S8 Ep767: Eleanor Barraclough notes the Viking Age is often said to end in 1066 with the death of Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge — a legendary figure who served as an imperial bodyguard in Constantinople before returning to Norway to claim the Eng
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchelor, continuing my conversation with Professor Eleanor Baraklov, who is an historian, a BBC broadcaster, as well as working at the Baas Spy University. |
| 0:12.0 | The book is Embers of the Hands. It talks about the Viking Age, roughly 750 AD to 1100 AD, but both sides, there's no certainty here, |
| 0:24.0 | because the magic of the Viking Age collides with the magic of the Christian conversion process. |
| 0:31.0 | We're now going to the geography, and the geography includes a big battle |
| 0:38.4 | a big battle |
| 0:39.6 | and a and a graveyard |
| 0:42.2 | that is a way of talking about the endings we begin with the big battle in ten sixty six |
| 0:48.8 | harold |
| 0:50.1 | of england |
| 0:51.4 | harold of norway and william |
| 0:54.0 | of normandy. |
| 0:55.0 | We need to establish Eleanor that Normandy is as Norse as anything in England, correct? |
| 1:01.0 | Yeah, absolutely. |
| 1:03.0 | Rallo was the founder of Normandy. |
| 1:06.0 | So we're talking about the Vikings at war with the Vikings, the traditions of all. |
| 1:11.6 | Yes, pretty much. Yeah, so Norman literally means Northmen. |
| 1:15.6 | What's interesting is it's a bit like when we were talking about further east. |
| 1:19.6 | What often happens when the North settled in an area is that they assimilate culturally really quickly. |
| 1:25.6 | And so by the time of William the Conqueror, as he, |
| 1:29.1 | you know, is shortly to become in our narrative, they are not, they're not Norse in that way. |
| 1:35.9 | They don't speak the language. But having said that, if you look at the Bayo Tapestry and how |
| 1:40.9 | the Normans are depicted there, their hairstyles are the hairstyles that we |
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