Hello and welcome to Stories of Scotland in this wonderful winter season themed on ideas of the north.

I'm Annie, a frosty archivist inside a wardrobe.

And I'm Jenny, a 23 and a half metre watertight Viking longship.

And in this episode, we're going back to Scandinavian Scotland

to explore the Norse mythology of the north of Scotland.

These are the stories brought by Viking warriors and north settlers who held significant

control in the north and west of Scotland in the medieval period. Yes, so we have varying degrees

of Norse power in medieval Scotland and the really famous examples being Shetland and Orkney,

which were under Norse rule until 1472, and these

islands are now tremendously proud of their Viking heritage. However, there were Norse strongholds

all along the north and west coast of Scotland, as we can see by the scattering of Norse place

names. And with the Norse place names.

And with the Norse and the Vikings, we see some really brilliant mythology developing around the coasts of the Atlantic.

Scandinavian legends mix with those of the Gauls to create some very surreal worlds.

So let's unravel some of these meat-soaked superstitions.

They're very sticky.

Okay, so our first Norse mythology is a bit of an origin story of the Vikings coming to Shetland.

Now, this is a mixture of the old mythology and a kind of folk history, and it blends together to give you a wonderful, fictional account of the Vikings in the north of Scotland.

Just because it's a bit fantastical doesn't mean it has to be fictional, Annie.

Just because you don't believe in magic doesn't mean it's not swirling around us all the time.

Well, we will start in reality journey.

We're in Shetland in the late Iron Age. So this is roughly between 400 and 800

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