Shadowing Practice: Ancient Animals The Viking Raiders Saw - Learn English Speaking with Video

Everyone who's ever stood under a museum skeleton has played the same game in their head.

What would I do if that thing was alive?

The answer is die.

You would die.

For us, it stays imaginary though.

These animals stay as bones behind glass because we were a few thousand years late.

But the Vikings were not late.

In fact, a thousand years ago, Norse hunters stood on arctic ice within spear range of one-ton animals with tusks built like short swords.

Animals that are now gone.

And to them, that was just the daily job of being a Viking.

Today, you're going to meet a bunch of different creatures the Vikings actually met face to face.

One of them they ate, one they sold to kings as a unicorn, and one they even walked on a leash.

And the last one that we're going to talk about is the one they sailed thousands of kilometers for over and over, right up until the very end of the Vikings' legacy.

Why?

Well, you'll just have to wait to find out.

But let's start on a river in Eastern Europe where a

Norse trader is standing face to face with a wild ox the size of his boat.

And he's realizing the old stories were true.

The aurochs was the wild ancestor of every cow on earth.

And calling it a cow is like calling a wolf a cock or spaniel.

The bull stood about 180 centimeters at the shoulder.

That's 6 feet tall, eye level with the man hunting it, and weighing over 700 kilograms.

Which is an absolute unit that's basically a big pissed off

forklift running at you the horn swept forward they were up to 80 centimeters each

which is longer than your arm those were nearly black with a pale stripe down the spine

and unlike modern cattle this thing was long-legged and fast

and according to the vikings who actually met it they were not particularly afraid of humans

which matters because fear of humans is the main thing

that we teach animals but the aurochs really had that dog in them and didn't give a fuck.

That Norse trader has never seen one before.

In fact, nobody from home had.

By the time the Viking Age starts, around the year 793, there hasn't been a wild aurochs in Scandinavia for centuries.

Their great great grand Vikings ate them all back in the early Iron Age.

So a Viking kid growing up in Denmark knew this animal the same way that you know it he wrecks.

From stories, from drinking horns, from grandpa exaggerating.

The first shelf in the story was empty before the story even starts.

But hold on to that empty shelf.

The Norse are about to spend the next six centuries finding nine more creatures.

Which is exactly why meeting one aurochs was such a big deal.

The aurochs have retreated south and east down the rivers into the forests of central and eastern Europe, and they were getting rarer every decade.

Norse traders and raiders moving through those river systems were passing through the last range of the last wild ox, and it being rare changed what the animal meant to the Vikings

because it stopped being viewed as lunch and started becoming a trophy.

The kind of kill you made specifically so you could tell people that you made it.

And you can literally watch the supply of them run out in the paperwork.

By around 1400, there were only a few hundred aurochs left on the planet, with all of them in Poland under direct royal protection by gamekeepers with laws.

Letters from the time period even call them the greatest attraction in Poland, which is a polite way of saying, stop turning the endangered animals into stakes.

We need them for money, dude.

But it doesn't work.

The herd keeps shrinking anyway.

And in 1627, in the Jackdaro Forest, the last orcs on Earth die of old age.

The wild ancestor of every cow alive's legacy ends as a single lone cow

in a single forest guarded like a thing at a museum.

Except this museum piece would fuck your shit up.

And God, it was probably tasty.

Have I ever mentioned to you guys that I grew up on a farm with cows?

Everyone always says, oh my god, look, cows, they are so cute.

But I, I know the evil truth.

Cows aren't cute.

Cows are evil.

I've been kicked about 20 times by cows as a kid.

That shit hurts.

Cows don't give a fuck.

Cows just kick and it hurts and goddammit, I hate cows.

And that's the reason I love snakes so much.

One more detail though.

A horn from the last bull that died actually got turned into a hunting horn

and then got looted as a war trophy and is now sitting in the Royal Swedish Armory in Stockholm.

The animals the Vikings hunted into a memory came home as the equivalent of a man posting his deer

or fish trophy on Tinder.

Wow, humanity has really come a long way, hasn't it?

So that's the aurochs.

But the next animal has the opposite problem, though.

They just couldn't get rid of it.

The gray wolf in Viking Age Scandinavia was everywhere that the Norse were.

In the same forests, the same mountains, and during the same long winters.

Living in family packs that could take down an elk.

Which, for the record, is an animal the size of a horse with antlers.

Nobody realizes just how big an elk or a moose is, by the way.

I live in Canada where we sometimes see those things, and God, they are absolute chonky boys.

Like, you don't fuck with a moose ever.

Spinosnack life tip, if you fuck with a moose, the moose will fuck with you, and you will likely be impaled, repeatedly, in a very not fun way.

Anyways, wolves were the top natural predator on the peninsula.

They had been the main thing killing aurochs before humans took over that department,

and every winter, they came down to the farms and did their own little resource extraction on Norse sheep, Norse cattle, occasionally even little Norse baby Vikings.

A Scandinavian wolf pack runs maybe 8 to 10 animals weighing 45 kilograms each, all working in coordination.

So the farmers weren't just dealing with one pest, they were dealing with a whole family of big bad wolves, and boy do they know how to huff and puff and blow the houses down.

And picture the Vikings meeting the wolves, because it happened every winter.

You're a Viking.

It's a cold February night and there's snow up to your knees and the sheep start screaming.

You come out with a torch and a spear and at the edge of the light there are these looming horrible shapes.

They've counted your sheep, they've counted you, and they are deciding right now whether tonight is worth it.

And this wasn't just a one-off attack.

The wolves came every winter, all ready to eat all of your yummy little cattle.

Most cultures that lose livestock to a predator just hate the predator.

But the Norse were a weird type of people.

I can say that because my family is actually from Norway before they moved to Canada.

Anyways, the Vikings were weird about wolves.

They honestly simped over wolves.

Like Odin, who's the actual head god dude guy, like the big bad boy, keeps two wolves at his table, Gary and Frecky.

100

Their names mean the ravenous and the greedy.

101

And to make Odin even more of a badass, he straight up feeds them by hand.

102

Yes, that's the god of war keeping the enemy as a pet.

103

Elite warriors even fought as Yulfnar, which means wolfcoats.

104

These were men who went into battle dressed as the thing that ate their sheep on purpose.

105

How badass is that?

106

And when they needed someone to end the world, they knew who to call.

107

They called Fenrir, a wolf, the son of Loki, who was raised by the gods themselves until he got too big to pretend about.

108

He was then chained on magical restraints with a sword propped in his jaws.

109

The prophecy is very specific about his purpose too.

110

And Ragnarok, he breaks the chain, swallows the sun, and then personally kills Odin.

111

Again, that is Odin, the head god dude.

112

Eaten by a pet.

113

The Vikings didn't just fear the wolves.

114

They wrote a whole damn apocalypse into their culture about them.

115

Which tells you why the wolf was so important.

116

Because every other animal that we will talk about tonight, they all convert into something for the Vikings.

117

Like meat, oil, ivory, or favor.

118

But the wolf converts into nothing.

119

You can't sell it, tax it, trade it, or hand it to a king.

120

It's the one creature in the Viking world that only ever took.

121

And killing one fed nobody and paid nobody.

122

The wolf was literally that guy to the Vikings.

123

The south was running out of cows, and the wolves in the woods were hunting back, which is why the Norse looked north instead.

124

Because up there, past the tree line, the money had legs.

125

And I do literally mean money, because guess what?

126

The Vikings had taxes, and reindeer were a core part of those taxes.

127

But first, let's talk about the animal, because the animal explains the money and the taxes.

128

Wild reindeer moved across the far north in herds of thousands with both sexes carrying antlers.

129

They are the only species of deer on earth that does that.

130

They had hooves that splayed out wide like built-in snowshoes, allowing them to float over snow that would have swallowed Norse boots up to the knee.

131

A herd like that is tons of meat hide and sinew on the move.

132

But it was on terrain where the best sailors on Earth could barely walk, so the Norse could see the wealth, but they couldn't chase it.

133

So they did what any human group naturally does.

134

They taxed it instead.

135

Yup, capitalism, baby.

136

Around the year 890, an actual Norwegian chieftain named Oet there stood in front of King Alfred, the great of England, and explained his whole business model,

137

and a scribe wrote it down, which means we have a Viking's income statement in his own words.

138

This was the headline.

139

His single biggest source of wealth wasn't raiding, and it wasn't farming.

140

It was tribute, gaffal, paid to him by the Sami, the indigenous people of the far north in fur, hides, and reindeer.

141

Yes, the scary axe people's best revenue stream was taxing their neighbors' hunting skills.

142

But real quick, if you're enjoying this video so far, the like and subscribe buttons are right there.

143

And unlike a Viking tax collector, it takes nothing from you.

144

Okay, back to talking about Sammy.

145

Because they had earned that tribute.

146

The Sammy were simply built different and better at this job of hunting.

147

They built literal funnel systems of standing stones arranged like scarecrow lines, steering whole herds into pitfall traps and enclosures,

148

with stone shooting blinds placed at the exact spot the physics would deliver the animals to them.

149

They kept tame decoy reindeer, which were deployed to walk out and convince wild herds that everything here is fine.

150

Nothing to worry about, fellow deer buddies!

151

And they crossed snow on skis the way the Norse crossed the water.

152

Which, by the way, the Norse were very good at crossing water.

153

Which is why the Norse made the extremely rational decision to not compete.

154

Why hunt reindeer badly when you can just tax people who hunt them perfectly?

155

So instead of a hunt, it became a market.

156

It got called the fin trade, with metal tools and silver flowing north into a region with no ore of its own, and furs and hides and reindeer products flowing south.

157

And this wasn't just some loose barter, because archaeologists keep finding Viking-era trade weights and coins at semi-settlements deep in northern Sweden's interior.

158

This was a whole monetized economy running hundreds of kilometers past where the sagas pretend the world ended.

159

And the two peoples got closer than the history books usually admit.

160

There's a 10th century burial in Norway, a full Viking ship funeral, the whole thing, except when archaeologists examined the boat, it wasn't nailed.

161

It was sewn together, stitched together with reindeer's sinew, in the Sammi style, meaning that these two group of people might have been closer together than we initially thought.

162

But enough about talking about taxes or land animals.

163

Let's talk about some water animals.

164

First, the whale.

165

The North Atlantic right whale is an 18-meter, 50-plus-ton filter feeder.

166

It's the length of two school buses parked nose to tail.

167

It has three things about it that mattered enormously to a man in a rowboat.

168

It swims slowly, it feeds right at the surface, and it floats when it dies.

169

So, later, whalers named it the right whale, as in the right one to kill.

170

It is the only animal I know of whose name is literally a customer's review.

171

Every other animal name describes the animal.

172

Hammerhead, grizzly bear, and then whalers looked at 50 tons of whale and named the species a five-star review.

173

Slow, fat, floats, convenient, would recommend to kill again.

174

Why not just throw in ugly or stupid in there at this point?

175

For Christ's sake, we named a living animal the way that you would rate a mattress.

176

Anyway, its head is crusted with pale patches of rough skin called callusites.

177

There was actually a different pattern on every whale, much like human fingerprints, which means the men hunting them could tell individuals apart.

178

The prey had faces to them.

179

The Norse hunting method was patient in a way that should really worry you.

180

You row out, you throw an iron-tipped spear into the whale, and then, this is the really important part, just like my ex-wife Becky, you leave and go home.

181

Except when I went home, Becky wasn't there because she left and took the kids.

182

Anyways, the spear you threw is marked with your personal identifying sign, much like a modern cattle brand.

183

And then the wound does the rest.

184

Infection sets in, and over the following days, the whale slowly loses a fight against the bacteria.

185

Eventually, it dies, floats, and washes ashore.

186

And then, when someone finds a 50-ton carcass on a beach, they check it for spears the way you would check a package for a shipping label.

187

Found your mark, that's your whale.

188

You killed it last Tuesday.

189

It just took a while to arrive, much like most Amazon packages.

190

So the Icelanders turned it into law.

191

The Gragas legal code lays out exactly how a beached whale gets divided.

192

A share goes to the hunter whose marked spear is in the body, another share goes to whoever found it, and another share goes to the landowner whose beach it chose.

193

If you were to cheat to split and steal from someone else's whale, the penalty would be outlawry, which in medieval Iceland meant anyone was legally allowed to kill you.

194

Yes, they had whale murder law.

195

That's how serious they took their whales.

196

And frankly, it was worth writing laws about, because one right whale is thousands of kilograms of meat and blubber.

197

It's the difference between a settlement eating through the winter or not.

198

The bones became game pieces.

199

Researchers ran genetic tests on heftenol pieces, which is Viking chess basically, that they found from graves in Sweden in the Åland Islands.

200

And most of them turned out to be carved from right whale bones, starting in the 500s, which was two centuries before the Viking Age.

201

So the Vikings whale killing worked so well that the next whale

202

that we're talking about is one that you have never seen in your life.

203

Nobody alive has.

204

The reason why took scientists until this century to piece it together.

205

Here's a fact that sounds wrong.

206

There used to be gray whales in the Atlantic.

207

Every gray whale alive today is in the Pacific.

208

That's where the famous migrations are.

209

That's where the whale watching boats go, and for a long time, that seemed like just how gray whales worked.

210

Then, researchers took 719 whale bones from European coastal sites and ran collagen fingerprinting by reading the protein signature in old bone,

211

which still works when the bone is a shapeless chunk, and after a thousand years of Norse butchery, shapeless chunks were all that were left.

212

Sitting in that pile, mixed in with the right whales, were gray whales, a whole Atlantic population's worth.

213

And these bones came from butchery sites and settlement trash heaps, meaning that people were eating a whale that science didn't know the Atlantic ever had.

214

There's no asterisks on this one, no remnant heard anywhere.

215

There's an entire ocean's worth of a whale species gone

216

so completely that science had to dig up the receipts just to find out it existed.

217

And the gray whale was almost custom built to be caught by people in small boats.

218

It's a 12 to 15 meter bottom feeder, about the length of a city bus, and it eats by rolling onto its side and vacuuming the sea floor, straining little animals out of the mud,

219

then surfacing with its face full of sediment like a dog that found something in the garden.

220

That feeding style keeps it in shallow water close to shore, which is exactly where a shore-based Viking-shaped hunter operates.

221

The right whale at least had the option of being far away.

222

Unfortunately, the gray whale lived in the kill zone, so the bones tell you the animal was there.

223

But here's what says the beatings weren't accidents the record of how Norse coastal communities actually hunted.

224

The spearing, the drive hunting, the herding whales into bays and closing the door.

225

Well, when you put the bones and the hunting methods together, it points to grey whales being deliberately, routinely hunted by at least the 11th century.

226

No, not scavenged off beaches, but hunted.

227

The marked spear system that you just learned about had another poor victim.

228

Nobody wrote down an ending of the Atlantic grey whales, because nobody really experienced it as an ending.

229

No hunter woke up one morning to a Twitter post that the Atlantic gray whales were extinct.

230

Each generation just saw slightly fewer than their fathers did.

231

And at some point, and we genuinely cannot say when, a gray whale surfaced somewhere off the coast of Europe for the last time.

232

And nobody knew.

233

This was an animal that had been in that ocean for hundreds of thousands of years, and it went out without a witness.

234

Because Vikings didn't understand the concept of extinction.

235

To a Viking, it all just feels like fishing.

236

And if a whale, an animal that can swim away, an animal with an entire ocean to hide in,

237

couldn't survive that pressure, I need you to picture the same Vikings meeting a bird that cannot fly,

238

cannot run, and lays its one egg a year on a bare rock in the open at sea level.

239

Well, Iceland's shelf was stocked with exactly that.

240

The Great Auk was the North Atlantic's version of a penguin, except it invented the look first.

241

It was 85 centimeters tall, which would be around hip height on you.

242

It was black and white with dense little flipper wings, and it was completely flightless.

243

In the water, it was one of the best divers the Atlantic ever produced, being able to chase fish down with seal-level agility.

244

On land, it was a walking bowling pin.

245

It bred in huge colonies on remote scaries, which were bare rock islets, because its entire defense strategy,

246

the whole plan refined over millions of years of evolution was to stand somewhere nobody visits.

247

It also laid exactly one egg a year, directly on bare rocks with no nest, no plan B.

248

That is a strategy written by millions of years of nothing ever coming to kill it.

249

Honestly, it reminds me a lot of the Dodo, and we know how those ended, which the Great Ox strategy actually worked beautifully up until it

250

met a very hangry civilization whose entire thing was visiting rocks nobody visits.

251

By the Viking Age, the Great Auk was already gone from most of Scandinavia.

252

Southern Norway lost it thousands of years before the Norse ever raised a sail and left, and most of the rest of Norway lost it by around the 500s.

253

The Auk had been pushed out to Iceland, Greenland, and the Outer Islands, which, unluckily for it, were the exact places the Norse were now colonizing.

254

The Vikings kept sailing to the ends of the earth

255

and finding the animals that had fled there to get away from people like them.

256

At some point, that stops being a coincidence and just makes you think the Vikings really hated Happy Feet.

257

Look, Happy Feet was an amazing movie, but honestly, if I was a Viking, I would definitely murder a few million penguins if I was forced to watch Happy Feet 2.

258

Fuck Happy Feet 2.

259

I hate that movie.

260

For Norse settlers, the auk was less an animal to them and more of a living snack, with meat and fat that you could render into lamp oil.

261

In fact, the bird was so oily, it practically came pre-packaged as fuel.

262

It also had down for bedding, which in a climate where insulation was survival, was pretty important.

263

And the hunting barely even qualified as hunting.

264

The birds couldn't fly, couldn't run, and had never evolved a reason to fear anything on land.

265

So if you were a Viking, you would just walk in there with a club, beat a couple funny not-penguins to death, and be on your way.

266

It reminds me of my days clubbing penguins in Ark.

267

Ah, good times.

268

For centuries, the hunting stayed low level.

269

It was a lot, but it was survivable for the species.

270

Then, European ships started crowding into the North Atlantic in the 1400s and 1500s, and every crew treated the colonies as free groceries.

271

And God, it was a slaughter.

272

Here is where I would normally make a joke, and I'm not going to, because the genetics show the Great auk was abundant and healthy when the intensive hunting began.

273

There was no decline, no disease, nothing wrong with the species at all.

274

Every step of what followed was just a Viking murder spree.

275

It all ends on June 3rd, 1844 on a scary called Eldiaf,

276

Iceland, where three men found the last breeding pair on earth and strangled them for a collector, and then their egg got crushed under a boot.

277

That's the whole ending of this bird's story.

278

This was a bird that outlasted the ice ages and got finished off by a boot of all things.

279

The auk kept Norse settlers alive as food, but it was never going to make anyone rich.

280

When it was dead, it was worth a meal.

281

But Iceland, it turns out, was also stocked with the opposite kind of animal.

282

One worth almost nothing dead and worth a fortune alive.

283

Meet the Jyrfalcon, the largest falcon on the planet and medieval Europe's most exclusive status symbol.

284

This is an arctic built raptor with a wingspan pushing 130 centimeters, which is about as wide as you are tall, that runs down water fallow and open tundrum.

285

And the high arctic ones come in nearly pure white, which matters because medieval falcony had a strict pecking order, written down like law.

286

Which bird a man could fly depended on his rank, and at the very top sat the jeer falcons.

287

Kings were the only ones who could fly it.

288

This wasn't just a pet, it was a status symbol.

289

Knowing me, if I had a bird for a status symbol, it would probably be a chicken.

290

What about you?

291

Let me know your status symbol bird in the comments below.

292

Anyways, Iceland settlers figured out fast that they were sitting on a goldmine.

293

Jerfalcon exports became such a pillar of the economy that other Icelandic goods got price checked against falcons, meaning the bird was basically a currency.

294

And taking one legally required an actual permit.

295

A falkebref, which is a falcon letter.

296

Yes, Viking paperwork for a bird.

297

And earning that paperwork was the worst job in Iceland, because Jir falcons nest on cliff ledges.

298

So behind every falcon on a king's glove, there was a man on a rope over the North Atlantic, in the wind, removing an angry apex predator from a rock face with his bare hands.

299

In fact, one bird, landed alive and healthy, outpriced whole shipments of the island's staple goods.

300

When a 16th century cartographer drew Iceland on the famous Kartana Marina map, the symbol he chose for the entire island was a jir falcon.

301

Not a volcano, not a cod, but a bird was the national brand.

302

Then the shipping manifests started getting weird.

303

Arabic sources

304

and falconry manuals describe white jir falcons appearing at the court

305

of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad in the late 800s and early 900s if you're keeping track, white jeer falcons don't live anywhere near Bogdod.

306

The evidence all points to birds being trapped in Iceland and Scandinavia, then moved alive.

307

Yes, a fragile, temperamental Arctic predator that needs feeding,

308

cooling, and handling was being moved 5,000 plus kilometers down the Viking river routes through Eastern Europe, hand to hand, all the way to the richest core on Earth.

309

The same guys that Cliff's geographers described as terrifying river barbarians were also apparently the world's most extreme bird dealers.

310

That was the whole Viking economy in one image.

311

Axe in one hand, bird in the other.

312

Then in the early 900s, the Baghdad Pipeline went quiet.

313

Maybe because the Caliphate hit political chaos, but the other explanation should sound familiar by now if you've been keeping up with the Vikings.

314

Over-harvesting.

315

Too many falcons were trapped and too few were left.

316

This was the same thing that killed the Aurochs

317

and the same thing that killed the whales just faster because the falcon population is small and a king's appetite isn't.

318

Now, don't relax because the two most expensive animals in the entire Norse world are still coming.

319

One of them is actually a lie about unicorns.

320

The other one is on a leash.

321

And to get either, you had to go where the falcon trade looked sane.

322

Greenland.

323

For the Vikings, the worse the commute was, the better the profits were.

324

Somewhere in the medieval unicorn business, there is a Norse trader who knew exactly what he was selling, and I think about him a lot.

325

The narwhal is a small arctic whale with one absurd feature, a single tooth, the left canine that grows straight out through its lip in a perfect spiral.

326

It's up to three meters long, which is longer than the bed you sleep on, and a rare few males actually grow two of them,

327

which raises questions about the unicorn story that nobody at the time wanted to ask.

328

But in short, it's not a horn.

329

It's a tooth packed with nerve endings, probably a sensor, and occasionally was used as a jousting pole for sparring males.

330

The animal itself lives in pods under the sea ice and dives past 1500 meters, which is a whole vertical mile straight down in the dark,

331

and then surfaces in the cracks of the ice.

332

Vikings in Greenland got them either by hunting or by collecting tusks from the carcasses the orcas had already brutally murdered.

333

But however they got the tooth, the getting the tooth was never where the money was, because the money lived over 4,000 kilometers away.

334

Because here's the clever part of the scam.

335

See, medieval Europe believed hard that a unicorn's horn could neutralize poison and cure disease, which for a medieval king was a big deal.

336

So when a spiral ivory horn arrived from the far north, no seller had to claim anything.

337

The buyer's imagination closed the deal and prices went to many times the horn's weight in gold.

338

And here's the great part about this scam.

339

Greenland was thousands of kilometers away.

340

The tusks came from the literal edge of the known world.

341

No skeptical court physician was ever going to sail to the Arctic to prove

342

if the tooth horn actually came from a unicorn.

343

The distance did what the forgery couldn't.

344

This may have been the Vikings' greatest scam.

345

The clientele they were selling to tells you just how much they made off these unicorn horns.

346

Ivan the Terrible got one as a gift.

347

The privateer Martin Frobisher even handed Elizabeth I of England a tusk valued at £10,000, which at the time was warship money.

348

Yes, for one tooth from an animal the seller's cousins were pulling out of a pack of ice.

349

It took until the 1600s for anyone to check.

350

A Danish naturalist named Ole Worm finally held an arwal skull next to a unicorn horn in front of everybody

351

and let the tooth socket do the talking.

352

And even then, the tusks kept selling.

353

Centuries of momentum does not stop for science.

354

The con outlived the con artists, the customers, and the entire civilization that started it.

355

But a tooth can only make a king or a viking rich, and kings and vikings were already rich.

356

If you wanted a king to remember your name, to owe you, then you didn't hand him ivory.

357

You handed him something that was still breathing, preferably something that was so badass and scary that it could kill him.

358

For the Record, Iceland does not have polar bears, but Iceland did have polar bears delivered to them.

359

Every so often, drift ice from Greenland comes ashore carrying a passenger, and that passenger is the largest land carnivore on Earth,

360

weighing 350 to 700 kilograms, which is grand piano territory, by the way.

361

This was a seal ambush specialist that also happens to swim open water like a fairy.

362

Yep, just an apex predator arriving on your beach hungry from its time of drift.

363

Most medieval cultures would call that as a disaster, but the Icelanders called it a business opportunity because they had figured out how a polar bear could become a financial investment.

364

Because the Norse were, as far as the medieval records show, pretty much the only people on Earth capturing live polar bears on purpose,

365

taming them enough to transport and gifting them to royalty.

366

The first documented case was around 880 to 900.

367

A settler named Ingenmud the Old catches a mother bear and two cubs off the ice, ships them to Norway, and presents them to King Harald Fairhair.

368

The king is so delighted he gives him an entire ocean-going ship loaded with timber.

369

To be clear, this is in Iceland, which is a treeless country.

370

Timber was wealth that you couldn't buy locally.

371

One bear family for one full ship of wood.

372

The exchange rate was set, and every ambitious Norseman heard about it.

373

Because think about what a bear gift says.

374

It says, I went to the edge of the world, this animal tried to kill me, and I wrapped it up like a present.

375

God, the Vikings were badass.

376

Have I mentioned my heritage is from Norway?

377

I love learning about this type of stuff.

378

Which brings us to the greatest career move in perhaps history.

379

It's the tale of the Ion.

380

And it goes like this a broke Icelandic farm and spends his entire net worth, like everything, on one polar bear in Greenland,

381

all while planning to gift it to King Sven of Denmark, except his ship docks in Norway, which is ruled by Harald Hardrada, who is at war with Sven,

382

and Harald wants the bear, so he offers to buy it.

383

Eoin says no, so he offers double.

384

No again.

385

The king then points out, with the balls of a man who owns an army, that he could simply take it.

386

Aeong then says, you could.

387

And then this farmhand, a man whose entire net worth is currently a damn bear, explains to the most feared warrior king in Europe

388

that the bear is spoken for because he's delivering it to the king Harold is at war with.

389

Silence.

390

And then Harold lets him go, basically out of respect for the sheer fucking audacity of those balls.

391

Aeong delivers the bear and Sven buries him in rewards like silver, a ship of his own, and a funded pilgrimage to Rome.

392

The bear was the best investment that man ever made, and it kept working for 200 years.

393

Iceland's first bishop hands a polar bear to the Holy Roman Emperor around 1056 and walks away with imperial protection,

394

and in 1252, King Hakon of Norway gifts one to Henry III of England, who keeps it at the Tower of London,

395

where the bear goes swimming in the Thames on a long leash, catching its own fish, while Londoners watch a piece of the Arctic do laps past their bridge.

396

Bears bought ships, and ships existed for one job, for hunting the animal that you all have been waiting for.

397

I want you to stand where the hunter stands, at the sea ice past the edge of the mapped world, and 30 meters away is 800 kilograms of muscle,

398

which is a small car's worth with 50 centimeter tusks.

399

And the ivory in those tusks is the answer to a question historians chased for years.

400

Why did Vikings really colonize Greenland?

401

Farmland was a story everyone has been told, but walrus was the reason.

402

The genetics lay out the trail like footprints.

403

First, they hunted walrus in Scandinavia.

404

They were then depleted.

405

Then they hunted the Iceland herds right after settlement.

406

Depleted.

407

So the hunt moved to Greenland.

408

And when the local herds then there, Norse crews started making the run north to the northern water Polinia, which is high in the Arctic.

409

It's a 6,000 kilometer round trip.

410

All the while they were in open boats and they did this to stand on ice next to the herds.

411

And up there, up at the top of the world, they met people, the Tunit and later the Thul Inuit.

412

Yes, Norse hunters were trading with the peoples of Arctic America, which was 500 years before Columbus, by the way.

413

And the ivory literally proves to us that they were there.

414

Here's the proof.

415

DNA sourcing of medieval ivory artifacts shows up from about 1100 to 1400.

416

The overwhelming majority of ivory in Europe came from Greenland walruses, meaning that one colony of a few thousand farmers at the edge of the world supplied a whole continent,

417

and this was the job.

418

Walrus hauled out in herds, in a herd that spooked stampedes for the water immediately.

419

Hundreds of animals would be accelerating towards the sea through anything between them and it, and the Norse worked that gap on purpose.

420

Their plan was to stand between a herd of panicking car-sized beasts

421

and the ocean with nothing but a spear and the sheer fucking audacity.

422

But then the tusks and the shipments started getting smaller, because the big animals are becoming harder to find, so the voyages get longer, the sea is more remote,

423

and in the 1200s elephant ivory floods into Europe and the price of walrus crashes.

424

Here's the problem.

425

The Greenlanders needed ivory to pay for everything, because iron, timber, rain, all of it was imported.

426

So when each tusk bought less, they didn't hunt less.

427

They did the only thing Vikings know how to do.

428

They hunted more.

429

Nine times tonight, the animal died and the hunter sailed home.

430

But this is the one time it ran the other direction.

431

In the 15th century, after 400 years, the Norse Greenland colonies go silent.

432

There's no massacre to point to, no final battle, the voyages just stopped paying, and then the voyages stopped, and then everything did.

433

A lot of researchers now think that emptied walrus grounds were a central reason why.

434

They had hunted the shelf bare, and the shelf was the thing holding up the whole civilization.

435

Nine animals we talked about today made the Vikings richer, but the tenth made them over-dependent.

436

The business was good until the beasts ran out, and then it took the hunters too.

437

If you enjoyed watching this video, make sure to give it a like and comment down below what you learned about the Vikings today.

438

If you'd like to watch another one of my videos, you can click the one that's on your screen

439

and make sure to like this video and subscribe for more content just like this.

✨ Recommend Video

79 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 439 sentences and 6189 words to shadow. The speech runs for 32:35. The speaker talks fast, about 190 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. Only 76% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 less common words from the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

whale /ˈweɪl/ (noun) — Any large cetacean, usually with the exclusion of dolphins and porpoises.
wolf /wʊlf/ (noun) — Canis lupus; the largest wild member of the canine subfamily.
cow /kaʊ/ (noun) — An adult female of the species Bos taurus, especially one that has calved.
falcon /ˈfælkən/ (noun) — Any bird of the genus Falco, all of which are birds of prey.
horn /hɔɹn/ (noun) — A hard growth of keratin that protrudes from the top of the head of certain animals, usually paired.
bone /boʊn/ (noun) — A composite material consisting largely of calcium phosphate and collagen and making up the skeleton of most vertebrates.
gray /ɡɹeɪ/ (adjective) — Of a color between black and white, having neutral hue and intermediate brightness.
medieval /mɪdˈi.vəl/ (adjective) — Of or relating to the Middle Ages, the period from approximately 500 to 1500 AD.
ivory /ˈaɪv(ə)ɹi/ (noun) — The hard white form of dentin which forms the tusks of elephants, walruses and other animals.
hunter /ˈhʌntɚ/ (noun) — One who hunts game for sport or for food; a huntsman or huntswoman.
tooth /tuθ/ (noun) — A hard, calcareous structure present in the mouth of many vertebrate animals, generally used for biting and chewing food.
spear /spɪə̯(ɹ)/ (noun) — A long stick with a sharp tip used as a weapon for throwing or thrusting, or anything used to make a thrusting motion.
polar /ˈpoʊlɚ/ (adjective) — Of, relating to, measured from, or referred to a geographic pole (the North Pole or South Pole); within the Arctic or Antarctic circles.
predator /ˈpɹɛd.ə.tɚ/ (noun) — Any animal or other organism that hunts and kills other nonplant organisms (their prey), primarily for food.
unicorn /ˈju.nɪ.kɔɹn/ (noun) — A mythical, horselike creature with a horn on its forehead, supposed to be very rare and to be drawn to virgins and other chaste maidens.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

talk about (verb) — Used to draw attention to the speaker's characterization of someone or something.
come from (verb) — To have as one's origin, birthplace or nationality.
deal with (verb) — To handle verbally or in some form of artistic expression; to address or discuss as a subject.
figure out (verb) — To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
find out (verb) — To discover, as by asking or investigating.
lay out /ˌleɪ ˈaʊt/ (verb) — To expend or contribute money to an expense or purchase.
sit in (verb) — To attend a class, educational presentation, meeting, etc. for one time, as a visitor.
think about /ˈθɪŋk əˌbaʊt/ (verb) — To ponder.

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 45 contractions and reduced forms, such as couldn't, wasn't, didn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: tooth /tuθ/, breathe /bɹiːð/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: shelf /ʃɛlf/, sheep /ˈʃiːp/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, occasionally /əˈkeɪʒənəli/, shore /ʃɔɹ/
Long words — get the stress right: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, occasionally /əˈkeɪʒənəli/, naturally /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like whale, wolf, cow.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	if I was a Viking, I would definitely · if you were a Viking, you would just
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	you've been keeping · have been waiting
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	being viewed · I've been kicked · be impaled
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	Poland, which is · Yulfnar, which means · men who went

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Ancient Animals The Viking Raiders Saw - Learn English Speaking with Video

Why These Nuns Cut off Their Noses and Lips

READING EXPLORER 1 UNIT 7A THE TRUTH ABOUT DINOSAURS

The ENTIRE Story of The Odyssey Explained

The GOAT of Holiday Animals | Scandinavian History | Extra History

03 OMEGA FILE 451 Loch Ness, Scotland

National Geographic Reading Explorer 2 Unit 3 Walking with Giants

(Oxford RnD - Level 4) Wonders Of The Past

The Insane Biology of: The Narwhal

(Vikings) Ragnar Lothbrok || The Choice

How Did Ancient Humans Survive the Deadliest Predators on Earth?

How America broke its beef industry

Heart of the Beast | Dogs, Stunt Doubles, VFX & Wolves | Behind the Scenes