Viking attacks on Noirmoutier with C.J. Adrien

Today’s special episode is an interview with C.J. Adrien. Adrien is a bestselling author of Viking historical fiction and co-host of the Vikingology Podcast. His acclaimed Saga of Hasting the Avenger series is inspired by his doctoral research in early medieval history. A published historian, C.J.'s articles have appeared in French historical journals, and he is a sought-after speaker at international venues like the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds. His deep knowledge of Viking history captivates audiences worldwide. Access his books at and his podcast.

Thank you so much for being on the show, Christopher Adrian. You are an educator and author with a long history of research and writing on Vikings. Can you tell us about your background and your many books on the Northmen?

Christopher: Absolutely. Well, thank you for having me.  My career started a bit haphazardly, I would say.  It actually started back when I was in high school. I spent my summers on the island of Noirmoutier which is where my French grandfather lived or where he's from. And while working in a fish market there, I was approached by a woman from la village, the village, from the village who demanded to be served by the Viking. And that was directed toward me. And I just I always want or at that time I just wondered, like, why is she calling me a Viking? Now to give you some reference of what I look like. I'm six foot three, 220 pounds and back then much blonder. For some reason I've gotten darker haired over the years. So I kind of fit the bill of what one might describe as the Hollywood Viking so we can start there. So that's where I thought she was coming from. But I took this home to my grandparents and they said, oh yeah, no, the Vikings came here. What do you mean? The Vikings came here. So that was essentially the kick start of this lifelong journey of discovery. Now to put a little extra context on that, I grew up internationally between the United States and France. Bilingual, bicultural and growing up that way, one does not develop a strong sense of place. At least my experience was I was essentially torn between two different, very different places that competed with each other. So at that age, I believe that I was essentially in search of, you know, finding my roots. And the Vikings just kind of came into my life right around that time. So is this perfect storm of, you know, identity formation. Plus, my favorite subject in school was history. I was planning on going to university to study history. And so, once I did make it to college, that's essentially the track that I took. That's like the foundational narrative behind me.

Gary: Well here I thought that Jaime Lannister, going sort of brown haired over the course of Game of Thrones, was a bad choice by the directors, but apparently that does happen. And you are proof of that. Uh, our podcast has looked extensively at the Vikings in relation to the Frankish Empire. However, we were less attentive to events within Scandinavia itself. Can you set the stage and tell our listeners what was going on in Scandinavia that started the Viking Age?

Christopher:  So that's a question that has a lot of different people enraptured, because ultimately we don't really know. Unfortunately, the Vikings from a historical perspective were mute. Now, recently, archeological finds have helped to uncover a wealth of information that has greatly informed us on what may have been happening at the at the beginning of the so-called Viking Age. Now that keeps moving around, too, because originally the delineation of the Viking Age historically was with the attack on Lindisfarne in 1793 and then ending with the Battle of Hastings in 1066. There's also what's called the Scandinavian Iron Age, which is essentially the archeological equivalent of the Viking Age, and that starts about 50 years before the historical Viking Age and ends about 50 years after. So just even nailing down what is the Viking Age? When did it happen? Is a bit of a struggle, and that all stems in part from this idea that they didn't leave us anything to really go by. So we kind of have to make it up, if you will. Right. And recent scholarship has moved the needle a little bit for everyone. So my research actually started with a fundamental question, which was, so the island of Noirmoutier which is I brought up earlier, was one of the first places, so-called Vikings. Now that's even disputed. But I won't go too much in the weeds there. Um, but this is one of the first places the Vikings attacked at the outset of the Viking Age. So in 793, you had a devastating attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne. In 795, the monastery of Iona, which is in the Irish Sea, were kind of north of there.  It was modern day Scotland. And then just a couple of years later, they show up in 1799, in western France, which is kind of far. But not only do they show up in western France and on this remote island Noirmoutier which is, for listeners who don't know where that is, think of the Brittany Peninsula. I call it the arm that reaches out into the ocean under England. And Noirmoutier is just south of the estuary of the Loire.  It’s this tiny little island today it's a vacation island visited by people from all over Europe. It's not what it used to be, I actually have a really funny story about my grandfather trying to put a boat in the water, and this lovely Englishman came up and said, oh, allow me to help you, old chap. And then, uh, and then so he went and tried to help my grandfather unload his boat. My grandfather yells at me, he goes, “Christoph, quick, this Englishman is trying to take my boat.”  But that's just to give you a sense that the island today. Beautiful place. So the Vikings show up in 799, there was a monastery there called Saint-Philibert. And that monastery really didn't have much going on, is very remote. Uh, it's on an island that was connected to the mainland only at low tide. Uh, and what makes Noirmoutier, or at least the Saint-Philibert special, is for some reason, the Vikings kept showing up. So Lindisfarne, they showed up, destroyed it. That's the end of the story. In Iona they showed up, they destroyed it, Let it go for a couple of years and they showed up way later again, once the religious community had been able to rebuild. And Noirmoutier appears that they came back every year. And so there's this mystery of like, why? Why here? Why every year? Uh, and so that question started me on this quest of trying to answer that question. What I inadvertently stumbled into was this question of what started the Viking Age, what drove them to leave.? And classically, at least as far as the the Western diaspora is concerned, silver is an obvious one.  Slaves, we have to remember that that. Vikings were opportunists to the extreme. So any portable wealth, anything they could pick up and throw in their ships that was valuable, they would take. So of course precious metals, but other things as well. Uh, and what else could there have been? Especially in a place like Noirmotier which is so remote. The first time they attack it and then take all the silver, say, for example, and take some slaves, you know, and then they go back the next year. Highly doubtful. The monks would have come back with hoards of silver to give them. Right.  So it's like there's something else there that that could have driven them. And there's an old theory that I uncovered. So backing up to my connections to the island too, my grandfather was the president of the local historical association, Les Amis de Noirmoutier, whom I got to visit while I was in school studying? And that's where I was introduced to this idea called the salt hypothesis, which is to say the Vikings came to Noirmoutier to take salt is a well known salt producing region.  And we have a fair amount of documentation showing that even during the Viking invasions, the production of salt increased,  as tracked by the Carolingian. So it appears that the Vikings showed up for salt. But why would Vikings need salt? And why would they go all the way to Noirmoutier to take salt back? And so then it relates back to this. What started the Viking Age and drove the Vikings west in search of these resources.

Gary: So let's get into that. So, what's let's get into the importance of salt. I mean, obviously, I think that when most people think of Viking raids, you're thinking of gold, silver, slaves and wine. But, uh, salt, at least today is not going to be nearly as important. But it was a crucial resource then. So why was salt so important?

Christopher: As far as the Carolinians were concerned, it was important for food preservation, generally speaking. So salt was and that's true of any I mean, the one of the, one of my favorite books is, Kerlansky's Salt where he goes through and talks about the history of salt and, and why it was important. So is saying that salt was important is one of those assumptions that we can leave in the assumption realm and say, it's obviously true that salt was really important, but why would it have been more important to the Vikings to solicit or to elicit? Sorry, that's the right word. There we go, to elicit a westward expansion worthy of exploiting that resource specifically. Until recently, the salt, this whole salt hypothesis of the Vikings came to Noirmoutier to get salt didn't hold a lot of weight, primarily because it was understood or it has been understood for a long time that the primary fish that the Vikings were fishing in Scandinavia was cod,  And cod how is cod preserved? It's dried. I have a good friend in Denmark. I was having a conversation with him and he also made mention that, “you know, look, uh, in Denmark we have, you know, 50km in any direction. I have the ocean. I don't need salt. And then we have cod and we dry it. So why on earth would we need salt?” And so it goes back to this idea of perhaps it was simply a matter of the Vikings, being opportunists to the extreme, realizing, okay, the salt's not all that important to us, but it is really important to the Carolinians. And what's really fascinating is there is a document from off the top of my head, I believe is the year 823, written to Pepin, who was one of the sons of King Louis the I. He was in control of Aquitaine. Pepin granted a tax exemption to the salt producers of the island of Noirmoutier in 823 to continue or to encourage further exports into the Carolingian Empire. So it could just be that the Vikings had an interest in Noirmoutier realizing that they could essentially take over that production and ransom it back to the Carolingians, which would be completely within the realm of how they did business, if you can call it that. More recently, and this is really a more specific to my research, because I have believed for a long time that the reason they needed salt was to compete with their contemporaries in the East, the Swedes who were going to Constantinople. There's great,  scholarship by Søren Sindbæk, who talks about the silver economy in Scandinavia, both preceding and during the Viking Age, talking about how silver was part and parcel to their society.  It was used in everything. So the ultimate goal was to make as much silver as possible. The Vikings, who were the, quote unquote, Vikings who went east to Constantinople, brought back hoards of silver, so much so they didn't know what to do with it. If you go to the island of Gotland today, it's illegal to dig more than, I think, 50cm in your yard without somebody present to observe you, because you're probably going to dig up silver from the Viking Age. So they're bringing back amounts of silver that were by that, by the, the standards of that time, astronomical. Therefore, they inflated the value of silver. So the Norwegians, the Danes, who did not have these, these opportunities, then suddenly had to come up with a way to make more silver or come up with something valuable to the Swedes that they could trade for that silver. And I thought, what if it was salt?  There are mentions of barrels of salt being transported in the east, because if I'm a Swede and I'm going east and I'm getting away from the ocean, well, what do I need when I'm moving up freshwater river systems, salt to preserve my food? So it kind of starts to make sense there. And then more recently, there was, a study that came out that showed that the herring trade may have started 3 or 4 centuries prior to what we originally thought. So going back to cod was the primary fish.  That was the primary fish that they were catching in Scandinavia and it's dried. Herring by the 14th century became the main fish that was being exploited. And that, because it's a fatty fish, was preserved with salt. Well, now they've found herring bones in the eastern Baltic that, are actually connected to fisheries off the coast of Norway that predate the original timeline, placing the origins of the herring trade to the Viking Age. So, now we have more of a case to say, okay, the Swedes would have needed salt no matter what. They're bringing back silver. The Norwegians, the Danes needed something to some kind of resource to compete with that. And you throw into the mix. Now that the herring trade, which was obviously moving east because we have fish bones from Norway moving into the eastern Baltic started during that time. So now we hit and that fish is preserved with salt. Now we have a kind of a framework to work for them to say okay. Now, it might make sense why Vikings would have traveled so far all the way to western France to corner the salt market in the region what's now the Bay of Biscay?

Gary: So let's focus for a moment then on that French connection, which seems to be such a vital part of this whole Viking Age development, despite being a relatively small,unknown island in western France. Can you tell us a bit more about the island, its history, who lived there, and, how this, great exchange, started and then really developed, over the years.

Christopher:  Yeah.  Before I dive in, I do want to point something out that I like to point out a lot, and sometimes it gets me into trouble. And but I still like to say it is what's fascinating about studying, specifically the Brittany region of France during the Viking Age is to realize the Anglo centric slant that the study of the Viking Age has in both popular culture and mainstream academia. Going back to the original delineation of the Viking Age starts in 1793 with Lindisfarne and ends in 1066 with the Battle of Hastings is a pretty good clue to say it looks like English historians have cornered this piece of history. And really come at it from their perspective and what we what we find in the Brittany region of France, as far as their experience of the Viking Age, is essentially what would happen 30, 40 years later in England, but kind of the precursor. So I always talk about the year 847, where a Viking army landed in in Brittany and started to invade, and they were eventually bought off and and I call it the Great Heathen Army before the Great Heathen Army is kind of the Vikings test case of, well, if we can be successful here, then we can be successful anywhere kind of thing. So I just want to throw that out there. There is a major Anglo centric slant to the study of the Viking Age. And so for those who like this topic and want to really explore a whole new dimension to it, check out the Vikings in France, because they were every bit as much active, if not more, earlier in the Viking Age in France than in the British Isles.  So then peeling that back and talking about Noirmouthier island, so it is this tiny little island. I think it's about 26 or 27km long, very thin. It's essentially a sandbar. And, and it's sediment that has been deposited by the Loire River into the Bay of Biscay. There's a little bit of a geologic formation at the north of the island that then stood as the center, and then the sand has essentially accumulated around it. And so it kind of looks like an apostrophe or a teardrop if you look at it from space. Geopolitically, it has been on and off an important place. So we can start with the Romans. There is a Gallo-Roman villa on the island.  The Romans were interested in the island Fort salt producing potential.  The Romans are actually the first to build evaporation salt pools to collect the salt with the island is best known for is the size of the salt crystals that they produce there, the Fleur de sel, as they call it, on the island. And so it's actually really famous. You can you can buy it on Amazon today thanks to globalization. And what's even more interesting is salt, to give you an idea, a sense of how important salt is to this island, in 1947 after World War II, the entire salt economy of the island, which was the primary good that was produced from the island, the entire economy collapsed because Scandinavians implemented refrigeration. I kid you not. So when the Scandinavians got refrigeration, the salt market in Noirmoutier just completely fell apart. And that's not just true of Noirmoutier but also of that entire salt producing region. Up until the late 1940s, this region of France was dependent on Scandinavia for buying their salt, which is fascinating in and of itself because it's not even related to the Viking Age. It's just kind of how things panned out. So now it's just a vacation island. But geopolitically, I mean the island has changed hands. I mean, the Dutch went in there in the 19th century, which by the way, people on the island will see me. And I'm tall, blue blond. That's mostly from my mom's side of the family.  But I also know that as far as my French family is concerned, they have a lot of blond, blue eyed people as well. But it's not from the Vikings. That's too far, that's 30 generations ago. There's no way that would have lasted so long. But the Dutch came and they created, they actually built dikes to expand the land in that region so that there would be more land to farm salt. So it is really an interesting, it's a small island, but it's played a big role in the history of France in general.  One of the, most famous periods in its history was the War of Vendée, where the Livonia, the people from Vendée, rebelled against the revolutionary government after they chopped the king's head off and the revolutionary government descended into Vendée and carried out what today is being described as a genocide. And the, gosh, so it's the revolutionary forces who went after the, the revolting Vendée. So it's rebels against rebels, I suppose. But the leader of the Vendée was executed at the castle of Noirmoutier. That's where he ended up at the end of his long campaign against the revolutionary forces. In fact, if you go to the castle today, they still have the chair that he was shot in with the bullet holes in the back. It's quite the spectacle.

Gary: Yeah. It's truly an incredible thing to think about from, both of us. I mean, I know you said you've been around the world quite a bit, but from an American perspective, to look at this island, which is, you know, basically as middle of nowhere as you can get in France. And yet it has this incredible, long, huge role to play in this and huge history. So, one final  question then, relating to this whole Viking Age is that if the salt hypothesis is true, how does this impact our understanding, then, of the Viking Age itself and of, this whole chronology? And as you are, implying that there is a necessary change we need to incorporate.

Christopher: The all important question. Why should we care?  And as far as the salt hypothesis, I mean, for me, what I find important is an expansion of our understanding of what drove the Vikings out of Scandinavia. So we going back to that question of what started the Viking Age. And there are there are several competing longue durée causes that probably all played somewhat of a role, we can go back to, I think in popular culture, the most the most common one is this idea that there was a climatic reason, there was a population explosion. Then they left. But actually when we look at it, that theoretical framework just really doesn't hold weight. So then what we have is more economic, political reasons, cultural reasons for why this all happen. And so I think for me it's understanding why they traveled so far west so quickly. And then to corner a market. I think it gives us a much more expansive view on who these people were. I feel like it humanizes them more because traditionally it's been, oh, they're Vikings and they're raping and pillaging and do all these things when in reality they're actually being really smart about it. A great story that I like to tell is in 2017, I had the opportunity to speak at the International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds, and my dad met me there and we did a tour of Northern England, while we were there. And I wanted to visit Lindisfarne. And when we arrived and no one's allowed to repeat the story other than me, but when we arrived, they have a submersible road to get onto the Holy Island, and I totally missed that. And we arrived a little bit at the wrong time. I mean, the tide was going out, but we stopped and we looked, and my dad kind of looked at me. He's like, you didn't know about this? I was like, this stays between us. But, we went and had the best fish and chips I've ever had in my life at this restaurant right up the hill.  Evidently, they were saying lots of people get stuck in that same manner. So that's how they do a good amount of their business.  But this idea that there's a submergible road that connects this island, and then on the island, there's a monastery the Vikings attacked. And my dad, who's a native of Noirmoutier just like my grandfather, looked, and that's what Noirmoutier is like. It is an island off the coast with a monastery that has a submersible road that connects it to the mainland that you can't access during high tide. And he looked at me. He said, “These Vikings, c’est pas con? They were not idiots, were they?” And so for me, it speaks to an intent that previously has not been assigned to the early Vikings.  We can even go back to the historians Lucien Rousset who say, who postulated the three phases of Viking expansion in the first phase, of course, is described as sporadic rating. There was no rhyme or reason to what they were doing, and that essentially the salt hypothesis flies in the face of that notion. Because now we're talking about a group of people, a small group of people by the way, the number of people coming out of Scandinavia would have had to be very small, and yet they exercised tremendous influence over much larger populations. So I always like to say they're really good at marketing. But as far as cornering the market, the salt market, even if at the beginning they thought, oh, you know what, we'll send some salt back to Scandinavia to compete with the Swedes. Great. But then realize that, well, that's a really long trip. Maybe we won't do that. So then they further corner the market and just start selling the salt back to the Carolingians. And we know from, from various pieces of evidence that the island was used on and off as a base. The salt production never stopped even after they sacked the monastery. So they go and sack the monastery. The monks would leave and go to the mainland. And in fact in in 826, there were so many raids in the summer that the monks would pick up all their things in spring, go to Satellite Priory on the mainland to escape, and then come back, come back in the fall. So that's how regular these raids were. And all throughout that, the salt production continued and it in fact increased. So I think what that tells us is we're dealing with a people who really carefully planned this out, I believe. And and just like my dad said, they were an idiots. They knew what they were doing and they figured out a system and they knew how to get back there. So I think the notion that there was a certain intent, I think, has the potential to really change how we think about this group of people. Now, they're not just hungry hordes of, you know, rapists and pillagers, but instead ...

Gary: Only Some of them.

Christopher: Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, there was some, you know what's really funny?  I've been in trouble for saying this before. Actually. No, I don't know that I've actually been in trouble, but, in the historical sources, the word rape is conspicuously absent. I think it's maybe it's because it's a given, but they actually,  they're not, it's not something that's mentioned. It's more of a modern fabrication of like, oh we assume  that's what they were doing.  And we know from genetic,  studies that,  certainly they were spreading their seed all around. So, there's no denying that. But anyway, but yeah, but I think we're really dealing  with an organized people, an economically driven people.  I've had the privilege of speaking to some of the leading academics in the field and just understanding the economics that go behind building one ship in the resources required to do so. They weren't leaving home on a whim.  And so I think what the research that I do on the salt hypothesis isn't going to completely change how we view the Vikings?  No, probably not. But I think it's just one more little piece we can add to the long list of pieces emerging and current in modern scholarship to show that, there was a rhyme or reason behind what they were doing.

Gary: So to end with, when I researched you, I found you really cannot get enough of the Vikings. Not only do you research them and write novels, but you also host the Viking ology podcast, the Art and science of the Viking Age. Can you tell us all about it and what unique facts you can give our listeners that they might not know about the Vikings?

Christopher:  Yeah, So the podcast is one of those things I always go back to. it's funny,  kind of Norse paganism, this idea that, you know, you're not quite fatalism, but basically saying, things are meant to be, and my co-host of the podcast, Terry Barnes, reached out to me one day. She had just written an article on what may have started The Viking Age. Funny enough, that's a question that both of us are intrinsically interested in trying to answer. She had read mine and so she wanted me to review hers. We got on a call and found out that not only are we both living in Oregon, which is kind of odd, we're in the middle of nowhere, right?  There's no Vikings didn't come this far.  So we're both Oregonians and we have the same birthday. Wow. Which is even weirder. So we're both Virgos. And so all these things, just the planets and the stars aligned. And so we started this podcast, and Terry has wonderful connections within the academic community for the Viking Age. So we have been able to speak to pretty much all of the leading academics in the field.  History, archeology, even linguistics, we've had tremendous conversations with the people. So the wealth of knowledge that's been shared in that podcast, I mean, even for me, I, I've learned so much from just participating in a podcast. So I feel privileged to have to be part of that project.  A fun fact about the Vikings that I can share, one of the biggest AHA's I got from our podcast, it happened with our guest, Matthew Ponesse doctor Matthew Ponesse, who studies ninth century monasticism. And I went into that podcast episode thinking, oh, great, a guy who studies monasticism. Perfect. They were the Vikings favorite victims. He's going to have lots to say. And his first statement was, “I have spent a career ignoring the Vikings,” and both Terry and I thought, “how on earth is that possible?” Because literally monasteries were ground zero for the beginning of the Viking Age in the West. And he said, “well, what you have to realize is, okay, Lindisfarne, Iona, Saint-Philibert in Noirmoutier... And then you add the other ones in Ireland and a couple more in France, and we're talking about what a couple of dozen of these institutions were attacked by Vikings?” But in France alone there were thousands. And so as far as the sheer numbers of it all, as far as monasticism of the ninth century was concerned, the Vikings were just a blip. They basically don't even talk about them in most cases. And that's why the sources we have are from such few and disparate sources. So that's just just to give a sense of a fun fact about the Viking Age is it's talking about just how small of a group of people the Vikings were. And how ultimately, as far as their contemporaries were concerned, how little of a role they were playing now that would expand throughout the Viking Age. But as far as the ninth century was concerned, they were just, a small terrorist group.

Gary: Right? A small terrorist group with, as you say, a great marketing department. Thank you so much for being on the show, Christopher Adrian.

Christopher: Yeah. Thanks, Gary.