Original subtitles

(ominous upbeat music)

The tales have been told since man first gathered

around the fires of prehistory.

Tales of the strange and wondrous things hidden

in the vast unknown shadows of the world.

Tales of creatures divine and beasts demonic,

of gods and kings,

of myths and monsters.

From dark forest to the lands of ice,

from desert wastes to the stormed thrashed seas,

every corner of the earth has its legends to tell.

Stories of heroes and the villains they encounter,

of the wilderness and the dangers within them.

Stories of battles, of love, of order and of chaos

but what are the roots of these fantastic tales?

And why have they endured so long?

In this series, we'll explore the history

behind these legends and reveal the hidden influences

that shaped them.

War and disease, religious and social upheaval,

the untameable ferocity of the natural world and above all,

the monsters lurking within ourselves.

(ominous music)

(bomb exploding)

(indistinct) however, by the death of fire brigade.

(upbeat music)

Our world is at war.

The battlefield today belongs to the sniper, the tank,

the bomb, the bullet and we seek

ever more inventive means of mutual destruction

but why do we fight?

It is a question asked

by every culture and by every generation,

for our world has always been at war.

Through the millennia of human existence we have fought

for land and wealth, for love and revenge,

to liberate and to oppress,

to slave allies and to punish enemies,

we have fought and fought again.

(soldiers screaming)

War is an intense period of struggle,

so it's also therefore an intense period

of cultural definition.

War allows you to see the ethical priorities

of a culture that's created it.

How do we cope with people we've captured?

What do we do if we lose?

Who do we go to war against?

Society's stories of war tell us

what values they hold dear

and that they maintain through warfare.

They're a way of incorporating unpredictable forces

into a belief system that helped people to make sense

of things that they couldn't prevent or predict.

In a society is representation of war,

it represents what it thinks of itself,

what its ideals are.

It determines what values the culture holds dear.

Whether by choice or necessity,

war has been a constant in human history

and all civilizations have had to grapple

with the questions it raises.

The stories we tell of war,

the justifications we find

for violence and the condolences we seek

for loss all reveals something about our values

as individuals and as societies.

(ominous music)

The Nemedians had come seeking a new home

but they found an island only misery,

for they were enslaved by the Fomorians,

cruel ogres renowned for their greed.

Chief among these terrors were the two strongest

and ugliest ogres,

Morc and his brother Conand.

The fruit of the Nemedians labor they seized for themselves,

but the Nemedians had not come so far to be slaves forever.

One man stood against their foe,

Fergus Redside was his name.

He was the son of the great hero, Nemed, himself.

Her stirred rebellion among the hearts and shacks

of the Nemedian villagers.

No longer would they bear the oppression of Conand and Morc.

They wearied of their servitude.

They readied themselves for war.

The story of the Nemedians and their oppression by the

Fomorians is told in the Celtic book of Invasions.

Compiled around the 11th century,

the book charts the history of Ireland

from creation through to the middle ages.

It tells the stories of five mythical tribes

who invaded Ireland one by one before the final arrival

of the Gaelic people and the establishment

of a Christian kingdom.

Origin stories such as this are common,

almost every civilization thinks it is special

and developed a myth of its beginnings to prove it.

Rome, the bustling heart of modern Italy is today one

of the largest cities in Europe.

It has been continuously inhabited

for more than 3,000 years and everywhere

in the city can be seen the remnants of that long history,

relics of an age when the city ruled the world.

By the second century,

almost 100 million people lived under Roman rule,

a fifth of the world's population at the time.

Rome's power stretched from the north

of Britain to Egypt in the south,

from Spain in the west to the Persian Gulf in the east.

The image is famous to this day.

A she-wolf suckling two infant boys as if they were her own.

These were the twin brothers Romulus and Remus,

their grandfather, the king,

had been usurped and the boys banished from home.

Thanks to the she-wolf however,

they survived long enough to be found

by a shepherd who raised them as his own.

Growing up, the twins discovered their birthright

and helped their grandfather retake his crown.

They then set out to found a city of their own.

Each began construction in a different place

and the dispute soon took a violent turn

when Remus mockingly leaped

over his brothers budding defenses,

Romulus respondent with a fatal blow and the words,

"So perish anyone who attacks my walls."

The foundation of Rome rests on fratricide,

brother killing brother.

It's not a positive place to start your story.

Usually you'd expect a single hero

who is the foundation of the nation.

Whereas in this instance, we have two competing heroes.

It's a very, very weird foundation myth.

It takes away from that idea of a single exemplar

of the virtues of the civilization that's founded.

Indeed, neither Romulus,

nor Remus is particularly exemplary.

Remus because he gets killed and Romulus

because he murders his own brother.

The tale troubled and intrigued the Romans,

especially as it was regarded not as myth

but as history and history that could be seen and touched.

The Temple of Jupiter Stator by the Forum was said

to have been founded by Romulus himself.

For centuries,

his heart was preserved on the Palatine Hill

and Romans could even visit the cave

where the she-wolf was said

to have cared for the infant boys.

We might expect them to be a bit awkward about the story,

but they're not.

They tell it again and again and again.

It's recorded in the primary sources,

it's recorded as something that is an important part

of what it means to be Roman.

It was grounded very much in the physical location

of Rome as the whole of the Romulus and Remus myth is.

It was very much about the roots these people

had in this particular patch of ground

which is why we always talk about the Roman Empire,

despite how far it spreads.

We always come back to Rome to these particular locations

that always remain very vividly part of the Roman identity.

Some identified in the story,

the seeds of violence which Rome would later use

to conquer the world.

Others saw in the deadly struggle between brothers,

a cruel omen of the civil wars

that would split the Roman Empire again and again.

Attempts were made by poets and politicians

to soften the tale of Romulus and Remus or replace it

with other more sanitized accounts of the city's origins.

The Romans were very good at understanding

that myths and stories had the capability

to be told and to be shaped and to be retold

and reshaped as you needed to do so.

So there were alternative versions told.

It's Cicero who actually denies

that Romulus kills Remus and actually sort

of deletes the part of the myth

that probably gave it its purchase on the Roman imagination.

The idea that in drinking the milk of a wolf,

Romulus and Remus are imbibing a ferocity

that Rome has yet fully to contain is in part

why Cicero's and Virgil's generation want

to forget the whole thing.

Plus they invent a bunch of other much sleeker,

much more fit for purpose foundation myths of

which the best known is the one invented

by Virgil, the myth of Aeneas.

The noble heroic, Aeneas was a refugee from Troy.

He led his people across the Mediterranean to Italy,

where he founded the city that would one day give rise

to the Roman people.

His story is told most famously

by the poet Virgil in his great epic Aeneid,

he was writing during a new era in Roman history.

Augustus was consolidating his power

as the first emperor

and the grander more dignified origin story offered

by the Aeneid seemed fit for the times

but if it was intended to eclipse older stories

in the Roman imagination, it would fail.

Romulus and Remus would retain their place

in the history books of ancient Rome.

But of course it wasn't real history at all.

The brothers did not create Rome.

Rome created them.

It's not the murder of Remus

that explain the violence of the Romans.

It was the violence of the Romans that lay behind the myth.

Military life goes through all aspects of Roman society.

The Roman army is conscript.

It's not a volunteer professional force and that means

that you have a very high proportion of people in Rome,

broadly speaking, who either will have been in the army

or will have relatives who have been in the army.

So there's a knowledge and a familiarity

with military matters that is very deeply embedded

in everyday life and everyday activity.

He does one really interesting thing

that's very important for Roman ideas

of the self and the relation between the individual

and the city and that is he's killed by Romulus.

So the point of the story then

becomes even my brother is less important

to me than defending Rome.

It's Rome above all.

Remus is there to show that Romulus is willing

and all Romans must be willing

to sacrifice familial ties for the city.

Perhaps that is why the bloody story of the twins endured.

No finer mirror of the city's character could be found.

In one act of fraternal bloodshed,

the myth taught Romans that the success

of their city relied not only violence but on sacrifice.

Rome was great but so was the price paid.

The Tower of Conand, the great fortress lay before them,

the Nemedians, 30,000 of them had come

to claim their freedom.

These men were farmers, not soldiers

but they would fight all the same,

for they were led by a brave and mighty warrior,

Fergus Redside, the son of Nemed.

From the high tower,

Conand watched them gather with an outraged snarl.

The impotence of these slaves.

Massed on the plane below,

the Nemedian army grew larger and larger,

hammer and pipe, scythe and spear,

they held their weapons aloft and roared

in time to the beat of the drum.

The great ogre was readied,

armor was strapped to his body.

(soldiers screaming)

The men raised their swords, the drums grew louder.

The battle was about to begin.

Despite wars constant presence in history,

a few of us are natural soldiers.

Killing other people runs against the instincts

of most and sheer terror

on the battlefield paralyzes many more.

It's no surprise then

that throughout history we find enemies dehumanized

and the glory of a heroic death magnified,

the sentiments are found in the words of politicians,

poets, in the works of sculptors and painters

and in the stories and myths that cultures held dear.

(upbeat music)

The frozen north is no place for the fainthearted.

It's winters are long and dark.

It is a land of sheer cliffs and deep fjords

of rock and ice.

To live in such a place is to battle

against the elements and such extremes

of nature perhaps produce extremes of man.

The Norse lived in Scandinavia

between the eighth and 11th centuries.

It was a society that extolled war and battle,

whose daring warriors crossed continents in search of glory.

What lay behind their success was a mastery of sailing.

In 793, the Norse launched a raid on Lindisfarne,

a sacred island off the Northeast coast of England.

The monastery there was looted

and its inhabitants slaughtered.

The age of the Vikings had begun.

The attack on Lindisfarne stunned Christian Europe,

one contemporary wrote,

never before has such a terror appeared in Britain

as we have now suffered from a pagan race.

I think there were two quite important factors

about the Norse that made them appear genuinely shocking

and that was that they arrived in boats.

They struck somewhere quickly and they moved

on and there was no way of knowing

where they would go next

and also there's the whole culture clash.

You can't say that the Vikings

and the north ever raided because they were thinking

about religious differences

but from the point of view of the Anglo-Saxons,

those religious differences mattered a lot.

Stories of the brave barbarous Vikings spread quickly.

Most feared among their warriors were the Beserkers.

These shock troops fought in a trance-like fury and seemed

to experience no pain or fear

but if this was a culture that glorified war

in all parts of Norse society, women included played a role.

Girls were often given war-like names,

Gunhild for instance was a popular choice

and literally meant war battle.

In time of course, they're expected

to raise strong future warriors themselves

and any deformed babies were

to be abandoned in the elements to die.

One thing they did not do was fight.

They were not trained as warriors as men were.

According to mythology however,

there was still a female presence

on the battlefield and they had the most important job

of all.

(ominous music)

The Valkyries are immortal warrior maidens

who's job is to decide which warriors get to fall in battle.

They were then tasked with taking the souls

of the dead warriors to Valhalla which is

in effect the afterlife, presided over by the God, Odin.

You might think of Valhalla as similar

to the way in which knights going on crusade were told

that their sins would be pardoned if they died in a crusade.

It sweetens the deal a bit, it knocks the edges

off the fear of telling them that if they die in battle,

they're going to live a lovely life

where they're given meat all the time and they just have

to fight each die for Odin

and then they're resurrected and they go back to feasting.

It makes the idea of dying in battle seem less terrible.

The promise of Valhalla must have offered

comfort to the fearful before battle

and solace to those grieving afterwards.

Death on the battlefield was recast as a mirror

of birth and just as it was women who once brought men

into the world, so it was females

who carried them into the next.

The gender of Valkyries is often bound up

in the roles that they perform in the myth.

So in Valhalla, when they're bringing the mead cup

around to the warriors, this is very much the role

of the noble women in society as well.

It's what the hostess would do at a great feast

or a gathering in a king or a lords hall.

Fate figures are nearly always female

in all European mythologies.

There is an unbelievably creepy Valkyrie moment

in the (indistinct) where you actually see the Valkyries

weaving with men's intestines

and using men's severed skulls as weights.

Instead of the tools of the trade,

they have a shuttle that is a spearhead

and they beat the (indistinct) with a sword rather

than the standard wooden tool that they'd use.

Weaving is usually a virtuous thing for householders

to do but these women are weaving with guts and heads,

so they're doing something

that's on the one hand really uber feminine

but on the other hand is a creepy inverted version of it.

Stories of war and the Valkyries

are found throughout Norse mythology.

The gods constantly fought amongst themselves

and against their rivals,

the giant and monstrous (indistinct)

but were the Norse as belligerent

to people as we often think?

Is their reputation for violent banditry

which remains to this day a fair one?

Were they all Vikings?

There's a great deal of association

between the Norse and a particularly savage kind

of violence and that's frequently overstated.

In the context of the time they lived in,

I don't think the violence committed

by the Norse was any inherently worse

than the violence committed by other medieval societies.

I don't think you could quantify the effect

of murder and arson and theft by the Norse

as being any worse than the murder and arson and theft

that occurred within Anglo-Saxon kingdoms

and continental royal houses.

It's fair to say that they're expansionist

and that their method of expansion is ship based

and that their modus operandi is on the whole

to cross the seas and raid foreign countries

and take slaves and take plunder

and then sail home with that

but they also tend to settle in areas

that they frequently raid.

So they don't remain these outsider pillagers,

when they established themselves,

they form societies

and then we can pick out the really

much more positive associations.

The bold spirit of the Norse saw them dominate England

and farm settlement stretching from the Black Sea

to North America but this golden period was fleeting.

By the middle of the 11th century,

Christianity had supplanted the indigenous faith,

the Valkyries flew no more,

the Viking age was ending.

The two armies charged at one another,

thrusting and slashing, cutting and stabbing.

So the enemies met.

The Fomorians were led into battle

by Conand himself and there was only one man

who dared face him,

Conand towered over him

but Redside was a brave and skillful warrior.

Back and forth, the two champions fought,

metal ringing on metal,

each waiting for the other to slip

for a chance to end the battle with one fatal blow.

Still eager, still strong, Conand charged

but it was a ruse.

Redside dodged the mighty ogres sword

and lunged forward his own blade flatly.

The great ogre roared out in pain

before collapsing to the ground with a mighty thud.

Conand had fallen.

No battle is without loss

and even victory cannot displace all the pain,

grief and anger.

The scars of combat can run as deep in the mind

as they do in the body and the greatest stories

of war know this.

(upbeat music)

In the Anatolian expanses of modern Turkey,

just south of the Dardanelles Strait which divides Europe

from Asia, there was once a place of legend,

a mighty fortress overlooking the plains.

A city of wealth and beauty.

The remnants of its thick walls are now shrouded

beneath the earth, its lavish temples

and palaces crumbled to dust but it was amid the rocks

and rivers of this ancient plain

that the greatest conflict in all myth took place,

the Trojan War.

It was a war sparked by the abduction

of Queen Helen of Sparta by Prince Paris of Troy.

An alliance of Greek kings then sailed

to Troy with their armies to bring her back.

A 10 year siege ensued.

Only cunning ended the long stalemate.

The Trojans were fooled

into letting the Greeks beyond their gates.

Troy was brutally sacked soon after this.

Countless works of art have been inspired by the war,

in its long duration and bloody aftermath,

there are near infinite opportunities

to explore the meaning and impact of conflict.

The Trojan War offers an opportunity

to look at a very wide range of human life.

It offers the opportunity to look at the failure

of guest friendship, what happens

when those bounds of hospitality are broken,

conflict in between two different regions,

the coming together of the Greeks

for a single purpose, all of these kinds of things,

the myth allows the Greeks to explore

through one particular narrative,

it doesn't just talk about war to glorify it,

it also really offers an opportunity to look

at the human cost, the people who suffer as a result of war.

But one account of the war has endured above all others,

a poem composed almost 3,000 years ago.

Alexander the Great conquered the world

with a copy at his side and soldiers

and civilians alike have for centuries looked

to it for a better understanding of war in their own times.

That poem is the ancient Greek epic, the Iliad.

Said to be the work of an author known as Homer,

the written version of the poem dates

to the eighth century BC.

Its roots however, are older still.

In an oral tradition which stretches back hundreds

of years more, the Iliad does not focus on the end

of the Trojan War nor on its beginnings.

Instead it tells one short episode

during the last year of the conflict.

Homer makes monsters of neither Trojans nor Greeks,

the poet instead grants equal dignity

to the soldier far from home

and the civilian trapped in theirs.

What the enemies have in common is emphasized.

The love of family, the pain of loss,

the inevitability of death.

One lovely example of a moment

of emotional connection with the family is the Trojan hero,

Hector in the Iliad who puts

on his helmet and then goes to kiss his wife,

Andromache, goodbye.

She's with his little boy,

he's only a tiny child and the little boy looks

at Hector in his helmet and starts to cry.

He doesn't recognize his father

because he's wearing this great helmet and Hector starts

to laugh and throws the little boy up

in the air and passes him back to his wife

but it's a lovely affectionate moment.

This lovely little domestic detail

that humanizes him and makes it clear that he's fighting

in the most literal possible way,

not just for his city as a political entity

but for his family in its extraordinary vulnerability.

You could read the epic as being

about the unreasonableness of war,

the pettiness of war and therefore the human need

to rise above that

to try and remain human, humane within that struggle.

Hector falls in combat

at the hands of the Greek hero, Achilles.

It was his fate to die and for his city to eventually fall

but he carried on nonetheless, he fought to the end.

His story still speaks to us.

For death comes for all but we all must carry on.

It's about very fundamental aspects of human experience,

jealousy, anger, rage, struggle, love, hate.

All these things are really fundamental parts

of the human experience.

(upbeat music)

Every generation

that has read the poem has repurposed its characters

and events for their own times.

After the fall of Rome, however,

Homers text was lost to Western Europe

for centuries but after rediscovering it

during the Renaissance,

the Iliad went on to become a foundation stone

in Western literature.

It continues to shape our thoughts about war to this day.

For though in many ways combat

has changed beyond recognition,

The Iliad captured something unchanging about war.

The poem glories in it and damns it just the same.

(upbeat music)

It is a city with many names.

First it was Byzantine,

later, it became Constantinople

but to many, it was just the city

and though we may not recognize it,

that is how we know it to this day,

for Istanbul is derived from the Greek words

(speaking in foreign language), meaning, to the city.

That city was once the largest and wealthiest

in Europe and the holy place of Christianity.

In 1453, however,

it fell to the invading forces of the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman empire was the superpower of its day,

an expansionist and aggressive one at that.

It was just assumed

that noway Christian could really fall to Islam,

it was just assumed

that God would protect it.

The idea that something

so strong could collapse just dismayed and horrified them.

According to the Christian understanding,

God really shouldn't have allowed it

to fall in the way it did.

The conquest of the city shocked Europe.

It would not be the end

of the Ottomans ambitions in the west however.

It expanded all the way into Eastern Europe.

In fact, virtually all of what we now think

of as the Balkans was either ruled directly

by the Ottomans or was an Ottoman vassal.

In this state of near constant war

that followed,

new stories and legends emerged

and just as men can make myths out of war,

war can make myths out of men.

Wallachia was a small principality

in what is modern day Romania.

To the north stretched the Transylvanian Alps

to the south lay the mighty Danube River.

This was the land that Prince Vlad Dracula called home.

Between 1448 and 1476 he ruled Wallachia

on three separate occasions.

All these reigns were brief

but his fame has become immortal nevertheless.

He was the inspiration

behind Bram Stoker's legendary vampire, Dracula,

but Vlad was notorious long

before the publication of Stoker's novel in 1897.

In his own time, he was reviled as a sadist whose tastes

for the cruelest of punishments led

to his gruesome nickname, Vlad the Impaler.

A German meistersinger produced a poem

that was actually sung in front

of the then holy Roman emperor,

Frederick the Third which told of Vlad's crimes

in detail and one of the crimes

that it emphasized was

that he impaled his victims on stakes.

There are stories of Vlad the Impaler

eating his dinner while his enemies rived

around him impaled on spikes.

Later, this was elaborated even further

and there was a really grisly tales

of mothers and infants being impaled together

so that the infants were trying to clutch

at the mother and the mothers were trying

to protect the infants but they both died,

really gruesome stuff.

But how fair was Vlad's reputation?

Where's the truth amid the legend?

And why did the tale spread and endure?

Vlad lived at time of upheaval.

His lands were caught between the Christian powers

to the west and the might of the Ottoman Empire to the east.

In 1417, Wallachia had become a vassal state

of the Ottomans.

Vlad's father was the then ruler of the principality

but he was murdered in 1447 and his crown usurped.

For decades afterwards,

control of the region was contested again and again.

As a grown man, Vlad fought to win back

what he regarded as his birth right.

At times he aligned himself

with the Ottomans and others he joined the forces arrayed

against them but his reigns in Wallachia was short,

unstable affairs.

He was a man with many enemies.

In 1462, having once again lost his crown,

Vlad traveled to Transylvania

to seek the help of the Hungarian King, Matthew Corvinus,

instead, the king had Vlad imprisoned.

It was at this time that stories

of Vlad's unique brutality began to spread.

As soon as you have a war,

hostilities of any kind, the atrocity stories begin.

People really got off

on exaggerating the evil Eastern European weirdness

of this guy and it just got more

and more exaggerated and peculiar

as the western pressers churned it out.

Even in his own lifetime,

the man was becoming myth and the stories

of the cruelty and wickedness

of Vlad Dracula did not disappear

with his death in 1476 but legends are changeable things.

Once a man becomes myth,

he can be repackaged and repurposed again and again.

In more recent years,

there's been a reappraisal of Vlad the Third.

He's become a perhaps unlikely hero.

Romania was long dominated by foreign powers.

It was subject to the Ottomans until the 19th century

in the establishment of the Kingdom of Romania

but that was swept away

after the Second World War and Romania was once again

in the shadow of a greater power, this time, Soviet Russia.

Like many post-communist countries,

it's eager to go back to the time

before communism and find heroes that predate those days

and Vlad is the perfect candidate.

He was recast as a harsh, yet just ruler

who strengthened central government and fought

for the nation at a time of conflict and unrest.

In the school rooms of Romania, Vlad's story is still told,

for deviance in the face of oppression will always appeal.

The battle was over.

The Nemedians celebrated.

It was Fergus Redside who had triumphed

but few in his army had escaped the battle

with the Fomorians unharmed and

as they tended to the wounded,

a dread sound echoed across the island.

It came from the sea.

A fleet of ships cut through the waves towards them.

It was another Fomorian army.

Morc, brother of the defeated Conand was already come

for revenge.

With a cry, Redside rallied his weary men,

they charged the beach to fight once more.

In the battle that followed, not one fled from the other.

Redside and Morc, Nemedian and Fomorian alike,

they fell in mutual slaughter.

The beach was stained crimson with their blood.

Of the 30,000 Nemedians who had come to win their freedom,

just 30 survived.

This mournful band of the wounded

and the weary seized a Fomorian ship.

They sailed away far from Ireland and far away

from the cruelty of the Fomorians.

The defeat of the Nemedians in the Celtic book

of Invasions paves the way for the arrival

of the Irish people themselves.

The book made war a part of their origins,

of their identity as a people as it was for so many others.

From the time of the Romans to that of the Norse,

from the golden age of ancient Greece

through to this very day,

the character of individuals

and of nations has been shaped by myths of war.

They can tell us where we've come

from and where we go after death, they tell us

what makes us different from others

and what we have in common,

they tell us what we cherish, what we deplore,

what we aspire to and what we fear.

They tell us who we are.

The weapons of war have changed down the centuries

and though battles on the field may look different today,

the battles within us remain much the same.

(upbeat music)