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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator.

This week my guest is Dr. Kat Jarman. And Kat's new book is called River Kings,

a new history of Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads,

which is wider than we thought Vikings may have gone.

But Kat, it begins with something very small indeed, doesn't it?

It's a single carnelian bead sets you off on this substantial work of scholarship. Tell me about that.

Yes, it's right. It's probably a bit surprising how that's very small object and try and tell that very big story.

But that was part of what I wanted to do. I wanted to get that contrast between how we are learning so much from very, very small objects.

You don't necessarily need a huge, big and important source,

but actually something quite unexpected can take you in a different direction.

And actually, this speed in itself as I start the book with did start me on that new way of thinking as well very much,

because it kind of represented something that hadn't really thought

about and that was exactly the sort of direct contact between the Vikings that we're familiar with

here in Britain and those who came and raid and attacked monasteries in that very traditional story

and those who went all the way to the east and all the very large trading networks that

extended all the way to the Silk Road. So that, very large trading networks that extended all the way

to the Silk Road. So that bead really very much started the story for me, which is why I wanted

to start the book with it as well. Well, tell us about this bead. It was found in the UK in

Repton, is that right? That's right, yes. So Repton is probably one of their better known Viking Age

sites in England. It was the winter camp of the Viking Great Army that sort of rewarded around the country from the eight 60s onwards.

And the site was, it's very much the kind of traditional Viking picture, you have an attack on a monastery, you have a desecration of old royal burials, and also excavations in the

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