Hello everyone and welcome back to the Viking Age podcast. My name is Lee and this is

Eastern Way 4, Gamaulah Obstala. This is part 4 of our series, covering the Viking Age in the East.

Before we get started today, I would just like to quickly apologize for the long gap between episodes.

I had a bit of bad health throughout October.

Nothing serious just a sinus infection that wouldn't quite go away. And so that's thrown a bit of a wrench into all my plans, including the podcast.

So I hope the weight was worth it, and hopefully I'll be feeling 100% soon.

And apologies if my voice is a little strange today, I'm definitely still on the road to recover.

For any patrons out there listening, the also much delayed patrons only episode should be released by the time this episode goes out.

So if you haven't had a chance to listen to it yet, be sure to go and check out the Patreon feed, and that show should be available there, along with this episode.

Apologies again about the long delay on all of this, but nature does its thing I suppose.

If you're not a patron and are interested in beginning a series on the Roman

Iron Age in Scandinavia, you can find all the information about how to sign up and

the benefits that you'll get over on our website at bikingage podcast.com. And finally, here is our standard reminder that this series is intended to be

listened to in order. The episodes build upon one another and if this is your first time listening, it might be a bit jarring to just jump right in with all sorts of names and places you're not yet familiar with. So if you haven't yet had a chance to listen to our earlier

episodes, I highly recommend that you hit pause on this episode and go back and catch up before continuing. The first

episode of this series is entitled Eastern Way 1. All right. Has everyone all

caught up? Excellent. Let's get on to the history. Oh, So in our last time out, we spoke about the decline, unrest in reorganization, which gripped the north throughout the 500 CE.

During these tumultuous decades, long inhabited settlements were abandoned, and some new homes and villages were then rebuilt at nearby sites.

At the same time burial patterns shifted and acres of perfectly good arable land were left to lie fallow.

In some places, formerly cultivated lands were left untouched for so long that forests began to reclaim them.

It would be decades or even centuries before some areas were re-cleared, planted, and settled.

Unsurprisingly, there is little agreement about what exactly caused this abandonment

...