Who were the Vikings, really? This animated history follows the Viking Age from the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 to the battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066: longships and navigation, berserkers, Odin, Thor and Valhalla, the Great Heathen Army and Alfred the Great, the sieges of Paris, Normandy, the Rus and the Varangian Guard in Constantinople, shieldmaidens, Iceland and its parliament, Erik the Red and Greenland, Leif Erikson's Vinland, Harald Bluetooth, Cnut, Harald Hardrada, and the vanishing of Norse Greenland.

Plus the missing chapters: why Vikings didn't wear horned helmets, why the English complained they bathed too much, the words and weekdays English took from Old Norse, the Viking who faked his own funeral to sack the "wrong Rome", the Viking graffiti in Hagia Sophia, the exact year Vikings were cutting wood in North America (1021), the replica ship that sailed to Chicago in 1893, the Kensington Runestone in Minnesota, and how Bluetooth got its name.

What surprised you most? Tell us in the comments and where you're watching from.

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:03 1 · Who Were the Vikings?
2:38 2 · The Day It Began
3:53 3 · Masters of the Sea
5:10 4 · Horns, Baths and Berserkers
8:10 5 · Gods of the North
9:28 6 · The Great Heathen Army
12:28 7 · Paris and Normandy
14:42 8 · The Road East
17:06 9 · Shieldmaidens
18:04 10 · Into the Atlantic
19:45 11 · Vinland
23:01 12 · Kings and Christ
24:52 13 · The Last Viking
26:43 14 · The Vanishing
27:29 15 · The Viking Legacy
29:32 What It All Means

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Sources: Britannica; Parks Canada (L'Anse aux Meadows); Kuitems et al., Nature (2021); Hedenstierna-Jonson et al., American Journal of Physical Anthropology (2017, Birka warrior); Margaryan et al., Nature (2020, Viking DNA); British Museum (Lewis Chessmen); National Museum of Denmark; Smithsonian.
Animation: original characters created for this channel. Narration: AI voice.

#History #Vikings #AnimatedHistory