The Long Ships: The Vikings — Sleep Podcast

The Long Ships. A slow, bedtime retelling of the Viking Age — from the fire on the sacred island of Lindisfarne in 793, to the last of the great ships at the bridge in 1066, and the long shadow the north left on the west.

One hour, in the voice of the show: a deep, warm storyteller at the edge of sleep. We follow the ship — the shallow-draft, clinker-built hull that made raid, trade, and settlement the same work — across the fjords, the sea, and the river roads. We hear the annals and the chronicles, the stones and the silver, and the names the north left in the ground of the west.

This episode:

• The word “Viking” — a job, not a people, and a nineteenth-century revival.
• Lindisfarne, 793 — the shock that Christian Europe wrote down.
• The raiding decades, the wintering fleets, and the first great army.
• Paris: the river as a road, and the silver that bought time.
• Alfred, the marshes, and the line that became the Danelaw.
• The road east — the Rus, the river to the Greeks, and the guard of the city.
• Dublin, the island chain, and the edge of the map.
• The turning — conversion, the runestones, and the long shadow.

Written to be heard, not read. A low, steady bed of wind and water suits the opening. No music is required.

Sources (a selection): Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Annals of St-Bertin; Annals of Ulster; Annals of Saint-Vaast; Alcuin of York; Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés; Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus; National Museum of Denmark (Jelling); Parks Canada (L’Anse aux Meadows); UNESCO; Encyclopaedia Britannica. Secondary: Barrett (2008) “What caused the Viking Age?” Antiquity; Price, Children of Ash and Elm (2020); Jesch, The Viking Diaspora (2015); Downham, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland (2007); Abels, Alfred the Great (1998); Crumlin-Pedersen, The Skuldelev Ships (2002); Christys, Vikings in the South (2015).