Original subtitles

(tense music) (man shouting)

(thunder crackling)

(snakes hissing)

(animals growling)

- The tales have been told since man first gathered

around the fires of pre-history.

(suspenseful music)

Tales of the strange and wondrous things hidden

in the vast unknown shadows of the world.

(suspenseful music)

Tales of creatures divine and beasts demonic,

of gods and kings,

(dragon breathes deeply) 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.

(dogs barking) (dramatic music)

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.

(sword clanking) War and disease,

religious and social upheaval,

the untameable ferocity of the natural world,

(waves crashing) (dramatic music)

and above all,

the monsters lurking within ourselves.

(tense music)

(fire crackling)

(dramatic music)

(engine humming)

(woman vocalizing dramatically)

(explosions booming in distance)

(dramatic music)

(explosion booming)

(reporter chattering over radio)

(helicopter blades roaring)

(guns firing)

(woman vocalizing dramatically)

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.

(bomb exploding)

But why do we fight?

(solemn music)

It is a question asked by every culture

and by every generation.

For our world has always been at war.

(soldiers shouting) (suspenseful music)

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.

(suspenseful music) (soldiers shouting)

- War is an intense period of struggle,

so it's also, therefore,

an intense period of cultural definition.

- 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?"

(soldiers shouting) (suspenseful music)

- Societies' stories of war tell us

what values they hold dear,

and that they maintain through warfare.

(soldiers shouting) (swords clanking)

- They're a way of incorporating

unpredictable forces into a belief system

that help people to make sense of things

that they couldn't prevent or predict.

- [Andrew] 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.

(dramatic music)

- 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.

(dramatic music)

(solemn music)

(dramatic music) (tools clanking)

"The Nemedians had come seeking a new home,

"but they found in Ireland only misery.

(tools clanking) (wind blowing)

"For they were enslaved by the Fomorians,

"cruel ogres renowned for their greed.

(ogres growling)

"Chief among these terrors were the two strongest

"and ugliest ogres, Morc and his brother Conand.

(dramatic music) (ogres growling)

"The fruit of 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 villagers.

"No longer would they bear

"the oppression of Conand and Morc.

"They wearied of their servitude.

"They readied themselves for war."

(foreboding music)

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.

(dramatic music)

Origin stories such as this are common.

Almost every civilization thinks it is special

and develops a myth of its beginnings to prove it.

(solemn music)

(birds chirping)

Rome, the bustling heart of modern Italy,

is today one of the largest cities in Europe.

It has been continuously inhabited

for more than 3,000 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.

(solemn music)

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.

(foreboding music) (children giggling)

The image is famous to this day,

a she-wolf sucking 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.

(dramatic music)

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 of fratricide,

brother killing brother.

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

(tense dramatic music)

- Usually you'd expect a single hero,

who's the foundation of the nation.

Whereas, in this instance,

we have two competing heroes.

- 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.

(man vocalizing dramatically)

- 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.

(dramatic music)

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.

(man vocalizing dramatically)

- 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.

(tense music)

- [Nicolas] 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 more sanitized accounts

of the city's origins.

(suspenseful music)

- The Romans were very good at understanding that myths

and stories had the capability to be told

and to be shaped and to be re-told

and re-shaped as you needed to do so,

so there were alternative versions told.

- It's Cicero who actually denies that Romulus kills Remus,

and actually sort of 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.

(dramatic music)

- 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.

(dramatic music)

(arrows whizzing)

- 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 have been in the army,

so there's a knowledge and a familiarity

with military matters that is very deeply embedded

in every day life and every day activity.

- 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.

(suspenseful music)

- 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.

(ominous music)

"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.

(people shouting) (dramatic music)

"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.

(dramatic music)

"The great ogre was readied.

"Armour was strapped to his body.

(people shouting) (dramatic music)

"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.

(suspenseful music)

The frozen north is no place for the fainthearted.

Its winters are long and dark.

(dramatic music)

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.

(thunder rumbling) (dramatic music)

The Norse lived in Scandinavia

between the 8th 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.

(solemn music)

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".

(solemn music)

- 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.

(dramatic music)

- 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.

(dramatic music)

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.

(mystical music)

- [Diane] The Valkyries are immortal warrior maidens

whose job it is to decide

which warriors get to fall in battle.

- [Andrew] 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.

(mystical music)

- 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

of 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.

(gentle music)

- [Nicholas] 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.

- 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.

- Fate figures are nearly always female

in all European mythologies.

There is an unbelievably creepy Valkyrie moment

in "Njals Saga" where you actually see

the Valkyries weaving with men's intestines,

and using men's severed skulls as weights.

- [Joanne] 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.

(gentle music)

- 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.

(dramatic music)

- 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 Jotnar.

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?

(dramatic music)

- 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.

(dramatic music)

- 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 really

much more positive associations.

(dramatic music)

- 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.

(dramatic music) (swords clanking)

"Thrusting and slashing,

"cutting and stabbing

"so the enemies met.

(dramatic music) (soldiers shouting)

"The Fomorians were led into battle by Conand himself.

(dramatic music)

"And there was only one man who dared face him.

"Conand towered over him,

"but Red-Side was a brave and skillful warrior.

(iron clashing) (dramatic music)

"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.

(iron clashing) (dramatic music)

"The great ogre roared out in pain

(ogre growling)

"before collapsing to the ground with a mighty thud.

"Conand had fallen."

(dramatic music)

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.

(dramatic music)

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.

(somber music)

- But one account of the war

has endured above all others,

a poem composed almost 3,000 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.

(gentle music)

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.

(gentle music)

- 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 the little boy looks at Hector in his helmet

and he starts to cry.

He doesn't recognize his father

because he's wearing this great 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.

(dramatic music) (soldiers shouting)

- [Andrew] 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.

(ominous music)

- [Nicholas] 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.

- It's about very fundamental aspects of human experience.

Jealousy, anger, rage,

struggle, love, hate,

all these things are really fundamental parts

of the human experience.

(dramatic music)

- 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.

(dramatic majestic music)

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

"is tin poli" meaning "to the city".

That city was once the largest

and wealthiest in Europe,

and a holy place of Christianity.

(suspenseful music)

In 1453, however,

it fell to the invading forces of the Ottoman Empire.

(suspenseful music)

- The Ottoman Empire was the superpower of its day,

an expansionist and aggressive one at that.

(suspenseful music)

- 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.

- [Andrew] According to the Christian understanding,

God really shouldn't have allowed it to fall

in the way it did.

(dramatic music)

- [Nicholas] The conquest of the city shocked Europe.

It would not be the end of the Ottoman's ambitions

in the West however.

- [Diane] 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.

(dramatic music)

- [Nicholas] 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.

(dramatic music)

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.

(dramatic music)

- A German Meistersinger produced a poem

that was actually sung in front of

the 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.

(dramatic music)

- There are stories of Vlad the Impaler

eating his dinner while his enemies writhed

around him impaled on spikes.

- [Diane] Later this was elaborated even further,

and there was some really gristly 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.

(ominous music)

- But how fair was Vlad's reputation?

Where's the truth amid the legend,

and why did the tales 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.

(dramatic music)

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.

(somber music)

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 traveled 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.

- [Diane] 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.

- 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.

(dramatic music)

In more recent years,

there's been a re-appraised 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 pre-date those days,

and Vlad is a perfect candidate.

(dramatic music)

- He was re-cast as a harsh yet just ruler,

who strengthened central government

and fought for the nation

at a time of conflict and unrest.

In the school rooms of Romania,

Vlad's story is still told.

For defiance in the face of oppression will always appeal.

"The battle was over.

(tense music) (men shouting)

"The Nemedians celebrated.

"It was Fergus Red-Side who was 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.

(waves crashing)

"It came from the sea.

"A fleet of ships

"cut through the waves towards them.

"It was another Fomorian Army.

(water crashing)

"Morc, brother of the defeated Conand,

"was already come for revenge.

(ogre shouting)

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

"They charged the beach to fight once more.

(dramatic music)

"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.

"The 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.

(dramatic music)

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.

(dramatic music) (gunfire blasting)

The weapons of war have changed down the centuries,

(artillery booming)

and though battles on the field

may look different today,

the battles within us remain much the same.

(gunfire blasting) (dramatic music)

(dramatic music)