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I'm Hello and welcome to the history of Vikings.

Today I'm so excited to be joined by my dear friend Hilbert, who has been on the podcast before.

Of course, the creator behind the acclaimed history YouTube channel, History with Hilbert, going on something like 160,000 subscribers.

And Hilbert is so passionate about history and many different time periods

in history. His YouTube channel, you can find videos from everything about the discovery and

settlement of Iceland to the Zulu War and the Spanish Civil War, and his videos are just

so well made, and they're so insightful and filled with knowledge. And I was a fan of that YouTube channel long before I started my podcast. So it's a real treat to be speaking with you again today, Hilbert. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Oh, thank you for the lovely introduction. It's always an honor to be here and I'm really pleased that we can have another chat about Vikings.

It feels like a long time ago now that we first had this discussion, but I'm looking forward to it again.

Me too. Me too. It was. It was one of the first episodes of this podcast. But you know, you recently made a video about the Viking Age, and it was titled, Why Did the Viking Age Begin?

And this is a question which we haven't often asked on this podcast, so I'm excited to discuss it with you today.

If one is to ask that question, why did the Viking Age begin?

How should we go about answering it?

How is it that the Vikings, you know, during the 800s or 793, whatever date you want to consider the start of the Viking age,

how is it that the Vikings were able to emerge for the first time, the Scandinavians, were able to emerge onto the main stage of Europe?

So I think what's important to ask before we ask the question in question is to ask what we

actually mean by the Viking Age because it's important to know what we're talking about.

What's different from, say, before the Viking Age begins to during the Viking Age?

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