PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
The Vikings are re-emerging from the dustbin of history, where they were dumped in some embarrassment at the end of the Second World War.

Wagnerian enthusiasm for the heroes of Valhalla, led all too clearly to an admiration of pagan ruthlessness in the Nazi leadership, and it became necessary to reinvent the Vikings and make them respectable.

Today the study of Vikings is an essential part of school syllabuses around the world, and Norse studies faculties are oversubscribed in American universities. Viking festivals are held in many countries, and Viking societies flourish. But the Vikings now look very different--they are presented as builders rather than destroyers, as craftsmen and innovators instead of plunderers. The old chronicles and saga stories of savage murderous ness are dismissed as propaganda an exaggeration.

Did the Vikings really not rape and pillage? And how did they achieve their astonishing feats of navigation and discovery, crossing the open sea, without ever inventing the compass?

This program sets out to answer these two questions by experimentation with the help of Sir robin Knox-Johnston and a nuclear particle accelerator.

Sir Robin's role is to test out a forgotten navigation instrument, a fragment of which was discovered in a monastery in Greenland. It is a simple wooden disc, with no moving parts. With no other aides he sailed down the channel out of sight of land (and mostly in fog), to make a landfall at the Lizard. If he misses, there will be no other landfall before America.

The accelerator is to date the bones found in a spectacular tomb. This tomb is claimed--by enthusiasts of the rape and pillage school--to contain the ritual burial of Ivar the Boneless and his army, the most savage Viking horde ever recorded. Most doubtful scholars point out that if it were true, then most of what has been written about the Vikings in the last 30 years would have to be scrapped. The results of these experiments are revealed for the first time in this film.

In the course of exploring the questions, we will see that one of the most famous Vikings of the sagas Egil Skallagrimsson was probably just made bad tempered by a bone disease. It also shows that the most astonishing feature of the Vikings was their enthusiasm for assimilation, disappearing in a single generation into the cultures where they settled.

PRODUCTION INFORMATION
Producer Alan Ereira
Series Editor Laurence Rees

DURATION
1x50'