Transcription
foreign [Music] podcast I'm Daniel farand owner of the company horns voting and today I'm joined by leisure godewa how is that perfect beautiful thank you so much yeah thank you for for joining us once again last time we spoke about women in the in the Viking age which was a fascinating episode but today we're going to look at the Slavic and Nordic mythologies and the similarities the differences yeah I'm looking forward to it yeah thank you thank you for having me I'm very happy to be here and happy to be sharing some stories from my part of the world so yeah yeah absolutely and before we were discussing you have possibly the biggest collection of books I've ever seen in my entire life I have a lot yes yeah um yeah so we were just talking about and you've collected these from all over the world um it's yeah for the last 20 years or so and uh across Europe and the wider world so uh yeah yeah it's you said it's one of the reasons why you think you can write so much I guess so because it's just with enhanced reaching all my Post-It notes and uh and everything so it just makes makes life much easier and makes writing so much faster oh I bet yeah absolutely so I think for most people listen to this and uh and myself you know we we certainly for myself I've learned a lot about nodding mythology over the years uh particularly from Matthias and we've I've heard of Slavic and I've heard of Slavic mythology and I've heard briefly of the Vikings going to the to the east but I think a lot of the fixation always tends to be on the West so I I guess it's quite embarrassingly I probably don't know as much about what Slavic mythology even is so if that's a a good starting point yeah it's a it's a great starting point I think before we we start talking about Slavic mythology I think for some of our listeners perhaps it would be valuable to to just say a few words about the Slavic world and the slabs so if you if you check the term Slavs on how let's say Wikipedia you will see that the Slavs are actually the largest ethno linguistic group in Europe so it's uh it's a it's a very vast world and a lot of people that that speak these Slavic languages and that spoke Slavic languages back in uh back in the Viking age they had interests us most here um so essentially to make a very very long story short uh the Slavs or the Slavic world can be divided into three zones or three areas so you have the Western Slavic World which back in the Viking age comprised of parts of Northern Northeastern Northwestern Germany Poland today's Czech Republic and Slovakia and then you have the Eastern Slavic World which is essentially the countries to the east from Poland's eastern border today so that's Russia Belarus and Ukraine and then you have the southern Slavic World which is some of the Slavic countries in the in the Balkans so these are three different sort of parts of what we what we consider as the Slavic world and of course as it is today it was sort of roughly similar in the past these these different areas and these different people had slightly different Customs different languages different uh beliefs in the in in some regards different material culture and different ways of expressing their identities so it's in talking about Slavic beliefs or Slavic mythology the basic question that arises is was there one Slavic mythology or some religious system of belief or where they're actually a couple or several or did it have local variants and of course we we have to say immediately and we have to answer yes of course and it was exactly the same in in Scandinavia we have this kind of concept of our modern construct of of Norse mythology but we know from from text and we know from archeology that in different parts of the Viking world or even in different parts of Scandinavia people did things differently and that there was a lot of a lot of regional variety uh social variety uh Variety in terms of material culture and and expressions of belief so it's we can say the same for for the Slavic world yeah what I do so just to just jump in just to even pull it back to you and it's more in a raw form I guess what what qualifies something to be Slavic would it is it is it just the geographical location or is it the language like yeah I would say it's the geography it's definitely the language it's it's a certain cultural model a combination of yeah geography language uh ancestry if you like yeah some some sort of tradition yeah but on a very basic on a very basic level uh or the life ways of the slabs in the Viking age were pretty much the same or very similar to the lifeways uh an everyday realities of people from from northern Europe um especially from from Southern Sweden or or Denmark the landscape is not that much different and you know they they were farmers they were um animal herders they they engaged in in all kinds of similar activities yeah like you know fishing carpentry production of metal objects on a on in a sort of civilizational sense on the same level I assume they wouldn't be as seafaring or is that just they they were actually uh perhaps not as much as the Scandinavians but we actually don't know um for sure because you know the Scandinavian world when it comes to ship building traditions and all the stories about these long voyages and raids we have a lot of sources that inform us about what where they went what they did for the Slavic world we have this big problem that we don't have the sources especially texts and I'll come back to this later on but but it it it it the impression that it was mainly the Scandinavians who who uh ruled the Seas of the Viking age maybe slightly um misleading so to say and and and maybe just an impression based on the sources that we have of course do you think that that is pretty much purely down to the quality of sources that we have it is because because it it is that idea when you think of I mean first and foremost it's called The Viking age I guess and you do just think of these seafaring people who went to North America down to Istanbul around Spain you know they're Conquering the season you you really don't even hear about the Slavic culture and it's it's probably you know it's quite sad to say and for you it must be very frustrating your history as well that you don't get that kind of mention the same yeah well there are many reasons why the Slavic world is not sort of doesn't feature so prominently in yeah discussions on the Vikings and the Viking age and if you open books called The Viking World usually you'll have a little bit about Vikings in the roosts so in this Eastern Islamic world but but hardly anything about the Western Slavic world so yeah for instance the the area of Poland today parts of parts of Germany Czech Republic Slovakia there's very little about it and this part of the Slavic World actually had a lot of connections with with Scandinavia especially with Denmark um so that's that's that's very interesting of course another reason for this is the linguistic barrier uh because uh until relatively recently most of the research concerning the Slavic world was published in Slavic languages or yeah or in German and occasionally in English so those who did not read Slavic languages from Northern or Western Europe or or German they just would not be able to access the the sources these articles um the the archaeological material so that's that that created a problem certainly and you know there's also there's also a a political historical side to this because as you know until 1989 Poland was uh was was isolated from the Western and Northern world uh so it was under under Russian occupation essentially um so that of course also created uh certain barriers you know and then and some Scholars I think they still have have an iron curtain over there oh really over their brains things have changed since 1999. yeah it's not that that's not the longest rather you know I was I was born in 1989 so that's what 34 years ago it's not it's not long when you really you know when you when you put into scale of things so hopefully that that changes and kind of things start to free up a little bit more so with the with the language barrier being as much in the Viking age as well because I think I can't remember who we who I spoke to I think he might have been Matthias who said they thought that the peoples of like Anglo-Saxons would probably be able to understand the like the Nordic languages that are enough to kind of just get by and just get on whereas how different is it when it comes to it's very different actually it's very different so um even today um I I I'm a native polish speaker so I can communicate on a basic level with practically any slav whether it is Russia Ukraine Belarus Czech Republic Slovakia okay I can talk to these people we may not be able to you know get into very profound topics but on a very basic level we can communicate yeah these languages are a different um but they they are very different from from English or from German or from any Scandinavian language so I I presume that back in the Viking age and people from the Slavic world and from the Scandinavian world could probably communicate on some very basic fundamental level but uh but anything more complicated would have required a translator or the use of some other language and of course among the among the elite of the time and we're talking about very the very late Viking age or even the post-viking age period the the elite would have presumably the higher high Elite the elite of the elite uh they would have spoken Latin or Greek maybe um so so they may have been able to communicate in those languages but if you know if these societies lived pretty much alongside and you know mixed and mingled and intermarried then I can I can fathom the possibility that they're through these inter-cultural marriages people some people were bilingual and they could speak some Slavic and some some old Norse or both languages very fluently so uh we will never know we will never know but it but the bottom line is these languages are and we're different yeah I mean I I didn't know that they were similar enough I guess I again it it is very ignorant of me that I just don't know that much about that area of the world and I know like when I if I see Russian written down I'm just like there's no way I can even try to figure this out but I didn't realize that it was so similar with all the other Slavic countries that you could say similar and they're so similar similar similar that you could kind of get by and yeah and understand some basic basic conversations I guess yeah yes um yeah it is quite embarrassing that how little we get taught about this area particularly for me at school as well it's not I don't think we even touched on like that whole Eastern European area is just not something that comes up and it is quite disappointing when you when you start to talk about it like like this I mean you go back and I really think about how much I know about that area of the world it's like it's embarrassing embarrassingly little well that's that's why we're meeting that's why we're having this this conversation so we can you know exchange ideas and exchange thoughts and learn from from one another and that's I think that's the point you know yeah that's that's how we learn we cannot know everything and uh we just have to be open and willing to uh to listen and to learn absolutely that's why we're here so yeah oh yeah yeah for sure um I said do you think where would be like a good starting point do you think when it comes to well I have a I have a little PowerPoint which I can show because it's always good to talk and and have some pictures when we're done archeology and we're talking about geography so what I'll try to do and you guys can tell me if you can if you can see uh See things I'll try and share this PowerPoint name of you guys yeah just as this is delicious he's putting that up um for anybody for anybody who's just listening to this you'll be able to watch this on our YouTube channel and also you can get early access to it via our patreon which is just not Anthology podcast no patreon forward slash naughty mythology podcast it's three pound a month and then you can get early access to all the episodes and all the videos on there go as soon as you're gonna be able to see all the little bits that that she's gonna pull up yeah and I'll try to I'll try to explain what we're actually looking at as well so it's those that are listening will will be able to imagine headphones yeah yeah absolutely what we're what we're talking about so yeah so I've just I've just made this little little PowerPoint that that gives you a bit of an introduction into this uh Slavic world so uh here you can see a map of of Europe showing roughly the location of the western Slavic world so that's that's the the part of the Slavic world that I'm mostly interested in and the part that we will be talking about uh today mostly um so as I said that this Western Islamic world is the areas of today's Poland Czech Republic Northern uh and Northeastern Germany um and Slovakia that is the Western the Western Slavic even Islamic world even just looking at that map um because again it's it's because I assume that it's not the part of the map I usually look at you know I'm always looking over this left-hand side where where I am when when even just looking at that you know two seconds of you putting that up I've just gone I can't believe how close Sweden is too exactly that's what I was just about to say look how close it is to to Scandinavia is just right across the sea it was like over to over to the side and they're going yes to get there but it's it's really not it's just basically next door neighbors the slums Scandinavians you have to remember that in the Viking age the Baltic Sea was like like a viking age Motorway it was it was almost like a big lake basically so there was a lot of traffic there was a lot of activity going on of course there are also islands where people mingled and integrated on even greater scale places like born Hall more gotland for instance uh all these all these islands they they witnessed a lot of activity and cultural exchange um there are a lot of Slavic traits on on both gotland and bonghorn and other other Islands on the Baltic so uh these worlds were were very very close and that's why I'm showing you showing you the map it's it's so much closer than England is it's it's so much closer so it makes complete sense that there would be contact in exchange yeah exactly so uh yeah what what I guess we're going to look at and talk about today is is the later part of the Viking age so the the 10th and 11th centuries and in in the part of the world of the Slavic world that I come from in Poland this was uh this was a very interesting time which uh was a time of of armed struggles and uh and a major ideological change and I I bring up this slide and it shows a very romantic images of two rulers of Poland in the 10th and 11th centuries um the the gentleman to the left was called mieshko and the gentleman to the right was called boleswav or a booty Slater as he is sometimes known in Old Norse texts and these are the two first historical rulers of what was to become in later uh decades or centuries Poland uh of course we had you know we have this whole mythology of pagan Kings and these legendary Kings but but we we're not entirely sure if they actually existed or if they had the names that some sources attribute to them but these two guys they were real they they really walked to the Earth yeah yeah and they were they were the Bringers of change as as I mentioned because the 10th and 11th centuries was a time when they were um conquering and uniting the various scattered tribes in this territory um and uh and and and and subjecting them to their to their own rule but it was also the time when they both mieshko and boleswav realized that in order to maintain power they need to convert they need to accept this new religion that is gaining a very strong foothold in in Europe so they they had they knew that they have to convert and I often say in in lectures and in public talks that that in this time and in the late Viking age being Christian or or converting your realm to Christianity was like a passport to the European Union that was that if you want to be part of a club of important players important gentlemen uh people who who are active on on a very wide uh European Arena you have to be Christian otherwise you will be sooner or later wiped out so whether whether or not these guys really uh converted out of pure you know spiritual need and and uh whether or not they they actually believed this and accepted accepted the Christian God uh is unclear and I to be honest I sincerely doubt it yeah but of course and we will see that in the following slides why why I doubt it but but of course that was a necessary political move so I have to ask you your because I I feel the same I have the same opinions when it comes to like the I guess the christianization of of Europe in in the Viking age but there's such a narrative and in modern day of how Christianity was this big evil thing that swept across Europe and I guess forcefully converted everybody and everything that it touched and that is just very much The Narrative of the of the time of the minute it's very anti-christian and I wouldn't I just wanted your opinion on that because I'm very much similar it's just like no there was a lot of people who chose to because there is a lot of benefits to it yeah on the one hand yes but I think that at least in the case of the the Slavic World um this was a very violent process a very brutal bloody process and people were generally I think I feel uh unwilling uh for the most part and willing to convert and there are some there are some sources signaling um several so-called Pagan uprisings where where people would sort of revert back to their old beliefs they they would not want to follow in the footsteps of of the Christian religion um there was there was a lot of opposition here and it wasn't it wasn't a peaceful process there was there was a lot of tension so would it be a case of the the higher ups the elites to convert relatively peacefully because there is there's a lot of benefit for them exactly put the lower down the day every day person is very against it because it's not they don't have to benefit from it I think that's exactly the case that the elite did it rather peacefully and out of necessity but when it comes to the conversion of their subjects that doesn't go easy and then that is a violent process okay so you kind of just put it into one kind of neat little box and say the official date for the christianization of Poland the one that you find in history books but one that is also very much debated by professional historians and archaeologists is 966. but I'd say it takes another two hundred three hundred years for Poland to be uh more or less Christian so it's it's a very it's it's several it takes several generations to uh yeah to well yeah I always wonder how they I would say I always wonder how they get like the single date for things like that yeah this is completely off topic I've been wondering this for a while there there always seems to be some sort of um correlation between the 66 ending and the events happening like what you must have noticed that what is that from 966 you'll have 666 right I guess nobody like you have like 1066 yeah and it's 1666 one was that the Great Fire of London one of them there's something about the six and the nine right yeah there always seems to be like this six six ending to like events and obviously there isn't a reason for it surely but it's always fascinating so like why stuff seems to happen then yeah well one other thing that I bring up on the slide and you can see it in the lower lower left corner is this fabulous uh Stone statue and I think that's that's actually a good starting point to talk about yeah Slavic mythology and Slavic belief and um and some of you may be familiar with this uh with this find and it's it's known under several different names we call it in Polish so in English it would be something like svantevit from um and this brooch is a river in modern day Ukraine and this is actually where this statue was found in 1848 um uh a local person was was walking along the river and suddenly noticed a human head emerging from the waters and then was terrifying and thought it was someone drowning in the river so so I was trying to to to to to help and then realized that it's actually not a human and that it's a it's a stone statue that has somehow come up from from the water depths so what's what's what they did uh is they they brought a I think a pair of oxen and then they tied ropes to this strange statue and they pulled it on Shore and then they realized that it's actually a pretty massive almost two meter long uh pillar with four sides and four faces and a very elaborate iconographic program if you like a lot of images here I I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this yeah it's it's it's very different to the kind of well particularly I've been spending a lot of time going around like I'm seeing like Anglo Scandinavian Stone sculptures like you get a lot of crosses and and that kind of thing and it this is nothing like those it's completely different this the figure at the top is quite terrified well let's let's maybe talk a little bit about what we actually see here so you have you clearly have a a three-tiered division here on this on this pillar or this this statue so you have the the upper level where on each of the four sides you can see a standing figure and you can also notice that the hands are arranged in a in a very particular way so you usually have the right hand somewhere close to the heart and then the left hand somewhere in the sort of groin belly area some Modern neo-pagans they think it's actually a gesture of prayer that this is how they would have prayed you know you're kind of touching your heart and you're bowing and that if you look at Recreations and reenactments of of um of past rituals that's how people often address their gods or bow to them we don't know if this was the case back in the back in the day but it's an interesting interesting idea it seems as if it's it's quite close quite clearly done on purpose yeah you know there each one of the four sides whilst they're maybe holding different things their hands are very clearly in yeah the exact same position yeah you can see that there are different attributes so on one side you have this this object that looks like a ring or a camp and we actually don't know if it's either a ring or a cup they're different different ideas uh of what this this thing this ring-like feature represents then on another one you clearly see a horn most likely a drinking horn yeah and the remaining two they don't have any attributes but one of the the sides has a saber and a horse yes and that is really interesting why is there a saber and that is a saber is a is an Eastern European or you could even say a nomadic type of of weapon um it's it's not really the kind of weapon that an average Western slab for instance would have used or certainly not something that a that a Scandinavian Viking would have used on a on a regular basis so based on this this detail some people have actually even speculated that the statue has nothing to do with the slabs that it's actually maybe something designed or linked to the beliefs of other people from Eurasia and and these you know Eastern step areas and so on well does that is that I guess is that frustrating that people would just attributed elsewhere because of one element could it not just be that maybe at some point somebody traded a saber and they're like this is a really because I imagine even more so if it's not native necessary to that region if one does come there through trade like a trade Network it's kind of maybe a review I think it's a special item that then would end up on a storm because it's like well we don't see this every day and this clearly influential person has this or a weapon yeah there can be so many interpretations and again you know it's the question of who who was the designer and who was the sort of executioner of the idea in stone and and who was the commissioner of the uh of the statue and and uh and maybe you know the person who commissioned this statue wanted the Carver to make a Slavic Idol but the person who actually made it came from the nomadic area and you know they thought okay they need a weapon so we'll put a local saber here we don't know we will never know but but I'm I'm a sort of firm believer in in the idea that this statue represents Slavic ideas so if we go further then you can see uh sorry just just before we do would we assume that all four sides are the same person holding different things that's that's a good question and then again there are different interpretations here so according to some uh there are four different deities represented on the top level uh and then different names are attributed to them and one of the names that can be attributed to the one of the faces is Peron and that is the Slavic god of thunder are a kind of equivalent to uh to Thor in in Old Norse mythology the Thunder God the god of the sky and that is the warrior God so with him we can we can link the the face with the saber and the horse okay um but we actually we don't know the one reason why this whole pillar or statue is called svantevit is because we have the account of a certain saxo grammaticus a very well known medieval writer historian so to say and saxo gives a very detailed account of a Slavic Temple not in the east in the Eastern Slavic world in in Ukraine but actually in what is today Germany Northern Germany in the on a on an island um in the north north of Germany and uh and saxo describes a Slavic sample and the temple is dedicated to a god called svantevit now we don't actually know if the names Fanta Vita refers to a is is actually the name of the god or if it's a description of who the God is and what this God does and if we were to deconstruct uh linguistically the name spantavite it would be something like holy Lord or holy man something like that so maybe it's it's just a nickname for a god but uh but saxo writes that in this Temple there was a statue that had four necks and four heads and the heads were looking in different directions and that people would would worship this God in this famous temple and bring all kinds of offerings the temple also had special priests responsible for yeah for all the ritual Acts there was also a special horse in the temple a white horse that they used to foretell the future and the ritual that involved the horse uh divination ritual was a ritual where they would lead the horse through three rows of Spears thrust in the ground and and forming a kind of frost symbol and if the if the horse walked through this row of Spears with its right leg or right foot that's a good omen but if you if the chorus does it with the left foot that's a bad omen so uh the slabs would conduct this ritual to find out for instance if they should embark on an expedition or on some kind of military campaign so they use the horse to to foretell if the campaign is going to be successful or not and they what I've never heard of it yeah guided the horse and the horse was saddled and bridled and then the belief of the Slavs they thought that the horse well kind of technically it's without a rider but actually it's the god the deity that rides the horse okay yeah in this way communicates with the people and and gives them certain information and it's all about which leg Yeah it's all about which leg goes first exactly yeah at what point do you is it is it it Stood Still and his which is the first leg as it sets off walking yeah or is it it walks it walks across the the thrust Spears it's a kind of yeah that's I feel like that's not very accurate way to uh certainly room for manipulate and I'm sure the priests knew how to how to oh yeah I'd be like ride their horse in the in the way they desired um yeah they're just like okay now now so yeah so so but it's it's interesting because this account by saxo grammatic was referring to arkona and on this left side slide you can actually see a modern photo of this cape Arcana where the stronghold with the temple was located it's actually a beautiful place if you want to go to for a nice holiday in Northern Germany I would highly recommend going to torukhen and and Arcana to see this place but but it's interesting because saxo describes the svantevit uh and it's and the statue and the fourth phase statue as being made of wood whereas what we have on the right hand side is a stone pillar so it's kind of similar but also a little bit different but maybe also because the the distance between rugen and zbrush where the statue was found is several thousand kilometers so here again we have this possible expression of of diversity and uh and differences in in different parts of the Islamic world but I want to get back to the Statue because there's a there's a lot of other things going on here I I was gonna also just ask um I have so many questions coming up so uh the the one with the horse and the saber he has no feet do you think there's any significance to that oh I'm just gonna work my way down to make sure I don't miss anything as I'm going that's an interesting idea I must I must say I actually have never thought about this so I uh I I think I I won't try and answer this right now it's an interesting thought that he maybe it's because he's on the horse so you can't you can't see the feet so well I don't know maybe yeah I don't I don't know why I just that stood out to me when I was looking at I was like why why is he doing nothing about that I need to think about that oh well I do my job thank you for that in your next book you can just I will reference you just a little reference to me that will make me so happy yeah well let's look at the middle tier because that's actually interesting so here you have again four figures and they have their arms stretched and sort of splayed fingers and uh and this level of the statue has been interpreted as the middle World whereas the the part above is the upper world so it's the Divine World okay and then the middle world is what you see in the middle and you have these figures and you can clearly see the breasts so you can kind of guess that these are women and men and uh and then the the stretched arms this has been interpreted as a gesture where they are actually holding hands and dancing forming a kind of circle and dancing um around perhaps around the statue and there's also one interesting detail and where obviously we're looking at it flat so when you put it in a what a you know three-dimensional Square they actually would be holding hands yeah exactly and and you can see that the thumbs are also pointing down so it's like holding hands okay yeah uh there's also a very interesting detail on the second uh you can call it the second side of the of the statue where you see a a sort of a larger female looking figure and then a tiny figure next to her okay yes yes um and this we don't know why or was it a mistake or is it there for a reason I'd like to believe it's everything is for a reason and this has sometimes been interpreted as as the human soul as a kind of miniaturized representation of the human soul oh wow but we don't know we don't know we when we don't have textual sources to pack this to back this up but it's uh it's a very interesting thought that this is essentially I think where we can agree is that this is the middle world yeah I I the kind of meat guard of the Slavic uh imagination yeah and I definitely would agree with you that I would say everything like you say everything is for a reason I wouldn't think that it's a mistake you're creating something that is and you're putting so much time and effort into it you're not gonna accidentally leave a little figure in there it's it's there for a reason yeah and then then comes the the lowest world the lowest part of the statue which is different because here you can see three heads or three figures or a figure with three heads um that seems to be kind of holding and supporting the tears above yeah and this is an interesting case uh because we actually know of a Slavic deity a Slavic God whose name is triglaf so the name translates to the three-headed one and based on on Surviving sources texts folklore Etc we can speculate that this was the god of the underworld that it was the three-headed god of the underworld so essentially what what this statue seems to represent is a vision of the Slavic world and of the Slavic Cosmos and of some of the deities responsible for recovering it or controlling its different spheres and we can also see that they had a they had this kind of Indo-European concept of of a three uh tiered layered universe so you have the upper world the middle world and the underworld and in a very basic sense this is something that you can also say about Norse beliefs of course they had many other worlds that were possibly differently distributed both in a horizontal and in a vertical uh sense but but the idea of the world being arranged on some sort of axis and we called it the axis Mundi the world axis is something that is that that shines through this strange pillar from from is that idea or something you see across most religions because I guess Christianity is very similar that it has exactly and then we have here and obviously you have little places in between like Purgatory but for the most part it's the three it's the three places yeah exactly so this for many years this this statue combined with some of the sources that we have has been sort of the the number one find when talking about uh Slavic religion and if you look at Publications entitled Slavic mythology this is what usually ends up on the cover this okay this find and if you would like to see it in in real life you can you can see it in Krakow in the archaeological Museum in Krakow okay there's a special room dedicated to to the Statue and uh it's quite uh quite the sight I think it's quite quite spectacular and like you say it's something that I've never never seen before and this could be very I don't know if I when I looked at it originally I couldn't help but think of like Aztec and that could be complete I don't know like I could be completely wrong with that I don't I without maybe to my untrained eye that was the first thing that I went to rather than having any link to uh kind of Scandinavia that was it was just went straight to that part of the world I was like oh it looks more South American but there's one interesting aspect that's maybe worth mentioning here because well we've kind of established that it represents a a universe that consists of three parts but in thinking about the the statue as such uh there's one interesting detail um it would not stand on its own like this it would just tip to the side and it has no base okay so this raises the question of how how was it actually assembled in some holy Grove or on a mountain or how how how did they stabilize it in the ground and I have this idea that uh perhaps the lowest part which represents this you know three-headed god of the underworld was actually below surface underground okay in this way the first level and the only level that people would be able to actually see in the course of rituals and so on would be the human level that the one on which they are themselves right the where the level where you have these these dancing dancing figures but they know the Deep down there below the soil level underground that there is this three-headed deity waiting for them one day that's the only way to stabilize to make this the statue actually stand but would you I I guess would you not see like a different a a different kind of wavy weathering if the if the bottom was underneath would there be I assume that would weather slower than [Music] there are actually traces of of erosion on on the Statue and also because it was actually in a river presumably for about a year thousand years we we don't know how it ended up in that River presumably as a result of christianization they just you know pulled the statue down and could not really destroy Stone so they just drowned the God because that would that's what to do I guess that's better than just smashing it up yeah yeah uh as we know from from the descriptions of saxochromaticus the the Christians they chopped the statue into pieces and burnt it that's that's how they dealt with it because you you have to kill the god in and its representation is effigy and in a spectacular way so there they could chop it up but here they couldn't really chop it up so they they just grounded in in in in the river so disappointing to think of how much stuff we must have lost oh yeah yeah but what's interesting in talking about these traces of erosion is that um there there are hints suggesting that this the statue was actually painted and that it had that there are some traces of pigment and some traces of paint so it's most likely had had red or a dark brown coloring in in different parts um we can't quite you know understand how these different colors were arranged but it wasn't as as uh plain as it is now yeah but I think the same goes for a lot of ancient statues you know you go to these these galleries of ancient statues and all these you know um Greek and other monuments they they look plain but they would have been originally painted in sometimes in very Vivid colors and this most likely was the case also with this spontevit statue that's such a good point because I was we we get so used to seeing these as just Stone colored and I I was recently at Durham cathedral which is maybe one of the most beautiful cathedrals I've ever been to and when I was talking to one of the gentlemen there he was saying how traditionally before I think before it was the product before the Protestants it was all painted it was all like very bright and Vivid and it was and then they have like a little section where it's been repainted because maybe kind of what it would have been like and it's remarkable and it makes such a difference to to what you see in all the patterns and the the details and and then even on top of that you don't know what is what details are then painted on that we just don't have anymore and he said when you start to think of things like that and how you know it could it would have been this or different rather than just this stone slab I guess yeah so that's that's kind of Slavic mythology like the the iconography and Archeology of Slavic mythology lesson one but what you can already what you can already kind of gather from this is that uh there's not so much in the archeology that we can lean on and there is actually not so much in the textual world that we can we can use in our reconstructions of their worldview and that is the major difference between the Slavic system of belief and the Scandinavian system of belief because of course you know the poetic Ada and the sagas um are very rich in detail and of course they are they are um written from a Christian perspective most of the in most cases at least the sagas but still they preserve a lot of authentic details it seems whereas in the case of the Slavic world we only have Christian or in some cases Arabic sources and we have practically nothing from the Viking age or from the medieval period uh written in the vernacular and by the slabs themselves so is this is this one of like the very this is the one of the only or there are there are other sources than saxo gramaticus but but again he's not Slavic and no sorry I was meaning the the actual stone stuff no there's more there's more archeology there's more archeology okay sorry there's very little there's very little texts okay that survive and that is the problem in trying to figure out what what was the mythology you know what what were the myths did they have any myths at all and what were the names of the Gods and all these supernatural creatures yeah I guess you need you need the two together you need to come together and and that has always been a big problem in research on on Islamic beliefs and one way to tackle this problem is to use folklore and people have been quite eager more eager in the Slavic world than in Scandinavia to use folkloristic materials in trying to reconstruct these Pagan beliefs from the Viking age okay and of course the problem with folklore is that it's you know from the 19th and early 20th centuries so it's it's kind of chronologically removed from the Viking age by about yeah almost a thousand years so uh this of course erases the question well how reliable is it can we at all use it I think in some cases we can and so we can try and talk about one of the basic myths if you like I can I have it on the next before we jump on I just ask you is there any significance to the clothing that the god figure is wearing because obviously he very much seems to be wearing a hat and then on the bottom half it's not it's not trousers it's either either I mean with that I don't I don't want to call because I've been rude but obviously say he's got towel wrapped around his waist that that's kind of what it looks like yeah uh well yeah that's so that's that's an interesting question I think it's some sort of uh cunic like uh um garment uh which yeah is basically what's what people back in the Viking age across Europe would have worn especially especially men okay this you know long tunic that's kind of goes all the way to your to your knees or slightly lower than the knees and and I think uh in this case this this band in the middle of the figure is most likely some kind of a belt okay either a leather belt or maybe some
Kind of, uh, organic, uh, strap made of, uh, woven, um, linen or, or wool or silk. We, we don't know. But when it comes to the hat, that's, that's a slightly unusual feature and again, something that has these Eastern, Oriental, um, analogies, so to say. Because this is a hat we, we sometimes call "kopak," and it's a, it's an Eastern, uh, type of hat again. Um, I had that, that, well, would have been worn by people of, of the Rus' areas, the Rus' territories.
[Music]
It's not the kind of hat that would have been worn among the Western Slavs, for instance. So again, it's, it's an Eastern type of.
Okay, yeah. So, on to them. Yeah, I just, actually, I just wanted the, the, um, if there was any significance to that, because I guess for me, looking at this for the first time, it looks like he's, I guess he would be topless and then from the waist down then have clothing. But as you've said it, and I kind of then look up, then yeah, it's a belt and he's wearing a tunic. But, uh, you know, from just like the very highest, virgin eyes on, on this, it was like, "Ah!" But that's, that's great because the thing about the bottom, yeah, I, I love this, this approach, and it's great when, you know, people who are from, uh, from a sort of different world and who have never seen this before look at it for the first time. Because, you know, guys like me, we've seen it a billion times and we're so used to it that certain things we just don't notice them anymore, or we never notice them. So it's great to have somebody else's opinion on it. I think that's really, uh, very fascinating. Like, you're missing those legs. Yeah, that's, that's, uh, that's an interesting detail.
But, uh, if, if we may, let's, let's, yeah, try and talk a little bit about the actual myths, yeah, about the actual myth. Um, so, uh, what I'm going to tell you in a, in a sort of fairy tale fashion, is what seems to be one of the basic myths, um, that structures the Slavic worldview and their understanding of the world. And I have to say that this myth is not something that is found in a, in the Slavic poetic Edda or some heroic tales. We don't have anything like that from, uh, from the Viking Age, or especially, uh, when it comes to the Western Slavic, uh, part of the world. But we have folklore, as I said, and, uh, the story I'm about to tell you comes from folkloristic accounts. And, uh, what I'm going to tell you is a, is a kind of an amalgam of, of several variants of the story. There's actually 50 different, or more than 50 different, different variants of this, of this story.
So the story begins a long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away, somewhere in the, in the Slavic world. And there is only an endless ocean. There's nothing else. There are no animals, no humans. There's just water, and it's endless. And suddenly, we don't quite know how and why, a little boat appears. And inside the boat sits a figure, and we will call this figure God. So God is in his boat, and he's floating amidst this endless ocean. And one day, he looks into the water and suddenly sees his reflection. And the water becomes a kind of foamy, and out of this reflection comes another being, another creature. And this creature jumps into the boat, and this creature introduces itself, and he says, "I am the Devil."
So here you have God and Devil in a boat, and they're floating. They're probably having an interesting conversation. And one day, God decides to create land. For some reason, he knows that deep below this watery abyss, at the very bottom, there is sand, there is soil. But because he belongs to the upper world, he cannot pick it up himself. So he has to ask the creature that comes from this watery realm. He has to ask the Devil for help. So he says, "Devil, I need your help. I need you to bring this handful of soil to the surface. But remember, in doing so, you have to say, 'I take the soil in God's name.'"
So the Devil agrees, of course, and he just dives into the water and goes all the way down, picks this handful of sand. And as he emerges, he says, "I take this soil in my own name." He opens his hand and he finds nothing, of course. So he has to do it one more time. So he dives, and he picks up this, this handful of soil. Then he comes to the surface and he says, "I take this soil in my own name." And again, he finds nothing. So he has to do it the third time. And then he picks it up, goes up, and he says, "I take this soil in God's name and my own." And then he opens his hand and he finds this little grain. He jumps into the boat, gives it to God. And then God picks up this little grain and casts it onto the surface of, of the ocean. And what happens is, this little grain begins to grow, and it eventually turns into a little island.
When the island is big enough, the two deities, God and Devil, they jump out of their boats and they, they make land. And God is very tired of this act of creation, so he decides to lie down and take a little nap. So he falls asleep. And as he's sleeping, the Devil thinks, "Ah, okay, now I can get rid of him and take full control over this beautiful island." So what the Devil does is he tries to push God into the water. And he pushes him to the north, to the south, to the east, and to the west. But God does not belong to the watery realm, so you cannot drown him. And what actually happens instead is that the island only becomes bigger. It just expands like under a rolling pin. It just, yeah, stretches in all these directions. And then God finally wakes up, and of course, he's very pissed off. So what he does is he starts striking the Devil with lightning. And the Devil jumps and hides, and he hides under a stone, and he hides under a tree. But God is chasing him constantly.
Now, there is a possible variant of the story where the gods either take the form of animals, and I think these animals were flying and roaring serpents or, or dragons, or they create their avatars in the form of snakes or dragons. But essentially, there is this conflict between the two opposing forces of the watery realm and the upper realm: light and dark, and fire and water, and so on. So they fight, they're engaged in the struggle, and eventually the Devil jumps back into the, into the ocean. And then God says, "Yes, this is your realm, and this is where you will remain, and I shall be the ruler of this, of this island and of this world."
So that is the basic story, the basic myth that we have from, uh, from Slavic folklore. And here you can see, uh, this idea of the two serpents fighting, uh, over, yeah, the domination, not over the, over the worlds, the control of the world. And, uh, and this fight seems to be an idea that is fundamental to our understanding of Slavic belief. So it's, it's a, there's a black metal band called Samael, and they have this album called "Ceremony of Opposites," and I think this is the ceremony of opposites, you know, fire and water, and light and dark. Um, but the conflict has to continue. It's a cyclic conflict for world domination, and neither of the two deities ever wins because, you know, everything works in cycles. You have to have winter, which is symbolized by these devilish powers, and then you have spring, which is symbolized by all these celestial, uh, lightning, the first thunder, and so on. So this is a conflict that keeps the world, uh, in its existence, that, that makes the world go round, literally.
Um, and you can see here that, that, uh, as I said, that if, if you break, break the story down, you have two opposing powers that represent two different domains. Usually in the folklore, you have beings that are labeled God and Devil. But we can make an educated guess that in the sort of original variant from the Viking Age, um, they were, of course, not called God and Devil. And most likely, the deity of the sky was called Perun, like I mentioned earlier. So the kind of equivalent of October or other sky deity. And the, the other creature, the Devil, uh, was most likely called Veles or Triglav, the three-headed one, the one you can remember from the pillar. So he is the god of the, the underworld. Um, this is the, the basic story, the, the cosmogonic myth, the myth of the world's creation. And, uh, and for a very long time, we didn't have any archaeology to, uh, to illustrate the existence of this myth back in the 10th, 11th centuries. And, uh, I think we actually now have it. So I don't know how much time we've got left, but I was...
We have as much time as you want. I'm, I'm loving this. But, uh, but I do have failure. I can show you what the archaeology is, or what the archaeology can be. And I have questions about the myth first.
All right. Uh, I have as much time as you have. I'm not going anywhere. This is so much fun for me. I, I just love learning about things I just have never heard of. Um, do you think that it's when God looked, when the God figure, uh, Perun, looks into the, the sea and sees reflection, do you think that's almost like a doppelganger type thing of it's always an exact copy of him as a, as like a devil figure, or it's its own being? Does that make sense?
Yeah, I think, well, there are different variants of the story. So one is where he, he looks into the water and sees a reflection. There's another where there's just like, you know, this foaming, okay, water, or just something comes out of the water. There are different variants. But, but I think the idea that it's a reflection and that there is this sense of duality, yeah, and it's, it's kind of the same, but it's not the same, and one cannot exist without the other. I think that's, that's where we are touching the core of, of essentially Slavic beliefs. Everything in the Slavic world seems to be based on this idea of duality. That's, that's not something that is so clear in the Norse system of belief, where you have hints of it, yeah, you have these different opposing powers. But I think for the Slavs, the idea, the double, is, is very important. It's, it's the fundamental, fundamental thing here.
Do you think that's down to lack of, like, say, lack of source material and like a, like a, it's hard to maybe expand, yeah, on this because nobody can really say? So I assume there would be other factors and other, other gods.
Uh, sure, yes, of course. They're, they're, you know, it's, it's a one or two-hour podcast, so we can't cover everything. But that's, that's the reason why I'm picking certain details and certain stories. There's more, there's a little bit more that we can use. But generally, the problem with Slavic mythology is that it's, it's fragmented, it's patchy, it's, it's a sort of a, a patchwork, uh, uh, belief system as it comes out, comes down to us today. So, uh, we cannot discuss it in so much detail, uh, as, as we can with, with the Norse, uh, beliefs. Um, because, yeah, because simply we don't have as many sources, especially texts. Because the reason why we understand the Norse belief system so well is because we have all these texts. We have the, you know, the poems, we have the Poetic Edda, we have the sagas. Then we have folklore, and we can, you know, mix and match and verify and cross-track these different sources. And, uh, and they're also written in the vernacular language, more or less. Yeah, runic inscriptions and all that.
Oh, isn't it? I, I just sort of a thought. It's a huge advantage. Yeah, but how fascinating is how you get, obviously, like the Abrahamic faiths, you have like the Bible, the Quran, where you have these, these texts that are pretty much like, "This is it." Like, "this book here is, is everything." But then you, and then of course it's not. And also in, in the Scandinavian world, then you have the Nordic ones who were then like the next, like, it's almost like the next step down from that, where you have like all these textbooks, you can't take them at face value. There is so much complexity to them. They're most of them, like, say, written by, um, like Christian sources or, uh, Arabic sources. So you say the next step down, but then you get even further removed from that and go to like the Slavic one where you have pretty much nothing. It's like this, it's like a very fascinating kind of like, uh, pyramid.
That's, that's why, that's why it's interesting, especially from, for me as an archaeologist. It's interesting to try and understand these belief systems in different cultures because sometimes if you have a profound knowledge of, of one system of belief from the same time, then you can use some, some of this knowledge to try and fill certain gaps in another system of belief. Because on some fundamental levels, these religions were similar, and certain practices were very similar. So you can, you can, you can approach it in a sort of comparative this way. Um, and that, that helps. For me, it's, it's actually has been my modus operandi, my way of, my procedure, my research procedure. Because I, I've always had an interest in the Slavic world, but my main interest has been the Scandinavian world. So I, I began with Scandinavia and Scandinavian sources and Old Norse sources and Viking archaeology, and then I moved on to the Slavic world. So I'm kind of also like you, kind of approaching the Slavic world as a kind of outsider, but at the same time an insider, because I, you know, I speak...
But I guess it gives you, it gives you a different, yeah, angle to look at it from that maybe other people have missed.
I think it has helped me. It has helped me a lot and has certainly helped me reinterpret certain objects in the archaeology of the Slavic world and, and, and view them in a different way than, than some of my colleagues, uh, have been viewing them for, for a very long time. And, uh, yeah, that, that's can lead to a lot of groundbreaking, uh, results, I think.
Yeah, absolutely. It's, you need that sometimes when you need an outsider perspective sometimes on, on all kinds of things. And I think that's, that's, that's valuable. Um, I mean, that's, that's almost like how this podcast started. It's one of the, the ideas behind it was that, you know, you have all the, we have so many scholars on here and particularly, and also like with Matthias, you know, we've, I think scholars almost become, you, you, you exist in your own, I guess, echo, echo chamber of like talking to all the scholars and kind of become blinded to seeing things the same way over and over and over. And then when you try, no, I'm not, I'm kind of speaking as a broad sense. When it then comes to like talking to maybe lay people like me, you're almost overlook the very basics because you assume a level of understanding that maybe is amongst the scholars, but it's overlooked when it comes to kind of just the everyday person. And, and this, this kind of gives the opportunity of somebody like me to be like, "I don't understand this. What's this little thing here? Can you tell me what this is?"
That's one of the great problems of, of academia generally, uh, where, you know, professional academics go to these conferences and you have to often pay to attend the conference, and they are not open to the public. And it's a bunch of people sitting in the room talking to themselves without any, any audience. And then they're publishing whatever they've discussed in super expensive journals and super expensive books that most normal people cannot buy. And, uh, yeah, what, what is this all for? I sometimes wonder. And, and I think if there is a future for academia, uh, we have to open up to everybody and be as inclusive as we possibly can, and listen and be open to other people from other cultures, from other backgrounds. And, uh, that's, that's the way to push the research forward. Of course, we, you know, we, we won't always agree, but we have to be open to these kinds of, uh, conversations. And, and the worst thing you can do is say, "Oh, I'm not listening to you because you don't have a PhD." So what? Doesn't matter. Someone can just have a great idea, and maybe that idea is worth considering. Yeah, absolutely.
That's, that's my take, you know.
Yeah, and I think you've got, it's a brilliant perspective to have because it feels like every, every other week on my Academia.edu, I see your name popping up with a new paper that people can, can read. But that's, yeah, you know, I wish, I wish all my work was open access and that everyone could read it. But some things I just cannot upload on Academia because there's a contract and, and it permits me to, to share this. Yeah, so, uh, it's extremely unfortunate. Not to mention the fact that most of the articles we write for these journals that then appear behind a 30, 40 Euro or pound paywall, we actually don't get paid for it as authors. Okay, yeah. So how crazy is that?
Yeah, it, it, it is very disappointing because, you know, we get all the, asked all the time, "How can people read more?" And there are people out there who just want to read as much as they can. And maybe, you know, it is frustrating because it's particularly in the, the Nordic side of things, like the Norse mythology, you get a certain group of people who just, they're happy just being like the entry level, and they'll just think of whatever they see on the TV shows or read on Wikipedia is true, and that's that. It's fine, they can, they can exist as they are. But there are so many people who want to do that further reading, and they want to get deeper involved. And for whatever reason, maybe they didn't have the opportunity when they were, you don't get to go to university to, to study this further, um, whether it's, you know, for whatever happened in life, or maybe they just didn't get interested in this until later in life. And then, you know, you have responsibilities like kids, house, all those, you know, all those things, and you can't then go back to university. So it, it would be nice for everything just to be as accessible as possible so people can just dive in and try and learn as much. Yeah, but that's a bit of an off-topic from...
It is, it is a little bit, yeah, our discussions. Um, oh, I, I have it all the time because, uh, we will move on to the archaeology, but it's, of course, very important what we just said. I think is, we have to try our best to make things as accessible as possible. It hits me all the time because, like, say, I spend, I spend a lot of my weekends just going around different places and trying to look at Viking Age finds, particularly like within, within Yorkshire. And I get, I keep getting hit with red tape, particularly it's from like, um, right. A lot of these things end up in churches anywhere. But some of it's fascinating how some of them are so open. The church is open all the time. You can go in, you can look, uh, you can take pictures. They're not bothered. It's, they love it. They're really proud that the history is there. But then you get some that are just like, "Okay, this is, we have this little bit of history, but it's ours, and you can't come in and take pictures of it, and you can only come and look at it if we say you can come and look at it." Sometimes we're not even going to give you permission to come and look at it. And that's what I find so frustrating. It's like, "You don't really own this. You just happen to be, yeah, your church."
The idea of being a curator is not the idea of ownership. You're curating it, you're not owning something. You're there to make sure it's safe, but you should, yeah, give people access, of course. Yeah, not everyone can access it for various reasons. Yeah, there are certain objects that are fragile, that requires certain transitions to for them to survive the next couple of hundred years. But, but, uh, yeah, essentially, knowledge should be accessible. It should, it should be.
In particular, what I, the one I'm referring to, and I'll name it on here, I don't care. Um, so there's a figured cross fragment that exists in the Ripon Cathedral. And this, this fragment of a cross is just sat in a back room. It's not, there's, they, they know it's of some importance. It's one of four secret cross pieces in the UK. Um, and it's just in a back room sat there. It's not on display in this. It's so frustrating because, you know, I wrote to them and said, "Can I come and see it? I'd love to make a video about it. It's really cool." And it's like, "No, we plan on doing something. Whether we understand this importance, we will do something with it at some point." It's just like, "In 20 years?" Yeah, so it doesn't take much for you just to put it, put it out and put a little plaque with it or something. Yeah, that's, I find things like that very frustrating. Yeah, that happens.
But anyway, yeah, head back to, back to the archaeological. Um, yeah, there's, there's one other thing I want to show you, and I think that's, that is, uh, an extension to what we've been talking about and, uh, with very interesting implications for, yeah, the wider Viking-themed research. So, uh, it requires a little bit of a, a little bit of an introduction, um, into, uh, Slavic or West Slavic archaeology. But if we have time, we can quickly run through it. Absolutely, a couple of slides.
So, uh, in the next couple of minutes, I'll take you on a journey to Poland. And you can see the map of the country as it is, as it appears today, with some of the major, um, cemeteries from the Viking Age marked and underlined. And I will show you some of the finds from two sites. Uh, one of them is called Lutomiersk, and you can see it in the middle of the picture, right in the very, almost in the very center of the country. And the other site is called Czaple. It's in the north of Poland, not far away from, you know, it's quite a famous historical city, a very popular especially among Scandinavian tourists. That's not far away from, from the coast.
So our story begins in this place called Lutomiersk in central Poland. And, uh, it begins in the 1940s. And that was a very dark time in history, in European history, especially in Polish history, the time of the Second World War and of the Nazi occupation. And in 1940, the Nazis, who already got a very strong foothold in, in Poland, gathered Jews from the ghetto in Łódź, a big city in central Poland, and took them to this little village of Lutomiersk to destroy, to force them to destroy an existing Jewish cemetery. And what they wanted to do is they wanted to use stone slabs from the cemetery, gravestones essentially, for the construction of a road. That was a, a common thing that the Nazis did, destroying religious heritage of other cultures and just, you know, using it as building material. This is the dark kind of story behind what, what is about to happen, behind an excavation.
Um, so what happens in the 19, in 1940, is one of the workers, uh, upon destroying this, the cemetery, comes across a Viking Age sword unexpectedly. Um, so it appears that underneath this Jewish cemetery was an earlier cemetery from the Viking Age. And of course, he picks up the sword. The Nazis are thrilled because it looks like a very old thing. It looks kind of Viking. So for them, from an ideological point of view, well, this is something really important because based on that find, they can then build an argument saying, "Oh, there were Vikings in the very heart of Poland from Scandinavia, so the Germanic world was here." And that's that, that is great, uh, from their perspective.
So what they did is they almost, uh, immediately launched an excavation campaign hoping to find more Viking traces in Lutomiersk. And they excavated about 15 graves, but they found nothing in those early medieval Viking Age graves. They found nothing of Scandinavian origin or diagnostically in Scandinavian style. So they abandoned the dig. They sent the finds to, to Poznań, where I'm based right now, actually, to a museum in. And only after the war, Polish archaeologists in 1949 decided to return to the site and excavated yet again to its full extent. And the, the, the, the idea behind this Polish excavation was to verify if the Nazis were right or wrong about the alleged Viking-ness of the cemetery and of the people buried there.
And what is really interesting is, uh, that the professor who was running this excavation, or the Polish, uh, Polish scholar, uh, Konrad Jażdżewski, arranged the start of this excavation so that it would coincide with the visit of a very prominent Swedish archaeologist called Holger Arbman. Now, for those of you who know Scandinavian archaeology, his name, Arbman, rings a bell. This is the guy who published, uh, some of the grave finds from Birka in Sweden, the famous cemetery. Arbman was the guy who published the finds, the graves, the plans, the, the objects, and so on. He was an expert in Scandinavian archaeology. So for the Polish archaeologist, this visit was very important because he wanted Arbman to verify if there are any Vikings in Lutomiersk or not.
So Arbman came. He looked at the finds, and he said, "No, there's nothing. There's nothing Scandinavian here. There's nothing diagnostically Nordic here. But maybe you have something Eastern European. Maybe you have something that points to the Rus' direction." He wasn't quite sure. Now, unfortunately, we don't know exactly what he saw and what finds he was talking about. But we can speculate, and it's possible that he had the opportunity to see two of the graves from the cemetery. And here you can see the plan of the site, and these two graves are labeled Graves 5 and 10. And these graves are in the middle part of the, of the site. They're marked with these red circles. Yeah, you can see that the middle part of the cemetery, all these squares are graves, and they form a row. It's almost like they're arranged along a road, perhaps a processional road where people would have, you know, conducted all kinds of funerary rituals and processions and so on.
And the graves are interesting. Uh, they have roughly the same contents, but they are, they represent two different traditions. So one is, is a cremation, so the body was burnt. And the other is, uh, is an inhumation, so the whole body was buried in, in the grave. Okay. And you can see some of the stuff that was in there. You can see these round things, and these are parts of a bridle, distributors for, for a bridle. I actually have a replica here, so I'm not going to put it on because it's for a horse. But, but you can see these little, these little animal heads. Yes, uh, so there were four altogether, and you put it on the, on the horse's head, and it would have looked really beautiful. Um, and the same grave also had a very strange copper alloy object with little animal figures attached to it.
So, just before you go on to that, that little, that little round thing with the animal heads, I, I don't, obviously it's the first time I've seen it, but I recognize that little heads, and I don't know where from or what, but they look kind of like, I, I imagine it's something that, that Luciano, um, who just did the Children of Ash, yeah, has shown me. I feel like there's, there's something in them that just strikes me as something he's shown us on this podcast before, like just the shape of them with their little ears. They, they just stood out to me straight away. I was like, "Oh, I've seen those before," or something very similar to that.
Yeah, but we'll come back to that. We'll come back to that. But I think what's important now to remember is that there are three, okay, three heads. And you already know something about three heads from, yes, in the talk. So that, that was in this grave as well as, uh, as this very strange kind of U-shaped object with animal, uh, figures. And, uh, the same kind of object with three animals is, uh, is something that was found in Grave 10, this inhumation grave. And you can, you can see it, um, on the sort of in the, in the center of the image to the right, on the left-hand side, more or less. So you will see a larger, larger, um, this photo in a, in, in a second. Here you go. This is the grave, uh, number 10, uh, reconstruction showing how it may have appeared at the time of burial. And you can see the rest of the gear that was buried with this, with this person. So again, you have elements of riding equipment. And these two, um, two things, um, in the upper left corner, these are so-called cheek pieces. So that's something that you, you, uh, attach to the horse bit to, to make it hold better in the horse's mouth, to, to stabilize a bit. But it's also, it also has a decorative, decorative aspect, of course. And, uh, and these here are very decorative. And what you can notice on, on, in the decor is that at first glance, it looks kind of floral. But what it actually represents, and it's not immediately clear now, but you will see why I think it represents what it represents, is that you actually have two flying snakes or two flying serpents. Okay, that are flanking something that looks like a tree. Yeah.
Now, I also have a replica because I like to commission replicas. So, um, that's, that's the replica of the bit. Yeah, yeah. So that's the thing that goes into the mouth of the animal. Yeah, and that is the cheek piece. So you can, okay, yeah, like gold. It was made of copper alloy, and you could see the beasts here flanking, uh, a central tree, uh, motif. And then finally, you can see the strange U-shaped object. And when they found it, they weren't quite sure what it was. So the original interpretation was that it was a part of a saddle, a kind of a saddle bow, uh, fitting or something. But what it actually is, as you can see, and you can read from, from, from the slide, it's actually part of a spur. And, uh, quite an elaborate one. The problem for these original excavators was that they couldn't quite immediately recognize it as a spur because for the spur to work, you need a goad. That's the thing that goads the animal, um, so you need this long kind of prick-like thingy at the end, um, and it was missing for some strange reason. So they couldn't quite figure it out.
And all these things, as wonderful as they are, in the 1940s, seemed very exotic to the excavators and probably to Arbman as well. That's why I presume that this is what he saw, and he thought, "Ah, this, this cannot be Slavic or West Slavic. This is definitely not Scandinavian. Maybe it's somewhere from the East, somewhere, somewhere else, somewhere in Asia. These are probably some nomads. We don't know." And this interpretation of all this, all this gear, and you can here see the, the reconstructed bridles and on, on horse, horse heads. All these interpretations, they, they kind of prevailed for decades on. And only until the last couple of years, we have actually, in the last couple of years, we have actually begun to understand what these objects are and what, what they communicate and how important they are also for Slavic mythology and our understanding of Slavic mythology.
And the real game changer is what I'm going to show you now. It came when, uh, who, uh, was an archaeologist in the Archaeological Museum in Gdańsk, excavated a cemetery in Czaple. That's the site close to Gdańsk in, uh, in the early 2000s. And, uh, she unfortunately passed away a few years ago, but her, her excavation skills were, and documentation skills were excellent. So the site was excavated to a very, very high standard. And we can now do a lot of fantastic analysis of, of this material together with another colleague, Kamil Kajkowski. I had the privilege to work with on some of this material. And, uh, and it was a fascinating adventure. Um, so what, what did she find? Well, she, she found a cemetery in many ways similar to Lutomiersk, but also very rich, or even richer than Lutomiersk, with a number of chamber graves, including weapons and riding gear. Or one of the graves had the exact same spur. And this looks so similar, it's exactly the same, uh, in, in terms of its design, at least. And it's complete. It has the missing goad, and it also has other parts that made it possible to attach it to, uh, to a shoe.
Wow.
So here you can see another image actually from the excavation showing where the spurs were placed in the grave. And you can see that the presumed rider had the spurs on, on his feet. So it's, it's, it was a person sort of fitted for an, we can speculate, an otherworldly journey, presumably on a horseback. The problem is that the horse was not in the grave. The horse was missing. There are actually no horse remains or large horse remains from, from the site. We don't know where the horses are, but he's ready for a ride, for, for an otherworldly journey to the afterlife. Here again, you can see a, a reconstruction of the grave by my colleague, Miroslav Hugema. We've been collaborating on these different reconstructions for many years. Um, so yeah, so that, that brings the image of the, of the grave in its, in its, um, presumed form. Yeah.
Now, this is again the spur. You can see it enlarged, and you can see some of the details. So on the goad, you can see an animal with its head turned to the back, presumably a horse. Maybe that's the missing horse from the grave. Then you can see these three animals on the arms of the spur that have these, presumably, horns on their heads. Yes, you can also see these little bells attached to the arms of the spur. And at the terminals, you can see the head of another animal, presumably a snake. There were also other elements of the spur which included, uh, parts of a buckle and, and the fastening mechanism. And the object was so, so interesting that we have, together with my colleagues, actually tried to reconstruct it and to restore its original appearance, making a, a replica. And, uh, one of my colleagues, who is a very experienced rider, has also used it in action.
Oh, wow.
What you can see here is the replica, and I also have it right. You have it? Oh, nice. So this, this restores the object to its original, uh, appearance. That's the original beauty. And, uh, and you can hear that it actually has its own voice, and it makes its own sound. Like, you can hear it. These are the bells, the rattling. But when the rider was wearing this, people could hear him approaching, and they would probably, yeah, when someone like that was, was coming, coming close. The reconstruction, the replica, was, uh, was made by a very talented, uh, jeweler, uh, uh, called Tomasz Trzcionka, um, and Kornelia, his wife. They're working, uh, together. They have a, they have a very, uh, uh, they're very skilled, and they have this wonderful, uh, workshop. And this is the best replica of these spurs that has ever been made. Um, and, uh, and it's largely thanks to them that, that we can understand the, the fastening mechanism, which is quite, quite unusual. But of course, all this detail implies that, well, it was there for a reason, that there is some kind of meaning behind it. Absolutely.
Um, together with, with Kamil Kajkowski, an archaeologist from, uh, Bytów in Poland, and with G. Suavec from the Archaeological Museum in Gdańsk, as well as with the rider, Bartłomiej Kligotski, and Tomasz, the photographers, well, we have speculated and, and, and kind of tried to unravel the meanings of this strange object. And we think that it has something to do with Slavic mythology, and that it's in one way or another linked to that cosmogonic myth that I told you earlier. So we think that's the way to understand this object is to read it along two different axes, so to say. So you have the horizontal axis and you have the vertical axis. That's how you read the comic book from the Slavic world. So the, what you can see on the strap is the upper world. It's basically the horizon. And, uh, and there's also a disc on the strap that slides and holds the strap in place. Okay, yeah. And the disc has a swastika motif. It's most likely the representation of the sun that travels on the horizon and rises and falls and rises and falls on this, on the, in the cycle of life, so to say. Yeah.
Then you have the buckle and the fittings. And if you look closely, you will see in the lower left corner that at first glance, this just looks like a decorated buckle. But if you look closely in it, even if you turn your head 90 degrees, you'll notice that there are actually two snakes on either side. They're touching with their, with their mouths. Did you see that? They're like, and then you have these, these guys here, it's kind of bird-shaped fittings. Now, what happens here is that, you know, for the, for the strap to, to work, to close it, these flying snakes and these crawling snakes on the buckle, they have to interlock, they have to clash, so to say. And if you remember what I told you about, you know, the Slavic cosmogonic myth and these snakes fighting in the sky, well, this is exactly what's happening here. They are engaged in some kind of cosmic struggle on, on, on, on the sky, in the sky.
Now, here you can see this horse. And of course, anyone who knows anything about past religions knows that the horse is a creature that can travel between worlds. And I think that this is what, what is happening here. You can see that below the horse on this goad, there's no ornament. It's all plain. Yeah. There's a little wavy pattern in front of the animal which implies that this creature is standing somewhere, I think, on, on a shore. And its head's turned backwards seems to suggest that it's capable of traveling into whatever is behind or on the water and to come back. So I think we could, we could make a guess that this is the horse that travels between worlds and presumably transports human souls into the afterlife.
And this is what we can see on the on the arms of the spur. So you see these three animals, uh, presumably cattle. That's how we interpret these, these, these creatures on a wavy pattern, so on water or on an island. And there's other stories in the corpus of Slavic folklore suggesting that in the afterlife, human souls took the form of cattle. So this is probably what we are looking at here. This is the representation of the afterlife where human souls turn into, into cattle. And then finally, you have the bell and this, um, this fitting. And if you close this fitting, it has to go kind of pro the slider and down below this wavy pattern. So it's, it's kind of like the way I'd suggest this is, this is the way to read it. Uh, it dives under water. So maybe this is a reference to that Holy Diver motif where the diver dives down and picks the, the grain of soil.
All this may be wrong, of course. But as you can see, there are certain, yeah, parallels here to the, the, to the few stories that we have left. There are certain ways to try and, uh, try and decipher it, um, going to further, further detail and deconstruct the symbolism. And this is something that we've done, uh, with Kamil Kajkowski and with G. Suavec in a big article. We wrote a 100-page article where, where all this is, you know, broken into pieces and, and interpreted. Um, but on a very basic level, this is, this is how we can, we can, uh, try and figure this out.
How much does it help having the, um, the replica that you've made? Because that must make it, that must make, make so much different being able to hold and manipulate and look at it.
Absolutely. That was one of the reasons, uh, for making this, this replica. We've actually, all together, three replicas have been made. There was one that I commissioned back in 2015, 2014, actually, I think in 2014, from a, from a different, uh, artist, uh, known as Moynita. Uh, she made one replica for me, but at that point, I didn't have enough detail. I, I, I, I, I hadn't seen the original find. I only had photographs. I was teaching, uh, Slavic Warfare in Rzeszów, it's a university in the south of Poland. And, uh, so I made it sort of building on my fascination, my growing fascination with Slavic Warfare. Then another colleague of mine, Bartosz Kligotski, he commissioned his replica from Tomasz, but they also didn't have some of the data that I was kind of acquiring at that time. And then finally, I commissioned the final replica, the third replica, from Tomasz, which is as exact as it can be. Okay, as, as authentic as it can be.
The, the interesting thing from a technological point of view is that, uh, you can see this goad was not cast together with the rest of the spur's body. It's actually a separate piece, and it's designed in a very particular way because it actually has an iron core. So it was cast over an iron rod and then riveted to the, to the arms of the spur. Yeah, um, and that's also really interesting because it seems that these things were not totally stable or, or, or, uh, uh, permanently fixed, and they would sometimes fall off. And we find those spurs across the Viking world, which is great for our, well, it's a, pro, it was probably a tragedy for the rider to lose something like this. But it's great for us as archaeologists because based on these variously distributed spur goads, we can actually trace the, you know, the trajectories, the mobility of these riders. And, uh, and we can see how far their contacts, uh, extended and where they went, and then speculate on what they did. So we have, uh, we have a couple of, uh, spur goads like this, uh, from, from Poland. But we also have some in Scandinavia, including Denmark and Sweden. So that shows again some very close intercultural contacts here.
Okay, you're gonna have to come back and talk more about this. We're gonna have to because we're coming up close on like two hours. So we're gonna have to, you're gonna have to come back and talk.
Yeah, I think that's a good, that's a good place to stop. And I think the last thing I wanted to ask you is, unless I'm remembering this incorrectly, when you, when we last spoke, we spoke about female warriors. Am I wrong in thinking that there was a spur in a female warrior grave that you speculate might have been from the Slavic region? I've not made that up, right? Um, was there something like that? Or if I remember correctly, actually, but actually, I believe I said that there were actually no spurs.
Maybe that was it. We're talking about the Birka grave. Maybe that was it. Maybe warrior woman's grave. Uh, that one didn't have spurs, but it had stirrups. And I said, "Okay, maybe yes, maybe that was nice." But with stirrups is something Eastern, like, "Okay, yeah." It represents the kind of Eastern way of mounted warfare, riding, and so on. Yeah.
Okay, I knew I just remembered this. Probably Facebook. That was it. Yeah, I remember there was something that I couldn't quite remember exactly what it was. Um, because we are going to do a little Q&A with, let's see, that's a good point to stop. Yeah, but I, I, the, I love these episodes where actually I'm learning something new. The chat is silent, so that means everybody's actually listening and not talking amongst themselves. And, you know, my favorite episodes are where I forget that I'm recording a podcast, where I just feel like I'm sat here just having a conversation with somebody. I forget that there's people listening, or they're arguing with people listening. I forget about the chat. It's just, I'm, I'm locked in and kind of just obsessed with whatever you're saying. So I, you know, I really appreciate this has been a lot of fun, and you do have to come back. You're always one of my favorite guests. That's why I pester you.
So, my pleasure.
So I'm pestering you all the time to be like, "When you can come back and talk to me again?" Um, okay, is there anything you want to plug, shout out, where people can find your work, anything you want them to buy? Uh, everybody go support, yeah, you can find my work on Academia.edu. And if there's something you cannot find, then you can always contact me via email or through Facebook. And I will just, yeah, when it comes to the Slavic stuff, I will just leave it here for today. But I can kind of silently announce that there is a new project coming up soon, good, concerning some of this material, but also its connection with the Scandinavian world. Wonderful. And I can't say anything else right now, but all right, now it's coming. Well, hopefully.
Okay, then next time, hopefully, when you come back, we know there'll be something more concrete you can, you can say, and we can make people give you some money somehow. That's always nice.
So it is always nice because you need to, that book collection needs to get bigger.
Exactly. Okay, if you enjoy the show, please leave us a five-star rating, a positive review wherever you get your podcast. And if you can, go check out Patreon for the Norse Mythology Podcast. You get the story time episodes, you get the Q&As with the guests. You can ask the guests your questions as well beforehand or during the live show. And there's a bunch of material on there you can go and check out. But yeah, listen, thank you very much. Um, let's have a couple of minutes break. I'm just gonna run to the bathroom, and then we'll, we will jump in and do the Q&A. Great. Sounds great.
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