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00:01The mysterious Ringfort of Trelleborg.
00:05An extraordinary monument built by a people who have faded into legend.
00:11The Vikings.
00:12Trelleborg still has so many secrets. There's so much more we don't know.
00:17The Vikings are famous for being marauding pirates who plundered without mercy.
00:22But why did their reign of terror come to an end?
00:26Now, new investigations could reveal the answer.
00:31Did this mighty fortress spark a revolution that changed the traditional Viking way of life forever?
00:38They really do tell us an awful lot about the Viking society at the time.
00:43And was the most famous and feared of all the Viking kings, Herald Bluetooth, behind the building of these magnificent
00:50forts?
00:51To uncover the Vikings deepest secrets,
00:56We will deconstruct this great monument layer by layer.
01:02We will dive inside its high walls and beneath the frozen ground to unearth the astonishing story of the end
01:12of the Viking Age.
01:19Trelleborg in Denmark is a mighty but mysterious medieval megastructure.
01:25An enormous circular fort, built by a people whose name still strikes fear into the heart.
01:32The Vikings.
01:35More than 1200 years ago, these legendary warriors terrorized medieval Europe.
01:41Sailing from icy Scandinavia to raid and pillage.
01:46But Trelleborg's true purpose remains a mystery.
01:50Why did a people better known as seaborne raiders and traders build such a gigantic structure?
01:56When people first found Trelleborg, they couldn't believe what they saw.
02:00It was nothing like what you expected from the Vikings.
02:04Now, new discoveries are starting to reveal why this enormous fort, and others like it, suddenly appeared at the height
02:11of the Viking Age, in the late 10th century.
02:15Did massive monuments like this herald a transformation in Viking society that brought almost 300 years of independent Viking raids
02:26to an end?
02:30At Trelleborg, almost 900,000 cubic feet of earth, stone, and clay make up nearly a third of a mile
02:38of 56-foot-thick earth ramparts.
02:43Just outside the walls lies a burial site with over a hundred skeletons, some in mass graves.
02:54Clues suggest that 16 Viking longhouses sit behind heavily defended walls.
03:06So what exactly is Trelleborg? And why was it built?
03:13Trelleborg doesn't appear in any written records.
03:18Archaeologists didn't even realize it was a Viking structure until the 1930s.
03:23It's really a fantastic and magnificent monument, Trelleborg.
03:30Anne Christine Larsen is Trelleborg's director.
03:36Until experts started digging here, it was thought most Vikings only lived in small farms and villages.
03:44Trelleborg is a very unique site in many senses.
03:48It's nothing like the villages around.
03:51Trelleborg looks like a simple structure, with ramparts made of earth and piled stones.
04:00But archaeologists like Anne Christine can tell from detailed surveys
04:04that Trelleborg is a masterpiece of advanced engineering.
04:09A geometrically perfect circle, some 450 feet across, aligned to the compass.
04:17It's quite clever actually.
04:21Trelleborg has four gates and they are pointed to the compass, meaning that one is pointed to north, one to
04:28the south, one east, one west.
04:31Anne Christine thinks Trelleborg showcases an astonishing new level of sophistication in Viking architecture.
04:39A thousand years ago when the Vikings built this fortress, they put out the ramparts very accurate, completely circular.
04:48And it's amazing that today we actually need this to do what the Vikings did without any equipment.
04:56A ring is the perfect shape for a fortress with a clear line of sight from every point on the
05:02wall.
05:03But Anne Christine suspects that Trelleborg's precise geometry goes far beyond what's needed for defense.
05:09This was designed to display prestige and power.
05:13So what exactly went on here?
05:16A clue might be hidden on the other side of these ramparts.
05:22Outside the Viking structure,
05:26archaeologists have uncovered a grisly surprise.
05:32One hundred and fifty-seven skeletons in a major Viking cemetery.
05:39Buried with one of the bodies are the remains of a massive battle axe adorned with intricate silver inlay, its
05:46blade over a foot long.
05:48In its day, this would have been a valuable and lethally effective weapon.
05:53But were all of the people buried here warriors?
05:57And can they reveal why Trelleborg was built?
06:05Today, the hundreds of bone fragments discovered at Trelleborg are locked away securely underground.
06:12Here, at the University of Copenhagen.
06:17Forensic anthropologist Nils Lunerup is trying to solve the mystery of what these warriors were doing here.
06:22Having the bones really adds an extra dimension to what we know about Trelleborg.
06:30The sheer number of bone fragments makes it difficult to work out how many individuals were buried at Trelleborg.
06:37In this box here, for instance, it's clear that we have fragments of several of the limb bones, the lung
06:44bones, and of the skull.
06:46Well, we really have only the mandibles with a couple of teeth in.
06:52As he expects, most of the bones do appear to belong to young warriors.
06:59There's very little abrasion on the third molar, which erupted when you were 18.
07:04At Trelleborg, we find more young males than we would do in, let's say, more ordinary village cemetery.
07:14But what really shocks Nils are some of the other skeletons buried with these fighters.
07:22Surprisingly, even though we have a lot of young males, this is an old individual, which can be seen again
07:30from the mandible.
07:31This is probably an old female, maybe 40, 50 years of age.
07:36So why was a woman considered elderly for the time, living alongside a force of Viking soldiers?
07:43Nils believes she was part of an army of workers who supported the young warriors.
07:51Inside Trelleborg, archaeologists found parts of a loom revealing that skilled female weavers made cloth for tunics and cloaks.
08:02The people here also smelted raw materials into pure metals.
08:12Anvils found within Trelleborg reveal blacksmiths repaired weapons and forged new ones.
08:21This was a hugely sophisticated fortress, one of the most impressive in Northern Europe, built with incredible precision on an
08:30extraordinary scale.
08:34The Vikings' traditional way of life was raiding and fighting before returning home to tend to their farms.
08:41But these Vikings appear to be a garrison, stationed inside a permanent military base.
08:48Probably be compared a bit to Roman camps in England.
08:52So again, I think it reflects sort of a military encampment where an army has been stationed for some time.
09:02So why did the Vikings leave their isolated farms to build an enormous fortress?
09:10And could treasures buried beneath the ground reveal the secrets of how the Viking Age began?
09:29The mysterious Viking Ring forts of Denmark are forcing archaeologists to think again about these legendary warriors.
09:38After centuries of raiding, the Vikings constructed precisely engineered fortifications.
09:46But why did these notoriously independent seafarers eventually settle down in organized camps?
09:55To understand their journey, we must rewind hundreds of years to the dawn of the Viking Age.
10:09Deconstructing the towering walls of Trelleborg reveals clues from decades before.
10:16The buried remains from a much older settlement.
10:20Ceremonial pits containing offerings thought to be to the Viking gods.
10:24A bronze bowl and pottery.
10:28But beyond the fortress walls, the earth also contains exotic objects from around the world.
10:34Silver artifacts.
10:37Arabic coins and silver ingots.
10:42The Vikings got their hands on incredible riches from distant lands.
10:47Can these treasures help to explain the rise of this remarkable fortress?
10:54Archaeologist Soren Sindback thinks that the journey from farmstead to fortress
11:02began here in Riba, Denmark's first urban center.
11:06It's the first place in Scandinavia in the homelands of the Vikings where there's something we would call a town.
11:15Riba is an archaeological treasure trove.
11:18A marketplace founded centuries before Trelleborg was built.
11:22The Viking Age began in the 700s when Scandinavians started to travel and trade.
11:29At first, they only moved within northern Europe to places like Riba.
11:34This is in fact a piece of reindeer antler.
11:37And reindeer were not native to Denmark.
11:39They had to go far up into Norway to find this material.
11:43This was bought by somebody who came here in a boat and knew that this was a valuable material here
11:49to trade with.
11:50But alongside these objects from Scandinavia, Soren finds relics and treasures from even more distant lands.
11:58These beads were brought all the way from the Middle East to Riba.
12:03Could trade be the catalyst that changed society here and set the Vikings on a path to building fortresses like
12:10Trelleborg over 250 years later?
12:14In order to put together trading expeditions like this, you need to build the boat, you need to produce all
12:20the trade goods that you're bringing.
12:23It brings together a whole society so it takes a lot of organization.
12:28The interesting thing is that here in Riba we can see that just at the time that we usually say
12:32it's the beginning of the Viking Age, the 790s.
12:36This is when we start to find this material from Norway.
12:39This is because the first Scandinavian explorers were traders.
12:44But what turned them into the disciplined, fearsome warriors who built huge military structures like Trelleborg?
12:55A clue lies with the Vikings' longships.
12:59Built from dozens of trees, these boats were the most advanced vessels of their day.
13:07Longships were versatile.
13:09Designed with a very shallow keel, they could even be moved over land.
13:18They could traverse both shallow rivers and the deepest oceans, to take the Vikings everywhere from the Middle East to
13:26North America.
13:27But the longships were also perfectly adapted for warfare.
13:33Sailors on a trading mission could easily become an organized fighting force.
13:40Soren thinks the Vikings soon realized that they could simply take what they wanted.
13:46Each ship had a sailing crew of dozens of men, a small army of warriors.
13:53Trading prepares a way for raiding.
13:56Once you have learned how to date a sailing expedition to a market, you can also use that knowledge for
14:02something else.
14:03You can go across the sea to do raiding.
14:06The cooperation and organization required to build the fortresses was born at sea, as the Vikings became the most feared
14:15warriors in Europe.
14:19So why did this hugely successful way of life come to an end?
14:23And who was the powerful leader who united Denmark's independent Viking tribes to form a single fighting force?
14:46The Vikings.
14:49From the year 793, these rampaging warriors waged a campaign of terror that shook medieval Europe for over two centuries.
14:59But the fortress of Trelleborg reveals a whole new level of sophistication in military technology toward the end of the
15:07Viking era.
15:09So what, or who, dragged these fierce raiders out of the Dark Ages?
15:16Trelleborg is a military masterpiece.
15:20The Vikings reinforced the huge earth ramparts with wood to form a formidable barrier.
15:28On its outer face, a towering 26-foot-high oak palisade.
15:34In front of the ramparts, a 13-foot-deep ditch.
15:39They could have been filled with sharp wooden stakes.
15:44Who had the power to construct such a formidable fortress?
15:51Could a clue lie buried inside these timber defenses?
16:02Archaeologist Nana Holm thinks that evidence lies not just at Trelleborg, but over 30 miles away.
16:11This is Borgring, a recently discovered Ring fort with a striking similarity to Trelleborg.
16:19Nana and her team spotted it in aerial mapping data.
16:23We were looking at maps and could see this perfect circle here on the Leida maps.
16:29You kind of hide measurement maps.
16:32And we start excavating here, and exactly where we thought it to be, we found the fortress.
16:39Nana believes that the size and scale of both forts is so great that only a king could have built
16:44them.
16:45It cannot just be a small family saying, oh, now we're going to build a fortress.
16:51It has to be something organized for a united society to come together and build it with one organizer, the
16:58king.
17:00Until now, most Vikings had lived in small, scattered villages.
17:04Which ruler was powerful enough to wrench them away from this old way of life?
17:10Nana thinks dating the artifacts and remains buried in the ground at Borgring could provide the answer.
17:17The fortress here is placed just in the middle of the field.
17:21So every time the farmers plow on the earth here, new finds will just come up to the surface.
17:28Nana has discovered fragments of wood from Borgring's timber defenses.
17:34She works with dendrochronologist Aoife Daly to date them.
17:38Aoife thinks the wood samples could reveal when Borgring was built, and if so, which ruler was in charge.
17:45So this is from the north gate, and it is burnt, but it's very brittle, very fragile.
17:53This wooden fragment was actually part of Borgring itself.
17:57Could the age of the fort be hidden inside?
18:02Aoife starts by hunting for rings in the wood.
18:05A ring represents a year's growth in the life of a tree.
18:11What I think I can see, before I get it into the microscope, is rings right there.
18:18You can see those little ridges.
18:21I'm going to take off this chunk here.
18:25Aoife can calculate the year in which ancient trees were cut down by measuring these rings and comparing them to
18:33those from other trees.
18:34But she struggles to get a clear reading from this Borgring fragment.
18:38But as you can see, it's very fragile and flaky.
18:43I can't get a reliable sequence of tree rings because I need an uninterrupted measurement.
18:48This sample of wood is too damaged to date precisely.
18:52But Aoife has managed to date another piece found at Borgring.
18:57And matched it to wood found at Trelleborg.
19:01As you can see, that where one has a narrow ring, the other one also has.
19:06In this case, I find that it matches very well with the Trelleborg material.
19:12It's just one sample, but the implications are huge.
19:17It suggests both Borgring and Trelleborg date to the same era, the late 900s AD.
19:24The reign of Denmark's most famous Viking king.
19:30The first Viking rulers were great war leaders.
19:35Who drew in warriors with the promise of plunder.
19:41But they often failed to inspire lasting loyalty.
19:45Their success depended on their fortunes in battle.
19:51But just over a thousand years ago, one warlord stamped his authority over Denmark.
19:57A king known as Harold Bluetooth.
20:03Bluetooth ruled Denmark from 958 AD.
20:07He's famous as the king who popularized Christianity among the Vikings.
20:11But he was also a ferocious warrior and relentless conqueror determined to expand the Viking kingdom.
20:21These forts were certainly impressive enough for such a powerful ruler.
20:26But the date alone doesn't prove that Harold built them both.
20:31So Nana and her team scour the soil beneath Borgring.
20:36Each year brings new discoveries.
20:39Metal artifacts, beads and tools.
20:42But the most beautiful and intriguing is a piece of Viking jewelry.
20:46It's a small silver fitting from a box brooch.
20:51This is a fragment from an ornate silver casket.
20:55Incredibly, what could be the rest of the artifact was discovered almost 150 miles away at yet another Ring fort.
21:03This small silver fitting proves to us that one person who was in another fortress also was here in Borgring.
21:11And for the first time, we know now that they really moved from fortress to fortress.
21:17This brooch was found in the grave of a woman with other artifacts that indicate she could be a priestess
21:22or fortune teller.
21:24Perhaps she served as an advisor to King Harold, traveling with him as he visited his forts.
21:30This tells us the story of Harold Bluetooth and how he moved around all the country from fortress to fortress.
21:40All the evidence points in the same direction.
21:44The great king Harold Bluetooth built both the Trelleborg and Borgring fortresses.
21:51This ruler, who had designs on conquering much of Scandinavia, was also building big back home in Denmark.
21:58But mystery surrounds the fort's sudden appearance.
22:01Why did he construct them in these specific locations?
22:08And how did Harold Bluetooth unite the Viking tribes into an organized, fort-building society?
22:35New discoveries in Denmark reveal a transformation in Viking society.
22:40Under the rule of King Harold Bluetooth, the Vikings evolved from seafaring traders and pillagers to an organized fortress-building
22:48force.
22:49But where did he get his ideas?
22:53Decades before Trelleborg was built, armies of Viking warriors invaded the established military kingdoms of medieval Europe.
23:02So did these overseas invasions inspire King Bluetooth to build his own fortresses at home?
23:11Archeologist Kat Jarman investigates a Viking site in England.
23:15Could a clue to Trelleborg's origins be found here?
23:19So this is the 25-centimeter grid, so we're going to get better resolution.
23:24Kat has come to the grounds of a medieval church in Repton.
23:28She combines geophysics, a kind of radar, with drone footage, to investigate the remains of an early Viking army.
23:39In the recent excavations, we found some more evidence of that Viking presence.
23:44We don't quite know what or how, but in this trench, we found evidence artifacts that we can clearly link
23:53with the Viking great armies.
23:57Archeologists have discovered hundreds of skeletons here.
24:02Warriors from a great Viking army that invaded Anglo-Saxon England in the mid-800s.
24:10More than a century before Trelleborg was built.
24:13England was a great destination, so many riches. Some of them you see pickings it seem, monasteries.
24:19There's a lot of wealth here that is quite easily obtainable by an army.
24:26Chronicles say that the Vikings captured this important royal church and built a fortress around it.
24:33What we're looking for here is some kind of defensive ditch or ramparts or something like that that encloses a
24:39central space and keeping it safe.
24:44The radar picks up what looks like a massive earthwork around the church.
24:50Just like Trelleborg, the camp looks big enough to have protected hundreds of warriors.
24:57Well, we'll go and have a look. We'll get it on the computer and then we can see.
25:01So what we're looking at now, this is the plot of what we've been finding with the radar in the
25:05garden here.
25:06So we've put that all with the drone shots as well.
25:09This is showing to us that there's a lot more going on.
25:11The camp is much bigger than what we previously thought.
25:14It could correspond to a much bigger group and a much bigger army.
25:18But this camp seems too rough and ready to be a prototype for Trelleborg.
25:23This is very much a base where you're staying over the winter, perhaps plundering the surrounding areas for food and
25:29resources and making equipment, making weapons ready for that next big attack.
25:35The Vikings were experts at building quick temporary camps like the one here at Repton.
25:42But ultimately, these early military bases weren't enough for the Vikings to conquer England completely.
25:49Their enemies, the English, used a superior military strategy, which may have inspired King Bluetooth.
25:57To defeat the Vikings, the English fortified many of their towns, calling them Burrs.
26:03They spaced them all out equally to make it easy for any one Burr to call for reinforcements.
26:10After decades of raids, battles and skirmishes, the network of fortified Burrs helped to end the Vikings' reign of terror
26:19in England.
26:22The Vikings returned home to Scandinavia.
26:26Over time, fortresses began to appear across the Danish landscape.
26:32Did the experience of being beaten in England teach the early Viking armies a lesson that their descendants never forgot?
26:41I think you can definitely draw some comparison with what you're seeing later in Denmark with the building of the
26:46Ringforts.
26:46It's very possible that we have these same people who have been observing this strategy or building these Burrs.
26:52If that's been taken back to Denmark, perhaps that could be traced back to seeing these early fortifications here in
26:58England.
27:00The Vikings brought home more than just plunder. Their failure taught them a valuable lesson.
27:06A single military base is no match for a network of organized fortifications.
27:12Now, archaeologists want to find out if Trelleborg and Borgring are just separate individual outposts or part of a network
27:20of interconnected defenses.
27:24And did this painful defeat for the Vikings inspire Harold Bluetooth to mastermind a nationwide military strategy decades later?
27:48After one hundred years of terror, the Vikings suffered a monumental defeat.
27:53The English finally discovered how to fight off the Viking hordes, thanks to their chain of impressive fortifications.
28:01So more than one hundred years later, did this failure inspire the Viking ruler, King Harold Bluetooth, to build forts
28:08of his own?
28:10And can they also reveal why the age of the marauding Viking warrior came to an end?
28:18Archaeologist Soren Sindbeck thinks Harold not only built the Great Ring forts, he planned them as part of a single
28:25modernizing military strategy.
28:28What's really special about Trelleborg is the fact that everything is so perfectly laid out, and this is what we
28:34are looking for here as well.
28:36He believes all the fortresses followed Trelleborg's distinctive shape and design.
28:43Trelleborg isn't just a perfect circle. Even its wooden buildings are placed in a precise order.
28:49Evenly spaced holes in the ground reveal the location of sturdy timber posts.
28:56Curved planks laid out in the shape of a ship's hull support a heavy roof covered by a layer of
29:03wooden shingles.
29:04A longhouse is the heart of the traditional Viking community. But here, there are sixteen.
29:12Arranged in four perfect squares. Enough room to house hundreds of warriors.
29:18So did Bluetooth roll out this design across Denmark, mimicking the English kings who defeated his ancestors?
29:31If Soren's suspicions are right, then the fortress at Borgring should be a mirror image of Trelleborg.
29:38We're basically out in the middle of nowhere. We're between a farm field and a highway.
29:44This is not where you'd expect to find something important from the Viking aid.
29:47He carries out a geophysical survey to investigate the fortress at Borgring.
29:53We need to cover about 200 meters, 100 meters that direction and then 100 meters over to that direction.
30:02Scanning this 140-acre site is a huge challenge.
30:13Just go down and see if you can turn around. Perhaps you can go into the plough field and come
30:22back to the top.
30:26Using this cutting edge technology, Soren is able to watch the results of the survey come through.
30:32A Viking fort emerges after a thousand years.
30:37This is really one of the most fascinating things about archaeology.
30:40When you're there and you see something that's not been seen before.
30:43Nobody's seen it before and you see it coming out of the ground or on your screen as it happens.
30:49But is Borgring identical to Trelleborg?
30:52We need to cover every bit of the ground.
30:56We're starting to see patterns of what is buried here.
31:00And we can see that there's some structure in the middle of the map that's coming here.
31:05I can see a great big ring.
31:07It looks perfectly circular from what I can see here.
31:12The radar doesn't pick up any buildings inside the fort.
31:16But to Soren, the circular monument that emerges from the earth is strikingly similar to Trelleborg.
31:23Borgring is a perfectly circular structure with four gates in the four corners of the compass.
31:29It looks amazingly like Trelleborg, just like the same structure.
31:34We're almost 50 miles from Trelleborg and here's something that looks so very similar.
31:39That's what's so fascinating about this place.
31:42Soren believes that the only explanation for their similarity is that both sites were built to a specific plan.
31:50So why stop at two?
31:53Today, archaeologists have discovered no less than six remarkably similar fortresses.
31:58All these sites, Trelleborg, Borgring and the other ring fortresses, they all follow the same pattern.
32:05It must be a very close connection.
32:07So how did this series of forts work?
32:11Harold Bluetooth ruled a scattered empire.
32:15His influence extended into the fjords and valleys of modern day Denmark, Norway and even northern Germany.
32:23Very few structures survive from the Viking Age.
32:27But Trelleborg's distinctive shape stands out in the landscape.
32:35Archaeologists believe the other handful of forts discovered across Denmark share this same intriguing design.
32:45Each fort is found near the coast.
32:48Borgring appears to plug a gap between them.
32:55Soren thinks this newly discovered fort reveals Harold's master plan.
32:59To secure Denmark with a chain of almost identical forts linking fortified towns all within fighting distance of each other.
33:07The ring fortresses are not just individual places for hiding out.
33:13They're spread out as a network across different provinces.
33:17So they're about controlling.
33:19They're not just about hiding.
33:20And that's the idea which the Vikings borrowed from the English.
33:25A huge coordinated effort was needed to build these forts.
33:29They signify how Viking society had changed.
33:33There's massive amounts of people being organized in these places.
33:37Not just organizing for building them, but actually organized for manning them, defending them.
33:43They were all working like one big machine.
33:46It's something we absolutely don't associate with the Vikings.
33:49But if Harold did build all these forts, why did he embark on such a costly and ambitious enterprise?
33:58Were the fortresses designed to show off his power and sophistication to his own people?
34:03Or were the Vikings themselves under threat?
34:20The Viking fortress of Trelleborg is the most impressive in a series of military bases.
34:26That appear to date to the reign of Denmark's greatest king, Harold Bluetooth.
34:32But their sudden appearance just over a thousand years ago puzzles archaeologists.
34:40Were these structures merely designed to show off the king's power to his subjects or to keep out his enemies?
34:47The answer may lie buried in the fortress itself.
34:52Hidden inside Trelleborg are clues that hint at savage battles.
34:56The fort was a formidable obstacle.
34:59Strong wooden gates provided the only way in or out.
35:04And to make life worse for attackers, a roof turned the gates into a kill zone.
35:11But arrowheads unearthed at the scene provide evidence of an assault.
35:16Charred timber suggests these gates were once burned to the ground.
35:21And 130 feet from the southern gate, archaeologists discovered the only Viking shield ever found in Denmark.
35:28Could this lost shield reveal who was fighting who at Trelleborg?
35:33And even why the fortress was built?
35:37The final piece in the puzzle could lie hundreds of miles away in the frozen fjords of Oslo, Norway.
35:45Vegard Vika is one of the world's leading experts on Viking weaponry.
35:51For him, the discovery of the Trelleborg shield is rare and exciting.
35:56The Trelleborg shield seemed to be just a loose find or a throwaway.
36:01And that it was preserved is quite unique.
36:05Most Viking weapons are found in graves.
36:08These great warriors were so attached to their axes, swords and shields that they even held onto them in death.
36:16The weapons were the tools of the warrior, both in life and in afterlife, it seems.
36:23In his laboratory, Vegard carefully restores metal weapons like swords, axes and Viking helmets.
36:31But among his most rare finds is a simple wooden shield from a Viking ship discovered here in southern Norway.
36:38So this is one of the shields from the Goksta ship burial.
36:45What makes this shield remarkable is that its construction appears to be almost identical to the shield found back at
36:52Trelleborg.
36:54Despite being found 260 miles away.
37:00Usually when we have Viking Age graves, we usually only have this metal boss.
37:05The rest is gone.
37:07But in this unique grave find, we have a lot of organic material preserved.
37:13So we have these fabulous shields almost complete.
37:18The preservation of this shield is truly special.
37:22Its wooden planks are more than a thousand years old.
37:28This shield from Goksta is very similar to the Trelleborg shield.
37:32It's built up from seven or eight planks in the same way.
37:38The planks have more or less the same thickness as the Trelleborg shield.
37:43They are both a little bit less than a centimeter thick.
37:46And they're both made from very light types of wood.
37:51The Trelleborg shield from pine and this one from spruce.
37:56Weigard can tell that both shields may well have come from the same place.
38:01The analysis of the wood from the Trelleborg shield show that the wood was actually from Norway.
38:08These two shields are so similar that one could possibly think that they could have been made by the same
38:15workshop or at least in the same tradition.
38:18If Weigard is right, how did a Norwegian shield end up at Trelleborg in Denmark?
38:24The people in the army of Trelleborg could have been brought together by people from various places.
38:32The Trelleborg shield could be viewed as evidence for Norwegian warriors being at Trelleborg.
38:40So was the Trelleborg shield carried by a Norwegian warrior, perhaps a mercenary fighting for King Harald?
38:48The answer could lie with some of the skeletons buried at the fortress.
38:53Analysis of their teeth reveals that many of the young warriors buried here aren't Vikings from Denmark.
39:02They grew up in modern-day Norway, far to the north, or in the Baltic Sea regions.
39:08These men traveled hundreds of miles to fight at Trelleborg.
39:13As Harald Bluetooth grew in power, he also seized the throne of Norway.
39:18But as his Vikings settled down, they became targets.
39:23The Trelleborg shield could be evidence that Vikings from all over Scandinavia were banding together to fight off common enemies
39:31under Harald Bluetooth.
39:35A new picture emerges of the crucial role that these fortresses play in Viking history.
39:42Trelleborg reveals how under Harald Bluetooth's rule, Viking society in Denmark became united under a single national identity.
39:51Trelleborg was built at the time where the king was unifying the whole country for the first time.
39:56We had a king, which was king over both Denmark and Norway.
40:03Centuries of organization, trade and warfare brought the Vikings to this point.
40:10The forts prove that these warriors became far more than just the marauding pillagers of legend.
40:17I think what especially we are appreciating now is that the Viking Age is not all about the men, it's
40:23not just about the violence.
40:24It's very much to do with contacts, networks, trade, a lot of culture, art and so on.
40:31So it's a much more complicated and nuanced picture than what we typically think about when we think about the
40:36Viking Age.
40:37By building Trelleborg, Harald Bluetooth laid down the blueprints for modern day Denmark.
40:44But in doing so, he also ushered in the end of the independent daring Viking warrior.
40:52They are built in a time where Denmark also wants to show the rest of Europe that we are one
40:59nation.
41:00So they're really taking us into modern society, showing that we can do this and we stand together as one
41:06people.
41:07So they are really also the symbol of the end of the Viking era.
41:12Trelleborg reveals a little known chapter in the history of these legendary people.
41:17So, from their origins as independent traders and pirates, the Vikings banded together, united under the leadership of Herald Bluetooth.
41:31This newly coordinated force built a network of vast earthworks with formidable walls and enormous longhouses, unlike anything else in
41:41Europe.
41:43Trelleborg was the crowning glory of a newly modernized military nation.
41:49But it's also a testament to a dying way of life.
41:54The end of the Viking Age.
42:12Wh coccipia 1
42:13Herald
42:13Slques
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