Original subtitles

[Day] The tales have been told

since man first gathered around the fires of prehistory.

Tales of the strange and wondrous things

hidden in the vast, unknown shadows of the world.

Tales of creatures divine and beasts demonic,

of Gods and kings,

of myths and monsters.

From dark forests to the lands of ice,

from desert wastes to the storm-thrashed seas,

every corner of the earth has its legends to tell.

Stories of heroes and the villains they encounter,

of the wilderness and the dangers within.

Stories of battles, of love, of order and of chaos.

But what are the roots of these fantastic tales?

And why have they endured so long?

In this series, we'll explore the history behind these legends

and reveal the hidden influences that shaped them:

War and disease, religious and social upheaval,

the untamable ferocity of the natural world.

And above all, the monsters lurking within ourselves.

[man speaking indistinctly]

Our world is at war.

The battlefield today belongs to the sniper,

the tank, the bomb, the bullet.

And we seek ever more inventive means of mutual destruction.

But why do we fight?

It is a question asked by every culture and by every generation,

for our world has always been at war.

[warriors shouting indistinctly]

Through the millennia of human existence, we have fought for land and wealth,

for love and revenge, to liberate and to oppress,

to save allies and to punish enemies.

We have fought and fought again.

[warriors yelling]

War is an intense period of struggle, so it's also, therefore,

an intense period of cultural definition.

[Gloyn] War allows you to see

the ethical priorities of a culture that's created it.

How do we cope with people we've captured?

What do we do if we lose? Who do we go to war against?

Societies' stories of war tell us what values they hold dear

and that they maintain through warfare.

[Butler] They're a way of incorporating unpredictable forces

into a belief system that help people to make sense

of things they couldn't prevent or predict.

[Teverson] In a society's representation of war,

it represents what it thinks of itself, what its ideals are.

It determines what values the culture holds dear.

Whether by choice or necessity, war has been a constant in human history,

and all civilizations have had to grapple with the questions it raises.

The stories we tell of war, the justifications we find for violence,

and the condolences we seek for loss

all reveal something about our values as individuals and as societies.

"The Nemedians had come seeking a new home,

but they found in Ireland only misery,

for they were enslaved by the Fomorians,

cruel ogres renowned for their greed.

Chief among these terrors were the two strongest and ugliest ogres,

Morc, and his brother, Conand.

The fruit of the Nemedian's labor they seized for themselves.

But the Nemedians had not come so far to be slaves forever.

One man stood against their foe.

Fergus Red-Side was his name.

He was the son of the great hero Nemed himself.

He stirred rebellion among the huts and shacks of the Nemedian villages.

No longer would they bear the oppression of Conand and Morc.

They wearied of their servitude,

they readied themselves for war."

The story of the Nemedians and their oppression by the Fomorians

is told in the Celtic Book of Invasions.

Compiled around the 11th century, the book charts the history of Ireland

from creation through to the Middle Ages.

It tells the stories of five mythical tribes

who invaded Ireland one by one

before the final arrival of the Gaelic people,

and the establishment of a Christian kingdom.

Origin stories such as this are common.

Almost every civilization thinks it is special,

and develops a myth of its beginnings to prove it.

Rome.

The bustling heart of modern Italy

is today one of the largest cities in Europe.

It has been continuously inhabited for more than 3000 years,

and everywhere in the city can be seen the remnants of that long history,

relics of an age when the city ruled the world.

By the second century,

almost 100 million people lived under Roman rule,

a fifth of the world's population at the time.

Rome's power stretched from the north of Britain

to Egypt in the south.

From Spain in the west, to the Persian Gulf in the east.

The image is famous to this day,

a she-wolf suckling two infant boys as if they were her own.

These were the twin brothers, Romulus and Remus.

Their grandfather, the king, had been usurped

and the boys banished from home.

Thanks to the she-wolf, however,

they survived long enough to be found by a shepherd,

who raised them as his own.

Growing up, the twins discovered their birthright

and helped their grandfather retake his crown.

They then set out to found a city of their own.

Each began construction in a different place,

and the dispute soon took a violent turn.

When Remus mockingly leapt over his brother's budding defenses,

Romulus responded with a fatal blow and the words,

"So perish anyone who attacks my walls".

The foundation of Rome rests on fratricide,

brother killing brother.

It's not a positive place to start your story.

Usually you expect a single hero who's the foundation of the nation,

whereas in this instance, we have two competing heroes.

[Purkiss] It's a very, very weird foundation myth.

It takes away from that idea of a single exemplar

of the virtues of the civilization that's founded.

Indeed, neither Romulus nor Remus is particularly exemplary.

Remus because he gets killed,

and Romulus because he murders his own brother.

[Day] The tale troubled and intrigued the Romans,

especially as it was regarded not as myth,

but as history, and history that could be seen and touched.

The Temple of Jupiter Stator by the Forum

was said to have been founded by Romulus himself.

For centuries, his hut was preserved on the Palatine Hill,

and Romans could even visit the cave

where the she-wolf was said to have cared for the infant boys.

We might expect them to be a bit awkward about this story but they're not,

they tell it again and again and again.

It's recorded in the primary sources.

It's recorded as something that is an important part

of what it means to be Roman.

It was grounded very much in the physical location of Rome,

as the whole of the Romulus and Remus myth is.

It was very much about the roots these people had

in this particular patch of ground,

which is why we always talk about the Roman Empire.

Despite how far it spreads, we always come back to Rome,

to these particular locations

that always remain very vividly part of the Roman identity.

[Day] Some identified in the story the seeds of violence,

which Rome would later use to conquer the world.

Others saw in the deadly struggle between brothers

a cruel omen of the civil wars

that would split the Roman Empire again and again.

Attempts were made by poets and politicians

to soften the tale of Romulus and Remus

or replace it with other, sanitized accounts of the city's origins.

[Gloyn] The Romans were good at understanding

that myths and stories had the capability

to be told and to be shaped

and to be retold and reshaped as you needed to do so,

so there were alternative versions told.

[Purkiss] It's Cicero who actually denies that Romulus kills Remus,

and deletes the part of the myth

that probably gave it its purchase on the Roman imagination.

The idea that, in drinking the milk of a wolf,

Romulus and Remus are imbibing a ferocity that Rome has yet fully to contain,

is in part why Cicero's and Virgil's generation

want to forget the whole thing.

Plus they invent a bunch of other, much sleeker,

much more fit for purpose foundation myths,

of which the best known is the one invented by Virgil,

the myth of Aeneas.

[Day] The noble, heroic Aeneas was a refugee from Troy.

He led his people across the Mediterranean to Italy,

where he founded the city that would one day give rise to the Roman people.

His story is told most famously

by the poet Virgil in his great epic, The Aeneid.

He was writing during a new era in Roman history.

Augustus was consolidating his power as the first emperor,

and the grander, more dignified origin story

offered by The Aeneid seemed fit for the times.

But if it was intended to eclipse older stories in the Roman imagination,

it would fail.

Romulus and Remus would retain their place in the history books of ancient Rome.

But of course, it wasn't real history at all.

The brothers did not create Rome, Rome created them.

It was not the murder of Remus that explained the violence of the Romans,

it was the violence of the Romans that lay behind the myth.

[Gloyn] Military life goes through all aspects of Roman society.

The Roman army is conscript.

It's not a volunteer professional force, and that means that you have

a very high proportion of people in Rome, broadly speaking,

who either will have been in the army

or will have relatives who've been in the army.

So there's a knowledge and a familiarity with military matters

that is very deeply embedded in everyday life and everyday activity.

[Purkiss] He does one really interesting thing

that's very important for Roman ideas of the self

and the relation between the individual and the city,

and that is he's killed by Romulus.

So the point of the story then becomes,

even my brother is less important to me than defending Rome.

It's Rome above all.

Remus is there to show that Romulus is willing,

and all Romans must be willing, to sacrifice familial ties for the city.

[Day] Perhaps that is why the bloody story of the twins endured.

No finer mirror of the city's character could be found.

In one act of fraternal bloodshed,

the myth taught Romans that the success of their city

relied not only on violence, but on sacrifice.

Rome was great,

but so was the price paid.

"The tower of Conand, the great fortress, lay before them.

The Nemedians, 30,000 of them, had come to claim their freedom.

These men were farmers, not soldiers, but they would fight all the same,

for they were led by a brave and mighty warrior,

Fergus Red-Side, the son of Nemed.

[Nemedians clamoring]

From the high tower,

Conand watched them gather with an outraged snarl.

The impudence of these slaves.

Massed on the plain below, the Nemedian army grew larger and larger.

Hammer and pike, scythe and spear, they held their weapons aloft

and roared in time to the beat of the drum.

The great ogre was readied.

Armor was strapped to his body.

[Nemedians yelling]

The men raised their swords.

The drums grew louder. The battle was about to begin."

Despite war's constant presence in history,

few of us are natural soldiers.

Killing other people runs against the instincts of most

and sheer terror on the battlefield paralyzes many more.

It's no surprise then that throughout history,

we find enemies dehumanized and the glory of a heroic death magnified.

The sentiments are found in the words of politicians and poets,

in the works of sculptors and painters,

and in the stories and myths that cultures held dear.

The frozen north is no place for the fainthearted.

Its winters are long and dark.

It is a land of sheer cliffs and deep fjords, of rock and ice.

To live in such a place is to battle against the elements

and such extremes of nature perhaps produce extremes of man.

The Norse lived in Scandinavia between the eighth and 11th centuries.

It was a society that extolled war and battle,

whose daring warriors crossed continents in search of glory.

What lay behind their success was a mastery of sailing.

In 793,

the Norse launched a raid on Lindisfarne,

a sacred island off the northeast coast of England.

The monastery there was looted and its inhabitants slaughtered.

The age of the Vikings had begun.

The attack on Lindisfarne stunned Christian Europe.

One contemporary wrote,

"Never before has such a terror appeared in Britain

as we have now suffered from a pagan race".

[Butler] I think there were two quite important factors

about the Norse that made them appear genuinely shocking,

and that was that they arrived in boats.

They struck somewhere quickly and they moved on.

And there was no way of knowing where they would go next.

And also there's the whole culture clash.

You can't say that the Vikings and the Norse ever raided because

they were thinking about religious differences,

but from the point of view of the Anglo-Saxons,

those religious differences mattered a lot.

[Day] Stories of the brave and barbarous Vikings spread quickly.

Most feared among their warriors were the berserkers.

These shock troops fought in a trance-like fury

and seemed to experience no pain or fear.

But if this was a culture that glorified war,

then all parts of Norse society, women included, played a role.

Girls were often given warlike names.

Gunhilde, for instance, was a popular choice,

and literally it meant, war battle.

In time, of course,

they were expected to raise strong future warriors themselves,

and any deformed babies

were to be abandoned in the elements to die.

One thing they did not do was fight.

They were not trained as warriors as men were.

According to mythology, however,

there was still a female presence on the battlefield,

and they had the most important job of all.

[Purkiss] The Valkyries are immortal warrior maidens

whose job it is to decide which warriors get to fall in battle.

[Teverson] They were then tasked with taking the souls of the dead warriors

to Valhalla, which is in effect the afterlife,

presided over by the god Odin.

[Butler] You might think of Valhalla as similar

to the way in which knights going on crusade

were told that their sins would be pardoned

if they died in a crusade.

It sweetens the deal a bit, it knocks the edges off the fear,

telling them that if they die in battle they're going to live a lovely life

where they're given mead all the time

and they just have to fight each day for Odin

and then they're resurrected and they go back to feasting.

It makes the idea of dying in battle seem less terrible.

[Day] The promise of Valhalla

must have offered comfort to the fearful before battle,

and solace to those grieving afterwards.

Death on the battlefield was recast as a mirror of birth,

and just as it was women who once brought men into the world,

so it was females who carried them into the next.

[Butler] The gender of Valkyries is often bound up

in the roles that they perform in the myths.

So in Valhalla,

when they're bringing the mead cup around to the warriors

this is very much the role of the noble woman in society as well.

It's what the hostess would do at a great feast or a gathering,

in a king or a lord's hall.

[Purkiss] Fate figures are nearly always female in all European mythologies.

There is an unbelievably creepy Valkyrie moment in Njáls Saga

where you actually see the Valkyries weaving with men's intestines,

and using men's severed skulls as weights.

[Butler] Instead of the tools of the trade,

they have a shuttle that is a spearhead,

and they beat the wool with a sword

rather than the standard wooden tool that they'd use.

Weaving is normally a virtuous thing for householders to do,

but these women are weaving with guts and heads,

so they're doing something that's, on the one hand, really uber feminine,

but on the other hand, is a creepy inverted version of it.

[Day] Stories of war and the Valkyries are found throughout Norse mythology.

The gods constantly fought amongst themselves

and against their rivals, the giant and monstrous jötnar.

But were the Norse as belligerent a people as we often think?

Is their reputation for violent banditry, which remains to this day, a fair one?

Were they all Vikings?

[Butler] There's a great deal of association between the Norse

and a particularly savage kind of violence,

and that's frequently overstated.

In the context of the time they lived in,

I don't think the violence committed by the Norse was any inherently worse

than the violence committed by other medieval societies.

I don't think you could quantify

the effect of murder and arson and theft by the Norse

as being any worse than the murder and arson and theft

that occurred within Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and continental royal houses.

[Purkiss] It's fair to say that they're expansionist

and that their method of expansion is ship-based,

and that their modus operandi is on the whole to cross the seas

and raid foreign countries and take slaves

and take plunder and then sail home with that.

But they also tend to settle in areas that they frequently raid,

so they don't remain these outsider pillagers.

When they establish themselves, they form societies

and then we can pick out the much more positive associations.

The bold spirit of the Norse saw them dominate England

and found settlements stretching from the Black Sea to North America.

But this golden period was fleeting.

By the middle of the 11th century,

Christianity had supplanted the indigenous faith.

The Valkyries flew no more,

the Viking age was ending.

"The two armies charged at one another,

[warriors yelling]

thrusting and slashing, cutting and stabbing.

So the enemies met.

The Fomorians were led into battle by Conand himself.

And there was only one man who dared face him.

Conand towered over him,

but Red-Side was a brave and skillful warrior.

[blades ringing]

Back and forth the two champions fought, metal ringing on metal,

each waiting for the other to slip

for a chance to end the battle with one fatal blow.

Still eager, still strong, Conand charged, but it was a ruse.

Red-Side dodged the mighty ogre's sword

and lunged forward, his own blade flashing.

[blade rings]

The great ogre roared out in pain

before collapsing to the ground with a mighty thud.

Conand had fallen."

No battle is without loss

and even victory cannot displace all the pain, grief and anger.

The scars of combat can run as deep in the mind as they do in the body,

and the greatest stories of war know this.

In the Anatolian expanses of modern Turkey,

just south of the Dardanelles Strait, which divides Europe from Asia,

there was once a place of legend,

a mighty fortress overlooking the plains,

a city of wealth and beauty.

The remnants of its thick walls are now shrouded beneath the earth,

its lavish temples and palaces crumbled to dust.

But it was amid the rocks and rivers of this ancient plain

that the greatest conflict in all myth took place,

the Trojan War.

It was a war sparked by the abduction of Queen Helen of Sparta

by Prince Paris of Troy.

An alliance of Greek kings then sailed to Troy

with their armies to bring her back.

A 10-year siege ensued.

Only cunning ended the long stalemate.

The Trojans were fooled

into letting the Greeks beyond their gates.

Troy was brutally sacked soon afterwards.

Countless works of art have been inspired by the war.

In its long duration and bloody aftermath, there are near infinite opportunities

to explore the meaning and impact of conflict.

The Trojan War offers an opportunity

to look at a very wide range of human life.

It offers the opportunity to look at the failure of guest friendship,

what happens when those bounds of hospitality are broken,

conflict in between two different regions,

the coming together of the Greeks for a single purpose.

All of these kinds of things, the myth allows the Greeks to explore

through one particular narrative.

It doesn't just talk about war to glorify it.

It also really offers an opportunity to look at the human cost,

the people who suffer as a result of war.

But one account of the war has endured above all others.

A poem,

composed almost 3000 years ago.

Alexander the Great conquered the world with a copy at his side,

and soldiers and civilians alike have for centuries looked to it

for a better understanding of war in their own times.

That poem is the ancient Greek epic, The Iliad.

Said to be the work of an author known as Homer,

the written version of the poem dates to the 8th century BC.

Its roots, however, are older still

in an oral tradition which stretches back hundreds of years more.

The Iliad does not focus on the end of the Trojan War, nor on its beginnings.

Instead, it tells one short episode during the last year of the conflict.

Homer makes monsters of neither Trojans nor Greeks.

The poet instead grants equal dignity to the soldier far from home

and the civilian trapped in theirs.

What the enemies have in common is emphasized,

the love of family, the pain of loss,

the inevitability of death.

One lovely example of a moment of emotional connection with the family

is the Trojan hero, Hector, in The Iliad,

who puts on his helmet and then goes to kiss his wife, Andromache, goodbye.

She's with his little boy, who's only a tiny child.

And he little boy looks at Hector in his helmet and he starts to cry.

He doesn't recognize his father because he's wearing this helmet,

and Hector starts to laugh and throws the little boy up in the air

and passes him back to his wife, but it's a lovely, affectionate moment.

This lovely little domestic detail that humanizes him

and makes it clear that he's fighting, in the most literal possible way,

not just for his city as a political entity,

but for his family in its extraordinary vulnerability.

[Teverson] You could read the epic as being

about the unreasonableness of war, the pettiness of war,

and therefore the human need to rise above that,

to try and remain human and humane within that struggle.

[Day] Hector falls in combat at the hands of the Greek hero, Achilles.

It was his fate to die, and for his city to eventually fall.

But he carried on nonetheless, he fought to the end.

His story still speaks to us,

for death comes for all,

but we all must carry on.

[Teverson] It's about very fundamental aspects

of human experience.

Jealousy, anger, rage, struggle, love, hate.

And all these things are fundamental parts of the human experience.

[Day] Every generation that has read the poem

has repurposed its characters and events for their own times.

After the fall of Rome, however,

Homer's text was lost to western Europe for centuries,

but after rediscovery during the Renaissance,

The Iliad went on to become a foundation stone of western literature.

It continues to shape our thoughts about war to this day.

For though in many ways, combat has changed beyond recognition,

The Iliad captures something unchanging about war,

the poem glories in it, and damns it just the same.

It is a city with many names.

First it was Byzantium.

Later it became Constantinople.

But to many, it was just the City.

And though we may not recognize it, that is how we know it to this day,

for Istanbul is derived from the Greek words, se tin poli,

meaning "to the city."

That city was once the largest and wealthiest in Europe,

and a holy place of Christianity.

In 1453, however,

it fell to the invading forces of the Ottoman Empire.

[Teverson] The Ottoman Empire was the superpower of its day,

an expansionist and aggressive one at that.

It was just assumed

that nowhere Christian could really fall to Islam.

It was just assumed that God would protect it.

The idea that something so strong

could collapse just dismayed and horrified them.

[Teverson] According to the Christian understanding,

God really shouldn't have allowed it to fall in the way it did.

[Day] The conquest of the city shocked Europe.

It would not be the end

of the Ottoman's ambitions in the west, however.

[Purkiss] It expanded all the way into eastern Europe.

In fact, virtually all of what we now think of as the Balkans

was either ruled directly by the Ottomans or was an Ottoman vassal.

[Day] In this state of near constant war that followed,

new stories and legends emerged.

And just as men can make myths out of war, war can make myths out of men.

Wallachia was a small principality in what is modern day Romania.

To the north stretched the Transylvanian Alps,

to the south lay the mighty Danube River.

This was the land that Prince Vlad Dracula called home.

Between 1448 and 1476,

he ruled Wallachia on three separate occasions.

All these reigns were brief,

but his fame has become immortal nevertheless.

He was the inspiration behind Bram Stoker's legendary vampire,

Dracula.

But Vlad was notorious long before the publication of Stoker's novel in 1897.

In his own time, he was reviled as a sadist,

whose taste for the cruelest of punishments

led to his gruesome nickname, Vlad the Impaler.

[Purkiss] A German Meistersinger produced a poem

that was actually sung in front of then Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III,

which told of Vlad's crimes in detail.

And one of the crimes that it emphasized was that he impaled his victims on stakes.

[Teverson] There are stories of Vlad the Impaler eating his dinner

while his enemies writhed around him, impaled on spikes.

[Purkiss] Later this was elaborated even further

and there was really grisly tales

of mothers and infants being impaled together,

so that the infants were trying to clutch at the mothers,

and the mothers were trying to protect the infants but they both died.

Really gruesome stuff.

But how fair was Vlad's reputation? Where's the truth amid the legend?

And why did the tale spread and endure?

Vlad lived at a time of upheaval.

His lands were caught between the Christian powers to the west

and the might of the Ottoman Empire to the east.

In 1417,

Wallachia had become a vassal state of the Ottomans.

Vlad's father was the then ruler of the principality,

but he was murdered in 1447 and his crown usurped.

For decades afterwards,

control of the region was contested again and again.

As a grown man, Vlad fought to win back what he regarded as his birthright.

At times he aligned himself with the Ottomans,

at others he joined the forces arrayed against them.

But his reigns in Wallachia were short, unstable affairs.

He was a man with many enemies.

In 1462, having once again lost his crown, Vlad travelled to Transylvania

to seek the help of the Hungarian king, Matthew Corvinus.

Instead, the king had Vlad imprisoned.

It was at this time that stories of Vlad's unique brutality

began to spread.

[Purkiss] As soon as you have a war,

hostilities of any kind, the atrocity stories begin.

People really got off on exaggerating

the evil eastern European weirdness of this guy.

And it just got more and more exaggerated and peculiar

as the western presses churned it out.

[Day] Even in his own lifetime,

the man was becoming myth.

And the stories of the cruelty and wickedness of Vlad Dracula

did not disappear with his death in 1476.

But legends are changeable things.

Once a man becomes myth,

he can be repackaged and re-purposed again and again.

In more recent years, there's been a reappraisal of Vlad III.

He has become a, perhaps, unlikely hero.

Romania was long dominated by foreign powers.

It was subject to the Ottomans until the 19th century,

and the establishment of the Kingdom of Romania.

But that was swept away after the Second World War,

and Romania was once again in the shadow of a greater power.

This time, Soviet Russia.

Like many post-communist countries,

it's eager to go back to the time before communism

and find heroes that predate those days, and Vlad is a perfect candidate.

[Day] He was recast as a harsh, yet just ruler,

who strengthened central government and fought for the nation

at a time of conflict and unrest.

In the schoolrooms of Romania, Vlad's story is still told.

For defiance in the face of oppression will always appeal.

"The battle was over.

[Nemedians cheering]

The Nemedians celebrated.

It was Fergus Red-Side who had triumphed,

but few in his army had escaped the battle with the Fomorians unharmed.

And as they tended to the wounded, a dread sound echoed across the island.

It came from the sea.

A fleet of ships cut through the waves towards them.

It was another Fomorian army.

Morc, brother of the defeated Conand, was already come for revenge.

With a cry, Red-Side rallied his weary men.

They charged the beach to fight once more.

In the battle that followed, not one fled from the other.

Red-Side and Morc, Nemedian and Formorian alike,

they fell in mutual slaughter.

The beach was stained crimson with their blood.

Of the 30,000 Nemedians who had come to win their freedom,

just 30 survived.

This mournful band of the wounded and the weary seized a Fomorian ship.

They sailed away, far from Ireland,

and far away from the cruelty of the Fomorians."

The defeat of the Nemedians in the Celtic Book of Invasions

paves the way for the arrival of the Irish people themselves.

The book made war a part of their origins,

of their identity as a people, as it was for so many others.

From the time of the Romans to that of the Norse,

from the golden age of Ancient Greece through to this very day,

the character of individuals and of nations

has been shaped by myths of war.

They can tell us where we've come from and where we go after death.

They tell us what makes us different from others,

and what we have in common.

They tell us what we cherish, what we deplore,

what we aspire to and what we fear.

They tell us who we are.

The weapons of war have changed down the centuries,

and though battles on the field may look different today,

the battles within us remain much the same.