Original subtitles

So far on Blood of the Vikings, I've discovered a story of Viking attacks and

invasions across Britain and Ireland.

Tonight, I travel in search of the evidence for Viking settlement along the

road from Shetland to Dublin.

What brought the Vikings here?

And were their dealings with the natives peaceful?

Or not.

Western Norway in winter.

It's dark and it's freezing.

The terrain is rugged and unforgiving.

Deep fjords lie below bare snow -capped mountains.

At the edge of one fjord, on a thin strip of land sandwiched between water

rock, I discovered the traces of ancient fields.

A thousand years ago, eking a living from this land must have been a constant

struggle.

Many of the Vikings came from this part of western Norway.

And when you come here and see just how little good land there is, then it's

easy to understand why some of them may have sailed away to places like Orkney

and Shetland.

The first stop for seafaring Vikings heading west were the islands of

and Orkney, the Northern Isles.

And there's plenty of evidence that the Vikings came this way.

Ruins at Jarlsop in Shetland show that Viking longhouses once stood here.

This Viking treasure, a symbol of wealth and power, was discovered buried in

Orkney.

There's even rare evidence of Viking writing.

On the walls of an ancient tomb in Orkney are the finest runic inscriptions

outside Scandinavia.

Graffiti of the sort you'd expect from Vikings.

Boasting of treasure and women.

And the locals still celebrate their Viking past.

On Shetland each January, they gather for the festival of Upheliar and burn a

Viking longship.

We know that the Vikings came to Shetland and Orkney, but we don't know

many.

Did Viking immigrants dominate these islands, or did most of the natives

To find out just how much Viking ancestry there is in Shetland... and in

rest of Britain and Ireland. The BBC have teamed up with geneticists from

University College London.

So far, they've identified distinctive DNA markers on the Y chromosome in the

Vikings' descendants, present -day Norwegian men.

The hope is that they'll find these same markers in men from Orkney and

Shetland.

Professor David Goldstein is the project leader.

I think the Scottish Islands are a very good place to start because we have such

good evidence, archaeological evidence and place name evidence, of Viking

activities in the Scottish Islands. So, in fact, it's really a good test.

If there are genetic signatures from Scandinavia in the British Isles

we ought to find them in the Scottish Islands.

Dr Jim Wilson, part of David Goldstein's team, is in Shetland to collect DNA

samples from members of the Family History Society.

Based on how many of them are found to have Norwegian ancestry, it should be

possible to estimate the scale of Viking settlement over 1 ,000 years ago.

Right. We have two consent forms to fill in. What's your name?

George Jacobson.

I think curiosity is the main thing. We're just interested to see if there is

any particular link with the Vikings or not.

We really don't know.

We're just...

Interested to see what you're going to come up with. I just open the swab tube

and you rub the cotton bud up and down on the inside of your cheek, five times

on each cheek.

And in the meantime, I'll put this preservative in the tube. Okay.

I think it's an excellent idea altogether because it offers really

proof as to genealogy and it can extend so much further back than the

Newton records and that sort of thing.

They're sampling 100 men in both Shetland and Orkney.

In order to lessen the distorting effects of recent population movement on

ancient genetic patterns, recruits must be able to prove that their father and

their father's father were born in the islands.

Ten? Five in Shetland.

Well, I'm a true Viking, definitely.

Any true Shetlander would be proud to find that they were of Viking blood

than Scottish blood.

Any more?

Sampling's going on at over 30 locations across Britain and Ireland.

It's the first time that such a large -scale genetics project has been used to

trace the movements of Vikings.

The Northern Isles will be a crucial test case for showing how well the

technique works.

One question that genetics can't answer, and that archaeologists argue about, is

what happened to the Picts, the people who were living in the Northern Isles at

the time that the Vikings arrived?

Did the Christian Picts stay on and live side by side with the new pagan

settler?

Or did the Vikings' arrival trigger a bloodbath?

Shetland archivist Brian Smith believes the evidence points to just one answer.

He's looked at all the place names in Shetland and Orkney and discovered that

% of them are of Scandinavian origin.

If the Vikings had...

coexisted amiably with the Pictish population of Shetland. If they'd

them, if they'd killed the men and married the women, there would be

place names in the islands today.

My only conclusion from the fact that there are no such names is that the

Vikings annihilated the native population of the islands.

In search of evidence to support his theory, Brian's examined the way place

names have changed in countries where there's been colonisation.

Sometimes names survive.

The United States of America is, of course, a place where the indigenous

population did leave some of its names.

The conclusion that we must reach, then, is that something ominous, something

awful happened in Shetland and in Orkney to prevent that happening.

He believes that 19th -century events in a corner of the British Empire mirror

the Vikings' colonisation of the Northern Isles.

The parallel that I like to draw is with Tasmania in the southern

hemisphere, where...

Over a relatively short period, the colonising white settlers got rid of the

local population.

Exactly the same thing happened to the place names. They virtually disappeared

in a very short period. We don't have native Tasmanian place names today in

same way we don't have native Pictish place names in Orkney and Shetland.

But is this view supported by archaeology?

The Picts are an elusive people who lived in northern Scotland and the

Isles over a thousand years ago.

They left a few clues behind them, in artefacts, carved stone, and in the

remains of their buildings.

Most Pictish houses are divided into small cells, but around the beginning of

the Viking Age, buildings like these vanish.

to be replaced by open -plan rectangular longhouses of a distinctly Scandinavian

type.

On the face of it, more support for the idea that the pits were wiped out by the

Vikings.

However, more recent discoveries in Orkney are now challenging this view.

25 years ago, Olwyn Owen's first archaeological excavation as a student,

the Brock of Birthday, where there'd once been an important Pictish

Pictish buildings were replaced by Viking longhouses, and within these, the

archaeologists came across something which would change ideas about what

happened when the Vikings arrived.

In the lower levels of the north houses, they began to find Pictish artefacts

mixed with north artefacts.

Obviously there had been a Pictish settlement here and there was an

intermingling of the cultural material from Picts and North.

and I think perhaps some of the earlier archaeologists were a bit surprised and

maybe even disappointed. They probably hoped they'd find a nice thick layer of

burnt debris and maybe some blood and gore to distinguish between the Pictish

levels and the North levels, but that isn't how it was at all.

And that was the first time, I think, that someone had been able to say so

clearly that there was no evidence of mass slaughter.

So the discovery of Pictish goods within Norse houses could suggest that at

least some Vikings traded with the Picts. But not everyone is convinced.

The fact that we find Pictish artefacts in Viking houses needn't necessarily

mean that there was peaceful coexistence between the two peoples.

It can also suggest that the Vikings took the...

Artifacts took the material from the houses of the previous population who

by then, in my opinion, been slaughtered.

It's difficult to imagine the sudden arrival of predatory Vikings intent on

grabbing land being anything other than violent.

But suppose contact developed gradually over a period of time.

Some archaeologists are now suggesting that this is exactly what happened, and

that consequently, the first contact with Norway may have been long before

Viking Age officially began, and may not have involved massacre.

A closer look at the reports of the first Viking

raid on Lindisfarne in England in 793 seemed to back this up.

The monk, Orquin of York, who wrote about the raid, poured scorn on his

Christians for what he saw as inappropriate familiarity towards the

Vikings.

Consider the luxurious dress and behaviour of their leaders and people.

See how you have wanted to copy the pagan way of cutting hair and beards.

Are these the people whose terror threatens us, yet you want to copy their

So maybe the attack was not by an unknown force, but by a people who'd

frequent visitors to Britain.

You have to remember where we are.

Orkney and Shetland are so close to the west coast of Norway.

So the idea that Vikings weren't travelling around in northern waters

before the Viking Age proper is supposed to have started, I think is a very

strange one. It seems to me highly likely that they were known in these

They weren't so frightening.

They weren't so alien.

But will this idea ever be more than speculation?

What archaeologists would really like to find in Britain... is some indisputable

evidence of early Viking contact.

And these bone combs, which date from the 7th century, may provide the very

first clue.

But only if scientists can tell whether they're red deer or reindeer.

This distinction is critical, because while red deer are native to Scotland,

reindeer only come from Scandinavia, the Viking homelands.

Dr Lubas Mirnova has analysed hundreds of bone combs from Viking Age and

medieval sites in Europe and has worked out ways of telling if they're made from

red deer or reindeer.

All antlers are porous in the centre, with a transition to compact solid

material at the surface, the useful part.

The transition is sharp in red deer antler and the porous material is rarely

used.

But in reindeer antler the transition is gradual.

and this semi -porous material is often used.

Reindeer combs also tend to look darker and rougher.

We asked Luba to examine a group of combs from Pictish sites across Orkney.

All of them were discovered in layers dated to the 600s.

If any of them are from reindeer, then it's proof of early contact with the

Vikings.

Luba begins with an examination of the surfaces.

So this is one of the typical pectish combs.

It's well polished, it's light in colour, and the surface

looks almost structureless.

Extremely compact, solid material with very, very fine threads

of fibres.

This would be red deer.

But there are several more Pictish combs to be tested.

It's a different type of Pictish comb, double -sided Pictish comb.

It's also very dark, very brown, very woody in appearance, very rough surface

with little polish.

Let's see if we can find any.

Transition areas.

Beneath the surface of the left edge of the comb, Luber has identified a semi

-porous region.

That is one of the rare examples when you are absolutely sure,

or as absolutely sure as is possible to be, that you are dealing with reindeer

antler.

Luber's examination.

They found that several of the Pictish combs are made of reindeer antler.

This is the first tangible evidence for early contact, perhaps peaceful trading

between Picts and Vikings.

Although it doesn't prove that Viking contact was always peaceful.

So what was the impact of the Vikings at this time?

With no historical records in Scotland, we have to rely totally on

archaeological evidence.

Dr James Barrett hopes to find some answers at a newly discovered site on

island of Westray in Orkney, where it appears that the Vikings took over one

the original settlements.

He's been searching for clues in ancient rubbish dumps or middens.

So here we have about 50 centimetres of the Viking Age bin dominated by fish

bone, these pieces sticking out all over the place, also a marine shell.

But here we have a major break into this material, which has very

little fish bone in it, a lot less shell, and the majority of the bone

there is mammal bone, often in quite large pieces.

It's incredible that you can see the point in time when the Vikings arrived.

by just looking at the change in refuse.

And close by on the shore, waves have exposed another midden and another side

Viking life.

It contains even more fish bone.

It's just incredible, actually.

You see a lot of shell. The shell is almost certainly bait, but in fact it's

fish that are really important. What you have are lots of skull bone and then

the vertebrae from the very front of the fish, ones like this.

And this is a butchery pattern which we know from medieval depictions of dried

or dried and salted fish.

So they're chucking the heads away. There.

and drying the rest of the fish.

That's certainly the likelihood, yes. Now the question is, why is there this

explosion in the use of marine resources?

There's no apparent increase in the consumption of fish.

based on the dietary evidence from the human bone.

So what are they doing with all this food? The most likely explanation to my

mind is that this material is going elsewhere, and really that it's part of

commercial revolution that happens at the end of the Viking Age, the late

Age, and into the Middle Ages, where trade in commodities becomes important.

James's unusual sight tells a story about the entire Viking period.

from how their arrival influenced diet to the establishment of big business.

It seems that Orkney was an important Viking colony, but can we tell anything

about what these new colonials were like?

Burials can provide vital evidence, because, as part of their pagan rituals,

Vikings were often buried with treasured possessions for the afterlife.

A few years ago, an unusual discovery was made on the island of Sanday in

Orkney.

A farmer came across human bones on the beach.

He thought they might be the remains of a sailor lost at sea, and so he left

them there.

He also noticed a curious metal object, like the top of an old car battery, and

took it home.

But he died before anyone realised the significance of what he'd found.

Three years later...

a colleague of Olwyn Owen's decided to investigate the farmers of Dory.

She'd been told there were bones coming out of the cliff at Scar, so she went

along and had a look for the bones.

And when she got there, she found boat rivets as well, and she knew what Viking

boat rivets looked like, and she realised that maybe there was more to

grave than met the eye.

Could the rivets be part of a Viking boat burial?

Archaeologists would need to excavate the site.

And soon, because within days, the first winter storms would hit the island.

In the first few weeks of the excavation, the conditions were almost

indescribable. They were dreadful. There were howling gales and winds and rain

driving horizontally.

We have some wonderful pictures of one of the diggers being almost overwhelmed

by what looks like a tidal wave coming across the site.

It really was terrible.

For weeks, the digging team battled against the worsening weather.

I was in Edinburgh and I got a telephone message to say that the outline of a

boat shape in stones had appeared in the sand and it was marvellous. My heart

was pounding. I believed then it was a boat, a boat burial.

On hearing that they'd found the rare remains of a Viking boat...

Olwyn hurried to the site to supervise excavation of what lay inside.

There were three bodies, a man, a woman and a child.

They also had with them a rich variety of grave goods, including some quite

spectacular ones.

And they're not just objects in museum cases, they're like a window into Viking

life.

In this incredible grave, the man was buried with a sword, two lead weights, a

quiver of arrows, a bone comb and 22 carved whalebone gaming pieces.

He didn't have any ordinary domestic tools or utensils as you'd expect.

They may have been lost to the sea because his part of the grave had been

badly damaged by sea erosion.

But he did have the set of gaming pieces, which were lovely. So on the

the finds that survived in the grave, he was a warrior with plenty of leisure

time.

The woman was buried with possessions that included a round spindle whorl and

pair of shears, a needle case,

A small sickle.

And a bone comb.

And something really special.

The most exciting thing you'll find, in the ground at least, has to be the

whalebone plaque.

And the wonderful thing about the plaque was that it was lying face down in the

sand at the bottom of the burial chamber.

It took a couple of days before it could be lifted, and the back of the plaque

is rather boring, and we had no idea how beautiful the front was going to be, or

indeed if it was well preserved.

And when it was turned over, you could hear this audible gasp of intake of

breath. And it really was in superb

condition. The moment it was turned over, you could see what a fantastic

it was.

The plaque may have been used as a sort of ironing board, but it's so

beautifully decorated that it must surely have been a greatly treasured

possession.

And another discovery would show just how wealthy this woman was.

A beautiful gilt bronze brooch.

Her brooch is absolutely gorgeous.

It's quite rare amongst Viking brooches.

There's only about... ten or twelve from anywhere, and every part of the surface

of the brooch was decorated with ornament and particularly prominent are

almost like cat masks, little faces, and so it was a really, really luxurious

and opulent object which she must have taken care of.

But in the boat, amongst these signs of wealth and status, was the evidence of

what may have been a tragedy.

While the woman was elderly, in her 70s, the man was aged about 30 and the child

was only about 10.

We'll never know what happened to these Viking settlers in their new land.

And new finds keep coming up on this tiny island.

A particularly surprising one was made by the landlord of the local pub when he

was repairing a neighbour's wall.

I was just building the wall and picked up the stone.

And I thought it was something unusual.

And I gave it to the kids then to take up to the school, to the headmaster, to

have a look at.

Robbie had discovered a Viking rune stone.

Translated, it revealed the name of Arskatla, the man who probably carved

Such a rare discovery aroused national interest.

We kept it under our bed for a while, but then the Crown claimed it was

trove, so then we had to end up having to hand it over to the museum.

But we got the local community council to back us, and we got it back in to

Sandy.

A lot of people do drop in by to see it, and it's nice to have it in the island.

So, having taken Orkney and Shetland so convincingly and settled there, where

would the Vikings go next?

Well, mainland Scotland might seem like the obvious choice, but archaeology, our

main source of information for this period of Dark Age history, has provided

remarkably little evidence of the Vikings being there.

But 200 miles southwest of Orkney, on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, new

evidence of Viking settlement is starting to emerge.

Neil Sharples has discovered the remains of a large building, long and narrow

with a central hearth, a Viking longhouse.

We're actually standing on top of the main hearth. And you can see here where

Elaine's working,

orange layers that are coming up in this charcoal this is the burning peat and

that defines the hearth area and is that quite long and thin as well yeah we've

got six pieces of it exposed that way yeah and it goes on behind us you can

behind us the top of it is exposed here and again this is a very sort of

distinctive feature of the viking house and it gives you some idea of sort of um

communal living conditions so people would come into houses and sit around

hearth And they would tell the sagas. It would be formed by people talking

around these long central hearths.

The size of the hearth and the building that it lies in suggest that this was

the most important house in the settlement.

But a closer look at the way it was built shows that it was not a standard

Viking longhouse.

One of the interesting things about this house, as you immediately notice as we

came into it, was that it's subterranean.

Now, originally the wall probably stood...

you know about this height and then the roof rafters would come in here and i

suspect this about here would be the original ground level and it's all been

into and the walls have been placed against it all you'd see is the roof

out above it building sunken houses was a tradition native to the outer hebrides

but buildings like this are also found in iceland so it appears that the

took these traditions from the hebrides to their colonies in the north atlantic

There's an enormous range of artefacts from the site, including rare pieces of

Viking artwork.

And yet, it's this unattractive, very crude attempt at pottery that tells us

more about these Viking settlers.

Because Vikings traditionally didn't make pottery.

Instead, they used vessels carved from soapstone, a soft stone found in Norway

and also Shetland.

The discovery of pottery strongly suggests they were taking up new ideas

native Hebrideans.

This shirt here, this is what we would call platterware, and it's a kind of

baking plate. Very distinctive, you have this grass -marked surface, which is

how they produced it. They lay a flat slab of pottery on some kind of

matting, and then they...

puncture holes and press it down with their fingertips.

On this surface, you can see the fingernails where they pressed it down,

little puncture marks, and then they produced some kind of baking plate.

That's the impression of a Viking fingernail there, is it?

Yeah, that's it, Viking fingernails.

But alongside these attempts at a new and unfamiliar technology, the Viking

craftsmen were still making their traditional Scandinavian goods, and with

skill.

You can see here, you've got an almost complete antler. And you can see this

segment here is actually a bit of the main beam of the antler. And they've

chopped it off, sawn it off.

And this is the sort of beginning of the process of working down a piece of

antler to make their composite comb, which you see here. Very nice comb

And they sort of chop it down to get sort of bluffly rectangular pieces like

this. And these are eventually going to be worked down to these little pieces

here. And this piece here...

is almost the very final stage of the piece that will slot in there, and it

be riveted by putting a spacer plate on there, and then they will cut the teeth

after it's all been riveted together.

In a nearby barn, Neil's team have been sorting fragments of fishbone sieved

from the soil around the settlement.

If you look at this tray here,

What we've got here are the residues from the very fine sieving. And if you

at some of the stuff here, some of these vertebrae have turned out to be from

herring. And it seems as though there's a very substantial herring fishing.

this kind of herring fishing requires organization you know several families

coming together pulling their resources several boats go out and you might catch

absolutely nothing for a week and then suddenly the herring will come and

have thousands millions perhaps of herring coming out and so what do you do

them you can't eat them all yourself there's only so many herring a man can

so you've got to start trading if you're herring fishing i think then you're

trading

This site, protected for centuries by its very isolation, is one of the

rural Viking settlements ever found in Britain.

On the Hebrides, as in Orkney and Shetland, archaeology is showing another

to the Vikings, a settler adapting to live in a new land.

The northern and western isles of Scotland provided the Vikings with good

farming, And good fishing.

But was that all they came for? Or was there another reason why these islands

were so important to them?

Maybe they provided the ideal staging post on the route to a much bigger

The next stage on the sea road was the short fail to Ireland, a country full of

whelpy monasteries that the Vikings knew very well.

They had, after all, ravaged the country with their early raids.

But was Ireland seen only as a source of plunder?

Here, we don't have to rely on archaeology alone, as the Irish annals

with the best records of Viking activity from this time.

The world's leading expert on the annals is Professor Donica O 'Corain, and he

believes they tell us when Viking settlement of Ireland began.

There are two entries in the annals.

One is about the Vikings on Lough Neagh in 1840.

And the first entry in the following year is, Heathens still on

Lough Neagh.

And for the winter, between 1840 and 1841, the entry in the annals says,

Heathens still in Dublin.

So we know that the Irish annalists note that they're... staying over and

not going home as they should in the winter.

And this is the beginning of settlement.

The annals report that the Vikings in Ireland made their camps in long forks,

fortified bases close to rivers.

But finding any archaeological remains of these early settlements has proved

difficult.

Now, though...

Ned Kelly believes that he's found the first good evidence for an Irish

longfort.

He was drawn here to Atlungcard on the River Shannon after hearing about the

discovery of Viking Age artefacts.

When I came here first, I didn't know what the site was and it puzzled me

because it didn't look like any typical Irish archaeological monument.

that I'd seen before.

We have a raised area here and that was originally surrounded by a ditch and a

bank outside it. So this would be a citadel and outside of that we have a D

-shaped enclosure which is running from this little stream, curving round to the

river again.

And as you can see, you have a fairly impenetrable marsh.

on this side. And that's particularly interesting because the references to

forts describe the Scandinavians building D -shaped enclosures with their

to a river and surrounded by marshy ground.

So it fits in perfectly.

But Ned's conviction is not shared by everyone.

I think the initial reaction was quite scathing. People said, oh, you know,

these things don't exist.

What's a lung fort anyway?

And my response to that was, well, you know,

if these sites aren't long forts, what are they?

I'm convinced that's what this site is and that there are many others like it

be found still.

And I agree with Ned.

All of the bits of evidence that I've been shown seem to point in one

Its position, right next to the river, defended on one side by an earthwork

and enclosure with a marsh beyond it. The 10th century finds that were found

within the enclosure.

All of these things seem to come together to point to the fact that this

a Viking long fort.

The annals suggest that the most important fort is in Dublin.

And it's here that we find the highest concentration of Viking dead.

Between the mid -1800s and the 1930s, workmen in Dublin uncovered up to 100

Viking burials.

Most of them were found before the development of modern archaeological

recording, and it's taken years for Stephen Harrison at the National Museum

Ireland to sort out all the artefacts.

There's a distinct contrast with Viking graves from the Northern Isles.

Those from around Dublin contained many swords, the largest collection of Viking

weaponry outside Scandinavia.

This is the most beautiful sword, isn't it? It is one of the most special ones

in the whole collection.

This is definitely right up there, I think. It's certainly one of my

if nothing else. But it's not the only one. There are actually five very

elaborately decorated swords.

They were all found in the railway cuttings at Kilmainham in 1845.

As, indeed, was this rather more plain sword, which is rather more typical, I'm

afraid, of Viking swords.

In this era, this is much less highly decorated and rather more functional.

But why is it bent in two?

This is a ritual which in Scandinavia is normally associated with cremation. You

very often find the artefacts buried have actually been subjected to an

heat and then bent or damaged in some way.

We don't know what this practice meant.

It may have been the symbolic killing of the weapon or simply done to prevent it

being reused by a grave robber.

Do you have any real favourite artefacts amongst these collections?

This amber brooch here.

If you look at it, you can see that it has actually been cut from a larger

object. You can see that the edges are quite definite here and here, but here

and there, the edges are actually very rough.

But the whole thing has then been converted into a brooch.

So we don't actually know what object it was cut from, but it was certainly

being used as a brooch at the time it was placed in the Viking grave.

But what about identifying the objects themselves?

I mean, can you always tell exactly what they are? I mean, what, for example, is

that rather strange -looking thing?

Well, we actually do know what this is. This is actually a glass linen smoother.

And if you turn it round this way, you can actually see the marks on the point

when the glass is still fluid.

It actually came from a woman's grave at Kilmainham.

It was found in a small gravel pit in the area in 1848.

Taken together.

These discoveries tell us that Dublin must have been a major centre of Viking

power. We're made even more aware and more conscious of the wealth of Viking

graves in Dublin, which are a reflection of the wealth of Dublin and its status

and its importance in the 9th century.

In the years that followed, the Vikings would strengthen their presence in

Dublin, which takes its name from the black pool where they first moored their

ships.

Under the Vikings, the long fort expanded to become Ireland's first town,

streets still followed by those of today's booming city.

And these Viking roots are still celebrated by Dubliners, if not always

most authentic way.

Before we go, I've got to teach you how to do the Viking roar. Vikings were

great vocal men.

The Viking roar comes from down here somewhere.

And it goes something like this. Put your hands above your head.

On the count of three. One, two, three.

It was a bit half -hearted. Come on, try it again.

One, two, three.

Evidence for the wealth of the Irish Vikings is found not only in their

but in what they buried across the whole of Ireland.

Silver.

Treasure that was hidden over a thousand years ago and never reclaimed.

Archaeologist Dr John Sheehan has been trying to explain why the Vikings buried

so much silver in Ireland.

We have huge quantities of silver and silver hoards compared to those found in

Britain, and indeed compared to those found in some of the Scandinavian

countries. For instance, we have a lot more hoards than are found in Norway.

In total, to date, there are 140 recorded silver hoards in Ireland.

So why is there so much more silver in Ireland, then?

The reason really is to do with the nature of Viking settlement in Ireland.

If you look at Scotland, or indeed England, it tended to be farming

In Ireland, the Vikings settle in towns, and towns survive through economic

activities. Trade, in other words. And the Irish Viking towns grow very

and silver is an expression of that wealth.

Judging from these hordes, the Vikings were making fortunes.

But the silver also reveals the true extent of their trading networks.

It's coming from pretty far afield. Some of it certainly is coming from Anglo

-Saxon England in the form of coin, which has then been melted down to

ingots and ornaments.

But there's also evidence to indicate that large quantities of it are coming

from the Arabic world, and the silver has been imported into Scandinavia, up

great Russian rivers.

and from there it's been redistributed across Scandinavia and to the West.

But what was it in Ireland that attracted so much Viking commerce?

The usual trade items that the Irish dealt with throughout most

periods would have been animal hides and wool, for instance.

But there's also little doubt that a very significant proportion of the trade

was in the form of slaves.

There's a hint of the scale of this trade in the Annals of Ulster, from 871.

The chronicler writes about the Viking rulers of Dublin returning from an

expedition to Scotland.

Im Lab and Im Mar came back to Dublin from Scotland with 200 ships and they

brought with them in captivity to Ireland a great prey of Angles, Britons

Picts.

Now that must have been a very large hall of slaves and they were being

back to Dublin because it must have been functioning primarily as a sort of a

slave emporium within the Western Viking world.

The Viking farmsteads are characterised by their huge size, and slave labour

would have been needed to operate those to their maximum efficiency.

The likelihood is that they were shipped on perhaps to Arabic Spain, but

certainly over to Iceland, to the Viking farmsteads in Scotland, and probably

back to Scandinavia itself.

And there are even objects that could have been used in this trade.

We have slave chains.

They are large collars which are big enough to go around a person's neck and

attached to them a long chain, exactly similar to the sort of slave chains

are associated with 18th century African slavery, for instance.

So could slavery have been the main attraction for the Vikings on their

down the sea road?

It seems that they'd take any opportunity to make money, whether it

looting, farming or trading.

And it didn't seem to matter whether the trade was in fish or slaves.

In my journey through these islands, I feel like I've come closer than ever to

the Vikings.

But did they really settle here in large numbers?

The answer may lie in the genetic make -up of today's population.

Professor David Goldstein's team are still collecting samples from across

Britain and Ireland.

But they're starting the analysis with the data from Orkney and Shetland.

When we carry out just a very simple analysis asking for those chromosomal

we only find in Norway, how much of them do we see in the Scottish Islands? We

actually see quite a lot.

When we look at Shetland, when we look at Orkney, we see something just under

% of the chromosomes.

are found in Norway, but we can't find them in the indigenous population.

So it looks actually quite likely that those chromosomal types have a Norwegian

origin. So we right away see a clear indication of substantial Norwegian

input into those islands.

That's quite a hefty figure, isn't it, really? Is it for a first stage? It is a

high figure, and in fact, probably in the end, when we've carried out a more

complete statistical analysis, the figure will only go up, because those

types that look pretty clearly to be Norwegian in origin.

Other chromosomal types may turn out, in fact, to be Norwegian in origin, just

you can't see it clearly.

The preliminary results from the northern isles of Oakley and Shetland.

provide for the first time clear evidence that people in Britain share

with the Vikings.

Fascinating. It was really good. I think it was really interesting.

I would say that we definitely should be Scandinavian, more than Scots.

Those are all Vikings that have.

I think these results are really exciting.

I'm quite surprised, actually, that you're getting such good results along

sea road that the Vikings took from Scandinavia through Orkney and Shetland.

You're getting what seems to me a significant genetic impact on the

even at this distance in time.

There's still lots of sample collecting and analysis to carry out before the

precise meaning of these results becomes clear.

But it now looks certain that some secrets of our Dark Age past will be

by the blood of the Vikings.