Viking history for sleep, the funny version: what Viking life was actually like, from the farm to the longship. Subtitles are on: tap CC.

A thousand years ago, Erik the Red got kicked out of Iceland for killing people, found a giant frozen island, and named it Greenland so people would want to move there. It worked.

That's the Vikings. Most of them were farmers with a summer side hustle. A Viking named Halfdan carved his name into the Hagia Sophia. An earl was killed by the tooth of a man he'd already beheaded. Iceland banned love poems. Thor put on a wedding dress to get his hammer back. A squirrel carries insults up and down the world tree. And the first European to see America didn't bother getting out of the boat.

Plus Viking home life (cows inside the house, a cat on every ship, the words you still use), and a Myths & Legends chapter: horned helmets, drinking from skulls, burning ships pushed out to sea, and the fake Vinland Map.

It starts lively and slowly gets calmer, and it ends with how the Vikings explained the night. So get comfortable.

More stories to fall asleep to, back to back (the whole playlist): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa8nXWTNR3d4

Chapters
0:00 Greenland was a scam
1:15 Viking Was a Job
2:25 The Raid That Started It
3:37 The Ships
4:49 Paying Them to Go Away
6:00 They Founded Dublin
7:03 Halfdan Was Here
8:16 The Cleanest or the Dirtiest?
9:35 The Emperor's Wine-Bags
10:46 A Ring From the Far Side of the World
12:02 The Berserkers
13:20 The Nicknames
14:36 Killed by a Tooth
15:49 Decorated Teeth
16:42 Swords With Names
18:01 The Lloyds Bank Fossil
19:04 The Parliament on the Rocks
20:16 The Last King of York
21:24 The Duel on the Island
22:33 The Love Poem Law
23:25 The Insult Pole
24:39 Viking Sports
25:49 Viking Divorce
26:54 The Warrior in Grave 581
28:03 Odin's Eye
29:17 Mimir's Head
30:05 Thor in a Wedding Dress
31:43 Thor Goes Fishing
33:07 Thor's Goats
34:19 Thor Drinks the Ocean
36:02 Loki and the Horse
37:33 The Valkyries
38:42 The Gossip Squirrel
39:49 Freyja's Cats
40:53 Your Days of the Week
42:05 Baldr and the Mistletoe
43:30 Why the Earth Shakes
44:39 The Fingernail Ship
45:50 After the End
46:55 The Man Who Named Iceland
48:26 Erik the Red's Real Estate
49:41 Didn't Get Out of the Boat
50:47 Leif Goes to America
52:07 And Then They Left
53:22 Greenland Goes Quiet
54:45 Iceland Votes Under a Cloak
56:12 The Great Heathen Army
57:42 The Fake Funeral
59:06 Rollo and the King's Foot
1:00:30 Come Rule Over Us
1:01:37 Navigating Without a Compass
1:03:04 What the Vikings Ate
1:04:29 The Longhouse
1:05:47 The Viking Board Game
1:06:59 Viking Kids
1:08:05 Skiing Gods
1:09:22 Viking Fashion
1:10:36 Cats on Board
1:11:46 One Mold, Two Gods
1:12:45 The Ship in the Ground
1:14:01 The Memorial Stones
1:15:10 Words You Got From Them
1:16:31 The Evening Stories
1:17:39 The Names in Iceland
1:18:46 Myths & Legends
1:19:22 Myth: They Couldn't Write
1:20:30 Myth: Drinking From Skulls
1:21:34 Myth: The Burning Ship
1:22:47 Myth: Only Valhalla
1:23:58 Myth: Huge Vikings
1:24:46 Myth: The Fake Map and Stone
1:26:08 Myth: Was Ragnar Real?
1:27:03 The Last Viking
1:28:23 The Night Rides Across the Sky

How this one was made: the channel wrote the script and checked it against the sources below before recording. Anything that's only a legend is labelled as one. The pictures are public-domain artworks and photographs from The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Open Access) and Wikimedia Commons. Music: original ambient score.

Sources
- Snorri Sturluson, the Prose Edda; the Poetic Edda: Thor's wedding, Ratatoskr, Baldr, Naglfar, Nott
- The Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders: Greenland, Bjarni, Leif and Vinland
- Ibn Fadlan's account of the Rus (921–922)
- The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Alcuin's letters: Lindisfarne, 793
- Orkneyinga saga: Sigurd the Mighty and the fatal tooth
- Grágás, the medieval Icelandic law book
- Hedenstierna-Jonson et al. (2017): the Birka warrior grave
- Parks Canada: L'Anse aux Meadows
- National Museum of Denmark: the Trendgården cross and hammer mould
- Museum of the Viking Age, Oslo: the Oseberg ship
- Yale University (2021): the Vinland Map forgery findings

#vikings #vikinghistory #norsemythology #history #sleep