025 is the last penny.

Oh, no. Everything's going to go up by 5.

Canute the Great was an early 11th-century Danish ruler who became king of England, Denmark, and Norway, creating what historians call the North Sea Empire. He's often regarded as one of the most effective kings in Anglo-Saxon English history for stabilizing the realm after decades of Viking warfare. Again, an example of a destroyer becoming a state builder.

Yeah. He was extremely strong. He was effective. England went from being the whipping boy of the Vikings to controlling the Vikings.

And ended up on a pilgrimage to Rome.

Went to Rome, yeah.

So, although a Viking war leader, Canute ruled as a Christian king, patronizing churches and monasteries and going on pilgrimage to Rome in 1027, where he attended the Holy Roman Emperor's coronation.

Yes, he was recognized by his contemporaries as something special, right? You don't get invited to those coronations if you're a nobody. But the most famous story of Canute that I know, my favorite story, is being in positions of power, being famous, having a lot of people sucking up to you, and having a lot of people telling you whatever they think you want to hear.

And so people are telling him all the time how wonderful he is, and he takes his whole court down to the seashore and orders his courtiers to carry him on his throne into the water. Then he commands the seas to stop, the waves to stop, and to retreat. They don't, obviously. But his point is, “Y'all are saying how great I am. I have no control.” I mean, this is his active humility, to kind of embarrass them: “I have no control over anything. Stop telling me I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread.”

I like the leaders, and there are a few of them in history who rise to the very top and are still able to maintain humility. Marcus Aurelius in the Roman Empire is an example. Reading Meditations is also an insight into the mind of a man who is, to himself, deeply humbled, because Meditations isn't supposed to be work that's published. It's just a diary. To himself, he's deeply humbled. One of the most powerful humans in history is still humble.

The 2 most famous Stoics: one was an emperor and one was a slave.

So, in the other part of the world, you've written a book and you did a legendary podcast series on The Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Roman Empire. Let me actually, just as a tangent of a tangent, ask you about the podcast.

You created what is widely considered to be the first history podcast. This was before Dan Carlin, before all the amazing podcasts we all know and love. The podcast series, of course, is The Twelve Byzantine Rulers: The History of the Byzantine Empire. What motivated you to explore this medium of podcasting? In the early days, this must have been 2005, something like this.

It was 2005, yeah.

And people should go listen to it. It's like we're talking about ancient times or something, because it is now a long time ago, but it's still an incredibly good podcast. It's a great podcast series.

Thank you. At the time, there was a series that I would get at the library called The Great Courses. I don't know if you're familiar with it.

Yes. The Great Courses, yes.

There was one particular professor. His name is Bob Brier, and he's an Egyptologist. He lives on Long Island, where I'm from. It's a massive thing, like 24 hours of lectures about the entire history of Egypt, and it was fascinating because he was such a good storyteller.

As a kid, I could never figure out if I liked the medieval period better or the Roman period better. I was constantly going back and forth, and I stumbled across a book that referred to the medieval Roman Empire. It was a bit like discovering your favorite TV show had 12 extra seasons you didn't know about, and they were just as good. So it really was a labor of love. I would not shut up about the Byzantine Empire.

My older brother and I would go on walks together, and I would be like, “And then Justinian…” He stopped me and said, “I have no idea what you're talking about. I need a framework. Give me a framework for this.” So I went home and recorded myself giving a framework, which turned out to be episode 1. I think I did it in a British accent—a really bad British accent. I was just messing around.

Luckily, I did it in my regular voice as well as this goofy accent, and I gave it to him and then forgot about it. That summer, I was on a dig in Petra, excavating the Temple of the Winged Lions, which was like a dream come true for me. I get this email from my brother, and he said, “Oh, I just submitted it as a podcast.” So he had to tell me what that was.

To the extent that I had put thought into it, I was going for a longer-form lecture Great Courses series on the Byzantines. Then a bunch of people started emailing me, saying, “When's episode 2 coming out?” Oh, okay. So I guess there has to be an episode 2. And then the thing kind of snowballed from there. I had no idea what I was doing.

Your brother, by the way, is super tech-savvy.

He is. It wouldn't have happened without Anders. So, Anders, thank you.

Looking back now, what do you think about that medium? Why do you think it connected so much to people? You've also written several amazing books. One of them is on the Byzantine Empire. Just looking back in a retrospective kind of way, that from there blew up an entire industry of incredible other history podcasts and podcasts in general.

Yeah, I've been trying to think for the past 20 years about why it's such a niche field, right? Why would people be interested in it? I think, number 1, it's a great story. People are people, and we haven't changed much, which is one of the reasons it's accessible, because these are people you could meet today.

But I think podcasting in general, because there's such a low bar to get in—or there was at the time. I mean, there was nobody else, so just by virtue of being first, it attracted attention. Whatever its merits, being first was the strongest one.

Which is to say, you also did another series on the Normans, who no longer had the benefit of being first and were still, nevertheless, very good.

Oh, I appreciate that. Thank you. I think podcasting, in a way, democratizes learning. It unlocked the potential of all these armchair historians. I'm one of them, who's like, “Hey, this is really cool. I'm passionate about this.” Anything that allows you to tap into your passion, I think, is going to be great.

And the Byzantine Empire is an interesting one. I don't understand why it doesn't get the love that it maybe deserves in history. You articulated this well: I think the framing of the book you wrote on the topic is that it's the reason we have Western civilization as we know it, or European-based Western civilization.

And then eventually they jump-start the Renaissance, because Constantinople's going to fall. It's inevitable. It's surrounded by hostile powers, and so they start migrating to Italy, just at the moment Italy is receptive to its Greco-Roman past.

Greek had died out in the West actually as early as the time of Justinian in the 500s, 560s. If you wanted to travel between the eastern and western parts of the empire, you needed guidebooks with helpful Latin or Greek phrases. So Latin had died out in the East and Greek had died out in the West by the 14th century, so you needed Byzantine teachers to be able to read Plato and Aristotle.

The book also emphasizes, as we've mentioned, a kind of great-man view of history. It celebrates people like Constantine and Justinian. Of Justinian, who would be your number-one top emperor in the history of the East Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire?

Hmm, that's a good question. Romantically, it's got to be Justinian. He dreams big. He dreams big. He doesn't always get there, but he dreams big.

He dreamed and tried to reconquer the Western Roman Empire. I mean, he fought a lot of wars of conquest and built the…

Built the Hagia Sophia. We're interested in the Egyptians because they built the pyramids. We're not interested in the pyramids because they were built by the Egyptians, right? It's like: What is the great thing that your society has created? I think the Hagia Sophia is that for the Byzantine Empire.

To go in it today is still the closest you can come to the 5th century. It peeled back the imperial splendor of what it must have been like. You can still see it. You can smell it. You can feel it. It's there.

There's actually a really nice video on YouTube of you going back, I think, 50 to 60 years ago. I don't know.

Seems like that. It does seem like that, yeah. We actually were kicked out.

Oh, what did you do?

My brother and I went.

What would you do?

Well, as you know, they're very strict about guides. They want to promote the local economy, so you have to have a local guide. You can't go in there and look like you're being a tour guide without a license. You have 15 different organizations.

We went there early, the hour it opened, and we had the entire cathedral to ourselves. We went around, and my brother was holding this camera while I was goofily pointing things out. One of the guards noticed us, and we had to remove ourselves from the building.

And so, one of the things—Justinian was a critical person in this, too. He overhauled Roman law, the legal system. First of all, the Roman Empire in general, the Eastern Roman Empire, propagated it. They believed in the law. They held onto the law. Many of the legal ideas we take for granted are grounded in everything that was developed in the Roman Empire to stabilize the Roman Empire, so they carried that flag forward.

That's right.

Many of the legal ideas we take for granted are grounded in everything developed in the Roman Empire and in stabilizing the Roman Empire, so they carried that flag forward.

Yeah. Outside of Great Britain, all European legal systems are ultimately based on the Code of Justinian, and then, weirdly, because of the French connections, so is the state of Louisiana. Actually, if you want to be a lawyer, you have to pass a different bar in Louisiana than everywhere else in the U.S.

Why do you think the Western Roman Empire and then the Eastern Roman Empire collapsed? Just looking at the grand picture of the history of the Roman Empire, it's 2,200 years, starting from the kingdom to the republic, to the imperial period, to the Eastern Roman Empire period. Why do societies rise and fall?

That's a really interesting question, and there are probably as many answers as there are different kingdoms. But just the Roman Empire—my take on it is that the collapse really starts at the end of the reign of Basil II. So the year is 1025. Basil is the last monarch of the Macedonian dynasty, which had seen the empire become the most powerful state in the Mediterranean, much more powerful and advanced than its Muslim or Christian neighbors. He had expanded the empire essentially as large as it was going to be after Justinian.

It was wealthy, it was glittering, it was educated. Courtiers had to memorize the works of Plato by heart. One of the emperor's favorite activities was to begin a quote, and you would have to finish it, but you didn't know where he would begin or what he was thinking that day. This is what amused him, so they were incredibly literate. Inside Constantinople itself, the literacy rate was close to 100%, which is crazy.

But when he died, the court—which had been this magnificent bureaucracy running the empire and vital to its workings—convinced itself that it could run the empire; it didn't actually need the emperor. So the court specifically selected weak rulers, and that led directly to the disastrous Battle of Manzikert in 1071, where the Turks entered the story and defeated and destroyed the Roman army under Romanos Diogenes, who was attempting to break free of the bureaucratic constraints.

Anatolia was flooded by these nomadic warriors, and the Byzantine Empire was pushed out of Anatolia. Once they'd lost the heartland, they'd lost their source of troops, their source of taxation, and their source of food. At this point, it was impossible to recover. The Crusades—the First Crusade, anyway—were an attempt by the Eastern Emperor Alexius to recover Asia Minor, more than Jerusalem. He wanted to recover Asia Minor, and obviously it didn't work out.

So I think that, at that point, it was on a trajectory that could only end in collapse. I think you can see that same kind of thing in the Viking world that we talked about: this stultifying bureaucracy, this inflexibility.

Combined with the growing threats from all directions.

Growing threats in all directions. Maybe your own success is beginning to be a problem. You can't adapt as quickly; you're not as lean and mean anymore. There are too many traditions, too much weight. The weight of history breaks you.

You mentioned the Macedonian period, the dynasty when the Eastern Roman Empire flourished once again, but they've gone through so many periods like that and lasted.

That's true. That is true.

I don't know what the reason is, but you can really trace the Roman spirit, the Roman state, the core of whatever that is, through that 2,200-year period. There's a real connection there, a thread that connects all of it, and so there are lessons. That's why we do need to study the Byzantine Empire for lessons about what makes societies last. Eventually everything collapses, but that one lasted—

That one lasted a long time.

—longer. It's easier to last when you're hidden away somewhere, but they were in the middle of everything. Everybody wanted what they had.

Yeah, they were getting hit on all sides. In their entire 2,200-year history, there was not a single year when they were at peace on all frontiers.

And it wasn't always because they were looking for trouble.

No.

A lot of it is defensive.

Yep, including with those pesky Normans.

Yeah, yeah. On the topic of great men in history, where do you land on this great debate? How important are individual humans versus systems? What do you think turns the tides of history? Can individual rulers, individual warriors, or individual humans have the power to change the course of history?

Yeah, that's the question, isn't it? The short answer is I subscribe to the great man or great woman theory. I think there are moments—I can't imagine the Protestant Reformation. I don't think you can just swap out Martin Luther and have a Protestant Reformation. I don't think you can swap out Augustus and have the Roman Empire.

I think ultimately these impersonal forces are insufficient for explaining everything, because we are people. We are humans. Everything is kind of a relational thing. But at the same time, the moment needs the man, but the man also needs the moment.

Some of it is timing, some of it is the environment—the system around it. I've seen so many incredible humans who persevere through things that would break basically everybody. Then there's the power of the belief they have.

We were talking offline about Napoleon. Here's a guy who was a student of all the great military generals of the past. He was extremely competent at micromanaging every aspect of the military affairs of a nation, but also extremely confident in his vision of the world and his ability to conquer anyone.

You have the same thing with Genghis Khan. This was a boy who came from nothing. Everything was taken away. He united all of Mongolia and then conquered most of the known world to them, including eventually China. Can you possibly have the great Mongol Empire without Genghis Khan?

No.

And the same is true when we, as Americans, ask ourselves that question about the founders. I mean, George Washington—not to romanticize it—but giving away power symbolically is a really powerful statement, as we'll mention with Augustus. When somebody is given power, and in some sense absolute power, what they do with that power can reverberate through generations. That's in the hands of an individual.

Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's well put. Cincinnatus in ancient Rome, same thing.

This is a big, ridiculous question, but what lessons do you learn from the Vikings?

Lessons to learn from the Viking Age.

By the way, I should mention one thing. It's a very practical lesson that you taught me: the Vikings groomed themselves. They were clean. This is so surprising to me. They washed themselves, and both the men and the women really took care of themselves. You don't often think about that.

Oh, yeah. The Vikings—everyone has this very clear picture of what a Viking looked like and also has no idea what a Viking looked like, somehow, at the same time. Almost everything we think about them is wrong. They didn't wear horned helmets. Their hair was probably disproportionately blonde, but that was more because they used lye to dye it, because it would kill the lice.

Then they would take baths on a regular basis, although this depended on where you were. So in England, for example, they were mocked as being soft, which always blows my mind. Really? You're going to mock the Vikings for being soft because they took too many baths? But then, in the Muslim East, one Muslim traveler writes that they were God's filthiest creatures because of their habit of disgusting shared bathing.

Oh, that aspect of it. So it's not that they didn't bathe; they bathed a little too much and together.

They bathed, but they also brushed their teeth using recycled water. They would then spit into a cup and pass it to the next guy.

Got it.

It's not awesome.

I read that—this could be propaganda—but I read that in England there was worry that the Vikings were a bit too attractive to the women of England because of how much the Vikings took care of themselves in terms of grooming.

Yeah. In the Danelaw, you get invaded by these people. They're kicking your rear end militarily. Now they're stealing your women, just to insult you as well.

Yeah. They wash themselves daily. They've got good teeth.

What is this bullshit?

Whether they need it or not, I know.

Why can't you guys have everything? What are you doing? Anyway, one of the lessons I think we need to draw is: shower daily.

Shower daily.

Yeah, there you go.

That's right.

That's the one thing I forgot.

That's the lesson, the takeaway, the big, profound takeaway. Is there something bigger about the exploration, about the leaps into the unknown?

Yeah, I think a couple of years ago, there were all these debates about statues: make sure we pull these statues down. This person did a bad thing; let's pull these statues down. I always thought they were kind of silly, too. I understand the point, but when you have a statue of Christopher Columbus, for example, you're not glorifying every single thing the man ever did and all the bad stuff that comes from this or that.

You're honoring something about him, like the spirit it takes to cross an ocean not knowing what's on the other side, and that's that spirit of exploration. I think with the Vikings, it's the same. There's this way you approach the world, this fearless, pragmatic approach. I think as an American, too, it's the ultimate rags-to-riches. It's the myth we tell ourselves: the man who starts with nothing and ends up as a sea king, well respected and sung about by poets. I mean, that's it right there.

When you're a society and you stop doing this, you run into trouble as well.

What about the Byzantine Empire? What lessons do you draw from them?

That's a much bigger one.

A 1,000-year history.

A 1,000-year history, and it's also what I think is so cool about the Byzantines: the ways in which they are like us and the ways in which they are unlike us. In some ways, they're very analogous to the United States. It's the polyglot nature of their inhabitants, their Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian roots. And yet it was a place of incredible alien things as well: men sitting on top of pillars, a king, an incredibly hierarchical system which abhorred democracy.

So I think it's a route we could have taken, and it's the way they handled things: immigration, inflation, war, peace, diplomacy. I think there are lessons there for us.

Yeah. I think from the Vikings, the lessons are a bit more poetic. The lessons from the Byzantine Empire are quite literal, like how to run a government, how to run the law.

Yeah. How to build a stable society. Honestly, you can count on the fingers of one hand states that have lasted 1,000 years, right? Byzantium and Venice, I think. And Venice was an offshoot of the Byzantines. For a government to last 1,000 years is a rare thing. We should be taking a look at this. How?

Yeah. But there were a lot, like you mentioned, a lot of people along the way from Constantine to Justinian, the Basils. There are so many emperors along the way who revolutionized and then restabilized the empire after it was almost falling apart.

Oh, yeah. You know what else, too, though? What happens to a human when you give that human essentially absolute power? Because the Byzantine emperor stood halfway there. I mean, he was more autocratic than anything other than the pope that we have in the modern world. What happens when you give someone that level of power?

I love Justinian, but I wouldn't have liked to know him. I wouldn't like to be one of his subjects. I love Basil I, but the man was a bloodthirsty tyrant. I think it shows you what happened. What is it? Lord Acton: “Absolute power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” That's quite clear throughout Byzantine histories, and it's a long, long list.

And as technologies become more powerful, absolute power becomes potentially more destructive, so—

Yeah, it's more absolute.

It's more absolute.

You know?

And this is the project for the 20th and 21st centuries: post-Industrial Revolution, post-computer technological revolution, post-discovery of nuclear weapons. How do we construct societies that last like the Byzantine Empire did, for 1,000 years? It's just a new challenge for us. There are going to be history books written about us because nuclear weapons, 80 years ago, are like Greek fire that you can apply to the entirety of human civilization.

There's going to be good history books, and I hope there are going to be these stories about the American empire, about the West, that sound similar to the Byzantine Empire, versus the Viking Age. It only lasted—

Three centuries.

I mean, I suppose the good news is it can be done, right? Or it has been done.

It has been done.

What gives you hope about the future, having looked at the deep history of us? What gives you hope?

During grad school, I was reading Frederick Douglass's autobiography, and he said, “I could sit with Plato and Cicero, and they would not flinch.” By which he meant that the great conversation was for everyone, no matter what your skin color, no matter what your level of income, and even no matter your intelligence.

I think that's actually why history comes alive for me, because these are not alien people. You had asked how similar ancient people are to us psychologically and what their goals were for life. I think the short answer is they were identical to us, which is why we can understand them.

It's why you should read things. It's why you should read the “Meditations,” because this is not just some dry whatever talking to himself in a culture that you cannot understand and can never recreate. It's a human talking about being human. I think human nature has not changed, and I don't think human nature will change.

We are flawed and broken. That's the human condition. We're going to be flawed and broken. So I don't think... I actually think that's the great question of history. If you want to understand history, you have to know about human nature. What is our human nature?

If you think it's a blank slate and we can educate ourselves to a utopia, like the Marxists said, then okay. It hasn't really worked out, but okay. If you believe we're basically bad, there's a whole set of things that come with that. If you believe we're basically good, there's a whole set of things that come with that, right? So you won't learn the appropriate lesson if you misdiagnose human nature.

Yeah. I think the diagnosis you're hinting at is seemingly the most accurate one, which is: we're flawed, a mix of good, a mix of evil, with the capacity for both.

That's right. I have to teach my kids to be kind. I don't have to teach my kids to be unkind. One of those is natural, and one is not. I think my kids can become kind.

The capacity—

Is there.

Humans have the capacity for many great things, but not perfection. It has to come outside of us.

Well, what is it? That line: “All of us are in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars.” So you've got to teach as many of us to look up at the stars and dream. Because once you allow yourself to dream of a better world, you try, you try—like the Vikings did, go out there. Try not to murder your neighbor, but if you do, all of us have, of course. If you do, there's Greenland. There's Greenland.

There's Greenland. Thank you for everything you've done for the world. Thank you for the podcast you put out there. Thank you for your incredible books, and thank you for the conversation today.

Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity. Thanks a lot.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Lars Brownworth. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, let me leave you with some words from the Volsunga Saga, a 13th century Icelandic prose epic that tells the story of the Volsunga clan, a legendary Norse dynasty of heroes and dragon slayers. "Fear not death, for the hour of your doom is set, and none may escape it." And another powerful quote from this saga is, "Better to fight and fall than to live without hope." Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.