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Hello and welcome to a brand new series of Empire.

And as we hinted in the last episode, this is the first mini-series in our collection on the history of the places on President Trump's shopping list.

And so we're starting with Greenland.

We're looking at the different waves of colonisation of Greenland from Vikings to American air bases.

So look, there is history in them there hills.

In this episode, though, we're going to go all the way back to the 10th century,

and we are going to ask, how did the Vikings actually get to Greenland to begin with?

And we are joined by Viking expert, Eleanor Baraklough, to explore just that.

We should give a bit of Eleanor's remarkable biography, which is contained in her books. She describes

herself as someone who's pursued her research into the ice flows of the far north and west

under the midnight sun with a caribou hunter. I love that. And on the way, she writes,

I've been knighted with a walrus penis bone. And that has to be the first time we've had a warrous

penis bone on this podcast, in the Royal and Ancient Polar Bair Society. And we need to know a

bit more about that before we get any further. A little bit more about that, please, Eleanor. I mean,

you know, it's not nothing to do with, you know, Realpolitik, but I want to know. Why did this happen to you? Well, this was actually in Arctic Norway,

to be fair. This isn't in Green. The Caribbean, the Caribbean, but we were doing a radio

documentary about the supernatural North and this Norse explorer called Oktur, who comes from the

time of essentially the Great Heathen army when sort of the Norsese attacking the Anglo-Saxons and it's all getting very messy in England.

Great Heathen Army being the army that we talked about on a previous episode of Kat Jarman and her Repton little bit of Amber, which came from exactly.

...