Original subtitles

(dramatic music) (flame whooshing)

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 forests to the lands of ice,

from desert wastes to the storm-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.

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 untamable ferocity of the natural world.

And above all, the monsters lurking within ourselves.

(flame whooshing) (flame crackling)

(thoughtful tense music)

All things come to an end.

Mighty trees wither,

monuments crumble,

and even the brightest star in the night's sky

will one day lose its luster.

(dramatic music)

We too must face our mortality.

Universal though death is, every culture varies

in the rituals and beliefs that surround it.

How death is dealt with

tells us far more about the living

than it does about the dead.

What a culture thinks death is,

is in many ways, less a statement about death

than a picture of the inside of a collective mind.

We tend to imagine the moment

of death as a moment of summation,

a moment that clearly tells us what we've been.

It can tell us about what is considered

a good death and bad death,

and what that then tells us about broader social values.

(wind whistling)

A culture's beliefs about death

reflected their attitudes towards life.

In their hopes for the hereafter,

in their stories of resurrection

and their visions of the end of the world,

societies revealed what is most important to them.

(tense music)

It was an age of the ax and the sword,

of the wind and the wolf,

the kingdoms of the Earth had fallen into chaos.

Survivors sought what shelter they could find.

For a mother and her child,

the shattered remnants of an abandoned village

offered comfort in these times.

(baby crying)

But starvation and despair had made monsters of men.

(suspenseful music)

(woman screaming)

(thunder booming) (debris crashing)

(wind whistling)

The whole world groaned beneath them.

A storm, the likes of which he'd never seen,

scorched the sky.

Ragnarok was upon them, the twilight of the gods.

Death is a test of what being human means.

It probes our responsibilities to family and the community,

and it asks what value we place on our links to the past.

(doors rattling)

The afterlife in Norse mythology was not a single place.

The best and bravest went to Valhalla,

but most were not so lucky.

(thunder crashing)

A darker place awaited them.

Through a sunless valley, they had to walk,

along a path carved deep by the dead.

There lay a land draped in fog, glimmering with misery.

Even the most beloved of gods was one day trapped there.

Balder was the son of the gods Odin and Frigg.

He was fair and wise and admired by all.

Balder is one of the most interesting gods

in the Norse pantheon.

He is beautiful, he is literally shining.

He is, in a sense, the best of the gods.

As a result,

like all people who are loved and admired,

and who seem intrinsically good, he's kind of doomed.

There's a prophecy that he's going to die.

(tense music)

Balder dreamt of his death.

So did his mother, the goddess Frigg.

So she traveled all around the cosmos

extracting a promise not to hurt Balder

from every pebble, plant, bird, and beast.

But she had made a mistake in her oath gathering.

There was one thing she had missed.

She doesn't ask the mistletoe.

Now, we're not sure why the mistletoe was excluded.

It was clearly a sacred plant of some kind.

Possibly because it winds around something else,

it's said that this was a weak plant

so she didn't bother asking it.

For whatever reason, there's this one

seemingly harmless thing in the entire world

which does not promise that it will not injure Balder.

Meanwhile, the gods had invented a new pastime,

using Balder for target practice.

They hurled rocks at him,

trees at him, and anything else they could find.

No matter how mighty the throw or how sharp the missile,

Balder was unharmed.

But one god knew more than the others.

Loki, the mischief-maker,

had heard of Frigg's mistake with the mistletoe.

He thought of a better game.

Loki is determined to bring about the death,

and so he coaxes the mistletoe

into growing bigger and bigger

and then eventually crafts it into a dart

which he hands to Balder's blind brother, Hod.

Hod threw this missile at his brother,

but instead of bouncing off,

the dart of mistletoe pierced Balder's heart.

The horrified gods could only watch as the best

and most beloved of them fell down dead.

(gentle thoughtful music)

This version of Balder's death was not of the Viking era.

It was among the stories compiled at least a century later

by an Icelandic poet named Snorri Sturluson.

He was a poet, he was a lawyer,

he was a politician, he was a historian,

and he wrote down many of the Norse myths.

Now, what's interesting in the way Snorri writes them,

he kind of writes them as a complete narrative.

He makes all of the bits match up with one another.

So you can sort of see him selecting bits,

probably making up a few bits as well,

so that you get this whole history,

this whole coherent history of the Norse gods

rather than fragmented myths

and rather than sort of variants of fragmented myth,

which is actually the normal way

that you would find mythology.

Earlier versions of the tragedy

depicted Balder as an aggressive warrior.

But in Snorri's telling, he is mild and joyful.

It's only the treachery of the wicked

that leads to his death.

It's one of those stories

where many critics have suggested

that we can detect the influence of Christianity.

The whole of the Eddas were written by Christian people.

And that's one of the tales that most scholars believe

is influenced by Christianity.

Snorri is not Christianizing things

in the sense that he's kind of repressing paganism.

It's much more that he's harmonizing the stories.

Balder is beautiful and he's good,

and yet he's doomed to die and he does die.

But he's also resurrected.

So it does have a quite theological feel to it.

It's a myth which I think also allows you to see

how cultures are able to bridge

a pagan world and a Christian world

in a very creative sort of way.

In Snorri's telling,

a near Christian perception of good and evil

was introduced to the old tale.

Loki is wicked and devil-like.

Balder is guiltless, near-perfect.

Even the most perfect of us cannot cheat death, however.

Like the Norse gods and their games,

we may amuse ourselves to forget,

but there's no getting away from reality.

Death is inescapable.

But as the myths and countless traditions tell us,

it may not be the end.

(flame whooshing) (flame crackling)

(tense music)

(wind whistling)

The enemy were on the march.

Monsters and demons,

giants and world wreckers.

They were coming for the gods.

Odin, chief among the gods, sought no counsel but his own.

Long had he awaited this day.

The gods gathered in their feasting hall.

The rafters shook to rumor and discord.

The world tree had shuddered, the Gjallarhorn had sounded.

Their doom had come at last.

"We will not shrink from this battle,"

Odin silenced them all.

"We will face them, we will fight.

"We will fight together one last time."

(doors creaking)

The gates of Valhalla, sealed so long, swung open.

The mighty warriors of ages past marched forth to war.

An eternity had they readied themselves for this,

the final battle was about to begin.

(men yelling)

Valhalla was Odin's domain.

The majestic hall, thatched in golden shields,

was home to the bravest of Norse warriors

who fell in battle.

(suspenseful music)

No such paradise was in prospect

for the warriors of ancient Greece, however.

Great heroes and lowly servants alike

descended into the vast darkness of the underworld.

A river stood before them there.

Only those who had been properly buried

with a coin beneath their tongue

could pay the ferryman to take them across.

Nowhere is the question of proper burial more pressing

or the consequences of getting it wrong more tragic

than in the story of Antigone.

Two brothers had fought for the crown of Thebes.

Polynices had raised an army

to unseat his brother, Eteocles.

In the mighty battle that followed,

each had fallen to the others' sword.

Their mourning sister, Antigone,

was left to bury their bodies.

But a new king had taken the throne, Creon was his name.

He decreed that traitors should not receive burial.

He refused Antigone permission to bury Polynices.

Defying the laws of the gods,

he ordered that the rebel be left to rot on the battlefield.

Burial was insanely important to the ancient Greeks.

The essential Greek idea of what happens to the dead

meant that unless you were properly buried

and properly mourned,

you couldn't make the transition from life into death

and instead were kind of trapped between life and death

in a miserable dissatisfied state.

The ritual itself took three stages.

There was the preparing of the body,

the carrying out of the body, procession of the body,

and then the actual internment or the cremation.

You had to do the ritual right to mean they could go

and be at peace in the underworld, as it were.

Because it's so important,

it, therefore, follows that for someone to be unburied

struck the Greeks as horrific.

All societies have rituals surrounding burial.

They convey the dead from this world to the next.

But they serve a function for the living as well.

Funerals tell an individual's life story

from the perspective of the community.

It emphasizes what the community sees

as being valuable in the individual's life.

By having a funeral, it's saying, well, "Our society,

"the group to which I belong, will continue."

But it's also a ceremony

in which the dead are sort of escorted

to whatever is going to happen to them after they die

and are, in a sense, made to stay there.

They're ritually a really important moment

for passing the dead person into whatever happens next

and then allowing the family of the dead person

to come back out of a phase of being polluted

by association with the dead body,

being reintegrated into society.

In sixth-century Athens,

the rich and powerful commemorated themselves

with grand monuments.

By the following century, however, fashions had shifted.

More modest grave markers were the norm.

Something had changed, but what?

In the 440s, Athens was beginning to empire build.

It had been at the head of Delian League,

which had been a group of Greek cities gathered together

to throw off the Persians, stop them invading Greece,

that had kept banded together,

but was becoming less and less a group of cooperative people

and more and more an empire by proxy

with Athens at the head.

The Athenians come into money.

They decide to spend it on huge cultural projects.

That's why they build the Parthenon,

so that everyone sees Athens

as the most beautiful city they've ever seen.

But if Athens could flaunt those new riches,

its citizens had to be more restrained.

Few individuals dared

build more than the most modest of tombs.

They were eclipsed by the thrusting imperial state.

If you die on the battlefield,

we start to see a way in which,

rather than individual burial,

people are brought back to Athens,

they are separated into their tribes,

and you are put into a tribal tomb.

It foregrounds the way in which epitaphs

and what gets written on your grave

become more and more of a public matter

and a moment in which the public contribution

of an individual is stressed,

which seeks to incorporate the military dead

into the life of the city itself.

Saying that the city exists because of them

and therefore owns them,

owns their lives and the sacrifice that they've made.

They no longer belong to themselves or to their families.

They now belong to Athens.

Antigone too was caught between the needs

of the nation and those of the individual.

She could obey Creon's edict

and leave her brother to the scavenging birds

or follow the law of the gods,

bury Polynices and free his soul to enter the underworld.

She chose to defy the king.

It was just a sprinkling of soil,

but that was all that was needed to satisfy the gods.

Creon was furious.

How dare this girl defy him?

She had to be punished.

So, the king ordered Antigone be entombed alive.

Sealed up in a mountain cave.

The rule of law Creon so prized

would come with a mighty cost, however.

First, his heir, Antigone's fiance,

killed himself from grief.

Then his wife took her own life as well.

(gentle serene music)

Although written almost 2,500 years ago,

the tragedy of Antigone exposes tensions in society

that we debate to this very day.

The words of Athenian playwright Sophocles

speak to us still.

Antigone captures a really compelling moral tension

about whether what Antigone did in defying Creon's order

was right.

The reason that carries on being so compelling

is the battleground of what right is keeps on shifting.

For the ancient Greeks,

it was sort of very much about respect for the gods,

about piety, and Antigone saying,

"Well, your rule, your law does

"not override the law of the gods."

At what point do you have to act?

When must you do something in complete defiance of the law?

When does it actually override everything,

including your own self-preservation instinct?

So, the question of was Antigone right?

Is one that every generation and every society comes to

with its own sense about what right

does and doesn't look like.

Ancient Greeks did not believe death was the end.

Their souls would wander the sad fields

of the underworld for eternity.

This seemingly dismal fate offered one comfort at least

to those left behind.

They had little reason to fear the dead.

The spirits of ancient Greece

could be irritable if dishonored.

They could be unpleasant, but they were not dangerous.

That was not a belief shared by all cultures.

Centuries later, Europe would be stalked by fears

of unhappy spirits seeking revenge

and of the undead who feasted on blood and flesh.

(flame whooshing) (flame crackling)

(dramatic music)

(wind whistling) (thunder crashing)

The sky was rent asunder,

the great battle of the gods had begun.

(wolf growls)

The dread wolf, Fenrir, that beast of slaughter,

strained to join the fight.

Odin stood fast with his dwarf-forged spear

and helm of shining gold.

The Midgard serpent,

immense and writhing, dripped venom foul and deadly.

(electricity crackling)

Facing him was mighty Thor, brave warder of the earth.

He summoned up his strength and all the power of his hammer.

More lethal still was the fire giant Surtr

with his body of riven flame.

It was Freyr the bright and his boar steed Golden Mane

who joined battle with this demon.

The earth convulsed as the fighting raged.

In the cataclysmic events of Ragnarok,

it is giant snakes and wolves that run amok,

yet perhaps more frightening and more fascinating

are the monsters closer to humans.

The ones that walk amongst us, the ones who look like us.

The ones who were us.

(tense music)

The river streaked plains of Serbia,

once a borderland between the East and West,

its soil was little troubled by the plow.

Few hunters roamed its trackless forest

and the strongest trade between its few villages

was rumor and superstition.

(gentle suspenseful music)

In 1725,

the tiny hamlet of Kilisova became the talk of Europe,

for nine people had died within a week

with no sign of sickness and no sign of plague.

It seemed impossible.

In fearful whispers, the rumors spread.

A nightwalker was stalking the village.

It throttled men in their sleep, some said.

But others insisted on a different explanation.

The nightwalker, they said, ate human flesh

and drained its victims of their blood.

Tales of demons who consume

the flesh and blood of the living are nothing new.

They've been found throughout history

in nearly every culture around the globe.

(ominous music)

The belief in the undead coming back to nourish themselves

in some parasitical, inimical way

on the bodies of the living

is very widespread in human cultural history.

One of the consistent things about societies

is that once the dead are dead

we really want them to stay dead.

There is an almost universal fear that if the dead return,

they will somehow damage the living.

As soon as an imperial official from Vienna

had arrived in the village as witness, they began digging.

But just before the nightwalker

had claimed its first victim,

an old man had died in Kilisova.

This was the grave the villagers opened.

(casket clunks)

What was found within stunned the imperial official.

The old man's body was pink and fat,

his hair and fingernails had grown,

and his mouth was wet with the blood of his victims.

(men murmuring)

A medical person would say, "Oh, no, hang on.

"This is natural decomposition.

"This is the gasses in the corpse, the pooling of blood.

"This is the fact that hair and nails

"don't really grow afterwards.

"It's just the corpse is shrinking.

"This can be explained. It's medicine.

"It's perfectly natural."

Well, that's fine, but it isn't necessarily going to address

the anxieties and the fears.

The villagers of Kilisova

removed the old man from his grave.

They drove a metal stake through his heart

and burned the body on a fire.

For the villagers were convinced the old man was a vampire.

(suspenseful music)

The folklore vampire is essentially a revenant,

a dead person coming back.

They're wrapped in their shrouds,

often they're bloated, slavering,

and they cause death more by contagion.

They're not bloodsuckers to start with.

Of course, it is fascinating

that a third category arises

between the world of the living and the world of the dead.

It's inexplicable and it's possibly threatening,

possibly liberating.

The story of the Kilisova vampire

soon made the newspapers in Vienna and far beyond.

A vampire panic was spreading across Europe.

Inevitably, it left its mark on wider culture.

In 1816, a group of authors and poets

held a ghost story competition.

Famously, it led to Mary Shelley's novel "Frankenstein."

Another contribution came from Lord Byron.

He started a novel about the foul-feeders of Eastern legend.

He never finished it,

but his friend, John Polidori, was inspired.

He wrote a short story based on it.

He called it "The Vampyre."

These are writers

who are products of the Enlightenment.

They're not a-religious persons,

but they are persons who no longer believe

in the Christian story.

They are therefore looking for alternate stories

to tell about the world of death.

The vampire, of course, offers that crossover figure.

The vampire story in the 19th century

develops in a very different way

from the folklore vampire.

You get this very, very popular figure

of this elegant nightwalker.

This handsome man in evening clothes

who is death to anyone around him,

and you get these extremely attractive,

very, very dangerous men,

and then slightly later women, as well,

who represent both a sexual threat

as well a sexual attraction.

(brooding music)

No vampire is more alluring or dangerous

than the one created by Bram Stoker in 1897.

His creation, an ancient nobleman called Dracula,

comes from the East to infiltrate Victorian Britain.

Dracula, who wants nothing more

than to dress up in English clothes

and to come to London with its teeming millions,

is, in fact, a story of reverse colonialization.

Instead of Great Britain colonizing Eastern nations,

we have a representative of an Eastern nation

who is about to colonize Great Britain.

He's an outsider, he's an element of pollution,

he's an element of destruction

who is both attractive and repulsive at the same time.

Stoker, himself, was an Irishman.

I mean, he knew what exclusion and conflict was like.

So, suddenly the vampire story,

in terms of a literary story, has emerged into something

where you can really, really critique the world.

It seems to me that the issues

in Stoker's "Dracula" are issues which are still anything

but resolved in today's culture,

and I think that's why we keep coming back to them.

(dramatic music)

More recent entries in the genre

have seen vampires terrorize the suburbs of Stockholm,

the post-apocalyptic wilds of Los Angeles,

and, most frighteningly of all, American high schools.

Our fascination with vampires, it seems,

is as endless as the demon's own thirst for blood.

(flame whooshing) (flame crackling)

(tense music)

(wind whistling)

The battle was over.

One by one, the greatest of gods had fallen.

Odin, Thor, Freyr,

and all the warriors of Valhalla with them.

It was the end of the gods.

And it was the end of the world.

(earth rumbling) (dramatic music)

(baby crying)

(water whooshing)

It's no surprise the story ends in this way.

Floods are one of the most common motifs in mythology.

The best known of course is the story of Noah in the Bible.

Displeased with the corruption and violence he saw on Earth,

God decided to start afresh.

He flooded the Earth

allowing only Noah and his family to survive,

alongside remnants of all the animals.

A similar story is found in Assyrian texts

dating back to 2000 BC

in ancient Egyptian tomb inscriptions

and in ancient Greek mythology.

(tense thoughtful music)

Phrygia was a harsh land.

Cold in the winters, hot in the summers,

and arid all year round.

From northern steps to southern hills,

the stony earth bore neither fruit tree nor olive.

But among its coarse plains and exposed ridgetops,

there was once a village.

(pensive music)

Its houses were fine, its citizens worthy.

Two wandering peasants came to this village.

They were in search of a warm welcome and a warm bed,

but those fine houses and worthy citizens

turned them away one after another.

Finally, the two peasants reached the end of the village.

Here they found a humble cottage

thatched with stem and reed.

(people chattering)

It was home to an old couple named Baucis and Philemon.

Poor though they were,

they opened their doors to the strangers.

The old woman coaxed the ashes of their fire back to life.

They offered their guests

the finest food and drink in the house

and the most comfortable of their chairs.

Baucis and Philemon were about to kill

their one and only goose in honor of their guests

when the strangers revealed the truth.

They were gods, none other than Mercury and Jupiter himself,

chief among the Roman deities.

They promised the old couple a just reward

for their hospitality.

The fable of Baucis and Philemon

was written by the Roman poet, Ovid.

He lived during the first century AD.

It was a time of great change in Roman life

when Augustus, the first emperor, was cementing his power.

Ovid is writing in a period of increasing stability.

It was a much more settled time for Roman society as a whole

that was thinking about coming out of

this period of great disturbance.

One of Augustus' great claims

about restoring the republic was piety.

He claims on his funerary monument

that in just one year he restored 28 temples.

So, Baucis and Philemon fits into that kind of narrative

because you have this idea of piety being rewarded,

of showing piety that other people aren't showing.

(tense thoughtful music) (wind whistling)

The gods had promised the old couple a reward

for their generosity.

They had told Baucis and Philemon to leave their cottage

and accompany them to the heights of a nearby mountain.

They heaved their aged bodies up the slope.

But when they finally reached the summit,

the gods told them to look back on their village.

A flood had washed every home and street away,

all except for their tiny hut.

That Jupiter had transformed into a magnificent temple.

Their whole village has been overrun by a flood.

The whole world has been drowned.

They've been saved and they're on a mountainside.

This was the punishment for not giving

hospitality to strangers that was due.

It just illustrates the insane importance

which you sometimes can get in the Mediterranean world

of being decent to strangers.

You have to invite them in,

and if you invite them in you have to feed them.

As reward for their piety,

Jupiter granted Baucis and Philemon a wish,

anything they desired would be theirs.

But the elderly couple had a simple request.

They asked to be the keepers of that fine temple,

to share every day with the other and never be separated,

even in the moment of death.

After years of service to the gods,

the day fated for their deaths came.

As Baucis and Philemon died, they were transformed.

They became trees of oak and linden.

Entwined in root and leaf,

they grew together for years to come.

From destruction, the story tells us, there is creation.

From death, there is new life.

(gentle serene music)

(bird squawks)

The gods were gone,

consumed by Ragnarok.

Water shrouded the Earth.

A vast ocean, still, silent, and unchanging.

But all things come to an end.

(birds chirping)

Life returned to the Earth.

(majestic ethereal music)

So the cycle of life begins again,

and with new life, there come new stories.

For human beings have always been storytellers.

In the myths and legends, we remember,

and those we choose to pass on,

we are links in a chain stretching back millennia,

part of an eternal dialogue between our past, our present,

and our future.

(dramatic music)

(giant roaring) (thunder crashing)

(waves whooshing)

(warriors yelling)

The fact that a myth might be completely incomprehensible,

completely nonsensical on a rational level doesn't matter

because it can still tell us

about what our society is like and what our culture is like.

(thunder crashing) (electricity buzzing)

A myth tells us what we believe to be the case.

It also offers us in those terms

means of resolving ethical, social, cultural conflicts.

If one thinks of it as a narrative, a way of encapsulating

the things that are important in society

and not always the positive things,

they are really telling us about the dynamics

in the society in which they're told.

I think it's very important that people sort of go on

probing things with myth.

An awful lot of our lives and our decisions

are actually not about reason,

they're not about planning, they're about emotions.

Mythology is a guide to that.

It's a way of understanding the way we feel,

not the way we think.

Many myths can seem bizarre or cruel to modern eyes.

Yet for all mythology's variety and infinite strangeness,

there is a common thread that links us

to even the most ancient of stories.

Whether it was on the streets of Athens

or the frozen seas of the North,

the dark woods of England,

or the distant mountains of the East,

the same thoughts have been uttered in 1,000 tongues.

Who are we?

Where have we come from?

Why is the world the way it is?

And what will we find beyond?

They're questions that define human existence,

no matter when or where it is found.

(majestic music)