Hello, my name is Clare Pickersgill and I’m the Keeper of the University of Nottingham Museum. It's a pleasure to welcome you all here today. Now today we are going to have a talk about the sort of behind the scenes look at the ‘Viking Rediscover the Legend’ exhibition and this was scheduled to be by its curator Natalie Buy from the Yorkshire Museum, however as you will probably notice this isn’t Natalie Buy and that’s because Natalie is not able to join us today. However, I’m absolutely delighted that Doctor Andrew Woods is here with us. Andrew is the senior curator for the Yorkshire Museum and he's also co-curator of the exhibition. His PhD and his research interests are in Viking silver which he tells me are very close to his heart and in fact he's also coming back in a couple of weeks’ time to talk to us about this very topic which is great but today he is going to talk to us about ‘Touring the Vikings’. Thank-you. [Applause] Good afternoon, thank-you very much for the warm welcome. So today, as Claire’s outlined I’m going to speak a little bit about the Viking Rediscover the Legend exhibition, and really to give you a curator’s perspective on that exhibition. I’m gonna start with a little bit of the background, so going back nearly two and a half years when we first started working on this exhibition where were we coming from and looking at a little bit of the Vikings in Britain, some of the previous exhibitions that have been done on that theme and some of the more recent research that we're trying to incorporate. We’re gonna go from there to talk a little bit about some of the big ideas that we hope to convey within course of the exhibition, and then talk a little bit around how we try to translate those big ideas into the nitty-gritty that you will see as part of the exhibition, and really what I'm going to try and do in kind of the middle section of my talk today is sort of take you on a virtual tour of the exhibition and to show you how we translate the big ideas into text, labels, images you see today, and I would encourage you that if you haven't been to see it already, hopefully after my talk, you’ll go and have a look – potentially with fresh eyes. I'm gonna talk a little bit about the methods by which we communicated those ideas and towards the end a little bit of reflection about some of the challenges of working on a touring exhibition like this and the successes of it as well. So then, where to begin? Well the exhibition ‘Viking rediscover the legend’ which is the exhibition over in the Djanogly gallery, not the one in this building; I’m going to be talking about that one in particular, is based upon two collections those of the British Museum, here depicted in the bottom right - and I'm not gonna bother introducing you to the British Museum, I’m sure you’ve all heard of it and know quite a lot about it. And the one that I'm based in, the Yorkshire Museum, here depicted in the top left. The Yorkshire Museum for those of you who are unfamiliar with it is an archaeology and Natural Science Museum, set in Museum Gardens in the heart of York. It is a regional Museum nearly 200 years old and it has a designated archaeology collection of national significance with nearly 1 million objects in it. In the current context it has one of the best Viking collections in the country and between that and the British Museum we have access to an almost unparalleled array of Viking collections to put on display, and in some ways these two collections were quite complementary. In York we have a real depth of collections; we have materials from the very top of society right down to the very everyday sort of normal objects of everyday life. In the British Museum they have a real breadth of a collection, collections that are incredible but from right across the British Isles and perhaps without access to those mundane normal things and so that's where this exhibition started really. This is the Vale of York Hoard and this was discovered 11 years ago in 2007 and it is the beginning of really the genesis or the seed of the Viking exhibition because it's the very first time that we in York and the British Museum worked together. So found in 2007 the most important Viking hoard found in Britain in 150 years, enormous over 700 objects and because it was valued as treasure and had quite a significant price tag associated with it, over million pounds, which required collaborative fundraising between ourselves in York and the British Museum, and we're very pleased to say that we were successful in the fundraising for it and we now co-own it with the British Museum, it spends its half of its time in the BM, half of its time in York – well, when it’s not touring around the country at least! We like to describe it as something of a treasure time I suppose and the beginning of that fundraising process created a link between the two institutions that has gradually evolved in a number of ways, and in the years since, to form the Viking rediscover the legend exhibition, so we loaned material to the British Museum in 2009, they loaned some material back to us in 2010. The idea for a Viking tour is not one that’s particularly new, but the British Museum do tours on a quite regular basis so you may have seen the last one, it toured to I think ten different venues around the country and it was called ‘Roman Empire, power and people’, and so that model of touring a significant group of archaeological objects around the country was one that the BM were keen to do again and with that established relationship around the Vale of York Hoard, they asked us if we would be interested in working with them on Viking-age collections; and this store built on the British Museums 2014 exhibition as well, called ‘Life and Legend’ . And we're very lucky to work with the British Museum; we in York were the lead partner and we were particularly lucky in that they were very comfortable letting us to curate the exhibition. This is very much a partnership of equals and we were fortunate in that they let us write the text as well as come up with ideas ourselves, as well as very generous with a shopping list of objects that we’d like! So, that's sort of the genesis of the idea and then it progressed into a tour where we asked for partner venues and so we're going to over the next 18 months or so, have visited five different venues around the UK - those that you see on the screen here, and the idea behind these different venues was really to give a geographic spread, to mean as many different people could see that exhibition possible, to go to places where there were pre-existing strengths in some places, either of really good Viking collections or centres of expertise, or both as you have here, and also to take it to some places that maybe haven't had an exhibition like this before, something new or different ,and those are the aims it means we've ended up working with a whole variety of different venues which is both fantastic and challenging at times. So in York we are an archaeology museum built in and around a 15th century abbey, in Norwich we're going to be creating an exhibition like this inside a medieval castle, here and in Southport, sort of an art gallery, so big white boxes, so the physical spaces are quite different between all of these different venues. Some have very clear connections to their Viking heritage – the east midlands exhibition here is excellent, sort of drawing out those links and others maybe don't have those same connections in quite the same way so there’s real variety across these five different venues. So that's just a little background to the tour, the kind of thematic approaches that we took are what I’ll speak about next and I should say that anyone who curates a Viking exhibition or does Viking research isn't working in a vacuum. The Vikings have been a topic of research and indeed museum exhibitions for 200 years or so, and from the very first there are histories written about Vikings so the quotes you see here in the bottom right from AD 1793, ‘the raiding of heathen men, miserably devastated God's church in Lindisfarne, by looting and slaughter’ that's taken from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a history written at the time and history about the Vikings has been written every day or every year almost since then, but really it was in the 19th century that our modern conceptualization of Vikings sort of took hold, and this image of the Viking you see here in the top left is from Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’ an opera in 1876 I think and it's that sort of romantic sort of male seafaring warrior that was quite beloved of the late 19th century historians writing about the Vikings, who drew a lot upon Sagas as their evidence. In the 20th century the Vikings were taken into quite a different direction, here you can see a piece of propaganda made by the Nazis where they've traded the connections between the SS soldier and his apparently Viking forbear and so they were very much drawn to that very Aryan and warrior cult idea, and so the Vikings went in a slightly different direction in terms of scholarship and research then. In the 1980s under the influence of urban archaeology in particular there was a move towards seeing the Vikings in much terms of folk migration - about traders and craft and what we in the exhibition refer to as sort of’ fluffy Vikings’. If you'd been curating this exhibition 30 years ago that's the angle you would have taken, and now researchers take it on a much more nuanced view, one that is happy to accept both the fluffy Viking perception and so there's much more violent emphasised as warfare as well. Now I just, I could spend a very long time talking about the historiography of the Vikings but really I just do this to outline the fact that no one's going to walk through the door of a Viking exhibition without some preconception as to what or who the Vikings were, and that preconception is going to vary enormously depending on what books you read and what TV you’ve watched and what films you have seen and also probably what time, or what a period of time you were going to school and how the Vikings were taught at that point as well, so we had these things in mind when we were creating the exhibition. Now we were not the first to curate a Viking exhibition and they are enduringly popular exhibitions, something really connected the public and perhaps the classic one of the last 50 years was in 1980 at the British Museum where they did the Vikings in England, it's an iconic exhibition where they had a Viking ship immediately outside the museum for a few months over the summer. More recently the British Museum did an exhibition called ‘Life and Legend’ in 2014, you can see the book there, but the Vikings are a sort of staple part of museums across the country so you have the Jorvik Centre recently reopened after flooding in York where you can see a replica Viking street or the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall focussed on Viking Seafaring a couple of years ago. So we were curating in the context of all of these different exhibitions and one of the key desires of us when we came the exhibition was to do something distinctive, to do something that wasn't the same as you could go and see elsewhere, but to do something quite, I suppose a story different to those you have heard before. And the first aspect that we really wanted to have was that we wanted the exhibition to reflect the new research about the Viking image, so the major trends in research could be reflected in the exhibition. And first amongst those was a kind of a move away from this view of the Vikings as sort of urban traders – the fluffy Vikings I’ve talked about, and into something emphasizing the more violent aspects at times, but just a kind of more nuanced approach to that. The second of which was to try and incorporate the most recent discoveries, the real wow things that have been found in recent years and this is the most recent set of objects that we added to the exhibition, but actually you can see for a few more days here the Watlington hoard that was only out of the ground I think two years or so, sort of brand new material and it's helping us understand the Vikings in new ways. And the third aspect was to try and bring in new sights or new interpretation about the Vikings based upon cutting-edge research so this is a reconstruction of a Viking camp at Torksey, I’m very pleased to say you can see some of the objects from that camp in the Danelaw exhibition, and our understanding of the early part of the Viking age has been transformed by archaeological work at these sorts of sites, and they're helping to tell us different stories about the Viking Age. So that was our aim, to bring those three things together. So the brief I suppose if I can summarize it was to try and do something different, we didn't want the same old interpretation or the same old exhibitions you’d seen before, it was to draw in new research that reflects and draws upon the most recent thinking about Viking Age, and something that would work well in five different venues, with different audiences, different buildings, and different histories right across Britain. Sounds easy when you describe it like that! It was a slightly daunting thing to approach a couple of years ago! So if I then sort of briefly talk you through the big ideas, these are the things that we wanted to convey within the exhibition to get across really; and the first of those is about geography or space I suppose, this is the map which shows to a certain extent the interconnected network of the Viking Age stretching from North America, Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, Britain but also into the East, to Russia and all the way down to Byzantium, and the very early decision we made within the process was that we couldn't possibly hope to do this entire story in a coherent and simple way. We made a decision to focus on Britain and by Britain I mean England, Scotland, and the Isles immediately around it, not to try and do everything. There were two reasons for this, the first of these is one that's inherently practical in the collections of the British Museum and York are based on British material, so to try and draw in material from elsewhere would have made things much more complicated, especially when you are trying to tour it around the country. And the second perhaps more satisfying reason is that by providing a geographic focus which is quite small allowed us to sort of make, simplify those stories and make them more coherent I suppose. It's not to say that we didn't want to talk about the extent of the Viking world, how far material could travel or how far people could move, but actually the focus for that is on Britain and material that has travelled from those places to be here so geography was the first of our big ideas really. The second of which, the heart of the exhibition is transformation, and for a very long time transformation is the word that guided us throughout all of our interpretation. How was Britain transformed by the arrival of Vikings from Scandinavia, but not just that - how were those incoming Scandinavians changed by their time here in Britain? How did that work, where did it happen, why, and what are the material remains that represent that? This isn't in the exhibition and this is in the National Museum of Scotland, but it's a real nice example of that which is an indigenous, Pictish British object here, which on the reverse has been altered, transformed by the addition of a runic inscription on the back, so the material representing transformation here. The third idea really was one around complexity and we didn't want to do a simple exhibition that was sort of capital T capital B the Vikings are this, the Vikings are that. Vikings are not a single people. Scandinavia was quite different, quite diverse, very different people lived in Norway from Sweden, from Denmark, from all the different areas of Scandinavia. Nor did they come across the North Sea to find a United Britain, there were at least seven or eight different Kingdoms with different customs, different rulers, probably slightly different ways of life. So what we were interested in is the fact that all the relationships between all of these different people aren't necessarily one thing at any one time, there could be conflicts they could be peaceful it could be intermarriage, adaptation or hybridity, and it's complex and not simple and it could be quite different things at different places at different times, so the relationship between Scandinavians and Brits was probably quite different in 800 AD to 900 AD to 1000 AD, and probably quite different in the Scottish Isles to the urban centre of York or a rural settlement in East Anglia, and so one of the things to try and convey some of those differences and that's really exciting from the prospect of a tour because it allowed other venues to kind of do their own stories, add additional bits to it as you’ve done fantastically well here in Nottingham with the Danelaw Saga exhibition which really focusses on how those changes manifested themselves in the East Midlands. And the last sort of big idea we had was around identity - what does it actually mean to be Viking? Our concept of Vikings is a bit woolly at times. It can be many different things it could be a job the word probably means something quite akin to Pirates actually more so than it is any kind of ethnic thing, but if you were someone in Britain you might have described these people not as Vikings but as heathens, or Danes or Norsemen, those type of things. Then we have our modern understanding of what Viking means the sort of thing that might have been taught in school, and so what we really wanted to do was not to say that a Viking is this, or Viking is that, but just to get people thinking about the idea of what it meant to be Vikings around the ideas of identity really, just to challenge them a little bit. Okay, so that's the kind of exhibition in abstract terms, that's what we're setting out to do, how does that actually relate what you saw, what you will see? Well the exhibition is divided into eight sections and I'm gonna quickly whizz you through some of those, and those sections are colour-coded on your way around, I’ll briefly refer to those colours, kind of let you know changing from one to the next and the images you'll see here are of the exhibition here in Nottingham so you should hopefully be able to go and find this part of the exhibition afterwards if you want to go and look at what I was talking about. I'm just gonna talk to you for 10 or 15 minutes, just a brief talk through that. When you enter the exhibition you start in the Viking homelands and what we wanted to do was for visitors to start in Scandinavia, want them to know where it is, when we're talking about, a little bit about the landscape, what did it look like? The crucial question is actually what was life like in Scandinavia at the time of those very first Viking raids setting up some ideas and particularly setting up some themes that we'd then touch upon later in other sections so how did people rule, how did they trade, what did they believe, what was faith like, what did they wear, what did they make and how did they fight? It’s those sort of six questions that we’ll return to at a variety of points thereafter. So you start the journey in Scandinavia - well actually we didn't want to spend too much time there so we have a section two which is our red section which is about raids, which is perhaps whenever we think about the Viking Age is the thing that most people have in their mind, ships sailing across from Scandinavia to the British Isles and the crucial question here is why would you get on a ship, what's the motivation behind the Viking Age and that's really the heart of this section, and it's quite difficult for us to display ships. The British Museum were able to bring in a real section of a real ship in 2014 – well, that wouldn't fit in our Museum in York and it would be logistically challenging to move around the country! So what you have here instead is a lovely replica Viking ship which you can sit in and row and some of this sort of the material remains of that which is mostly nails, and we have to do ships because people expect ships – it’s the thing, perhaps one of the major images of the Vikings associated with seafaring, so it’s something we had to touch upon, but actually this period of raiding are the very first raids from the late 8th century to the middle part of 9th is archaeologically very ephemeral, quite hard to trace. There aren't many surviving remains that we can connect to this period of time, and so we try to boil it down into two very simple ideas, one of which is these are the weapons that people on these ships would have brought with them so the spear head, the axe and shield boss and sword you see on the screen here, and then to kind of juxtapose with that, this is the type of wealth that they would have found and that would have attracted them to jump in a ship to risk their lives to sail across the sea to get. This is one of these standout objects in the exhibition, this is the Ormside Bowl and this is an object where with most objects it's really hard to prove they were used to raid or stolen treasures - with this we can be fairly certain it was, because it started off life as an ecclesiastical vessel, so used in a church with a beautiful decoration around it and it finished up his life in a warrior burial, so buried with a man, elaborately furnished weapons and this bowl with it as well. In between those two points it had been presumably taken out of that church and then we can see that it had a second skin added to the inside transforming from a vessel with an ecclesiastical function to one which is probably for drinking, for feasting, and I would encourage you to go and have a look at it - if you compare the inside and out you will see the gold for the colouring are quite different, that's because it had two different lives to it and this is real evidence for that raiding period that is actually otherwise quite difficult to pin down. So having jumped in your ship and a sailed over from Scandinavia what do you see when you arrive? You get to section three which is about Britain it's a sort of grey-blue section and what we wanted to show you was what the sorts of objects you would have seen in Britain in the late 8th and early part of the 9th century if you had been on one of these Viking raids. The types of things you might have used to buy and sell, so the coins like you see here and types of objects you might have worn as decoration on your clothes, or these are objects that represent faith, so this this ring if you get a chance to have a look at it says ‘sancti petrus’ – St Peter, on it and you have the images of the fisherman here and biblical images on a whetstone and a lot of these objects would be quite alien to someone from Scandinavia and the idea really was to set them up in contrast to those who we see in the very first case which are along the same sorts of themes but based on Scandinavia. The outstanding object in this section is this, the York helmet which is, well, was found in the 1980s. It’s near-complete, it's being slightly reconstructed. Over the years in York we have done many different things with this and we've talked about its workmanship which is outstanding, we’ve talked about literacy and Latin, if you look closely after you can the inscriptions in Latin over the top of the head and from side to side, you can use it to talk about faith, but actually within the current context what we wanted to show was actually in Britain that an important part of being a member of the elite and a man was your military prowess and your ability to show off about that, and this is sort of conspicuous consumption and military power. This is not a Viking object this is worn by someone who the Vikings would have come into contact with on their very first raids. We didn't want to set up a false contrast between peaceful Britain and violent Vikings really. Section four is probably, the idea behind that is really to highlight change of scale of the Vikings in Britain. For the first 70 or so years between the 790s and the 860s, the raids are largely hit and run. Vikings come, small numbers of ships retired back to Scandinavia, or actually more commonly bypass England and Britain entirely go and raid in Ireland or in Frankia, France, but in the 860s and the 870s that fundamentally changes with the arrival of the Viking great army, and this great army [fights] and defeats, well campaigns across Britain for 15 years, defeats and kills a variety of English Kings and ultimately settles across the eastern and northern parts of England also settled in a variety of the Scottish islands as well, and we have known far more about this great arm phenomenon because of lots of these sorts of things that you can see in the exhibition, tiny little objects that have been found as part of the great armed camps and in recent research, and the crucial element to this section of the exhibition is why did they stay? What changes it from a raiding and returning phenomenon to one which sees permanent settlement across a large swathe of Britain? And one of the arguments we make is around the wealth of Britain. Britain is an incredibly wealthy place, very fertile land, very large cities, trade connections - south and east, and it allowed the amassing of things that look a little bit like this and this is an enormous silver hoard from Bedale in North Yorkshire, many kilograms of silver buried in the ground by someone in the latter part of the 9th century, probably a first or second generation settler in the British Isles, and on this point this is also a really excellent marker of the complexity we try to convey. There are no coins in this hoard, it’s all lumps of silver and that's a very Viking way of doing business, so they've imported a Scandinavian way of trading. You also have things like this which is a fantastic silver neck ring and this is probably one of the most interesting objects in the exhibition, in that it looks like a Viking neck ring, looks like the sort of thing that you might have worn in Sweden or Norway, but it's not quite right. It's made by someone who's seen a number of Viking neck rings but not actually made one before – the sort of knock-off handbag of Viking silver if you will! It’s a sort of adaptation. We want to continue looking like we did in Scandinavia but we don’t have access to the same metal workers anymore, so that's quite an interesting thing, and then these three ingots over here that you’ll seen in the exhibition they are very typically Viking objects, but they have little crosses inscribed Christian symbols and there you have a really interesting mixing of cultures right from the very outset of Viking settlement in the British Isles. The biggest section is a transformation, right in the middle, and it's the yellow section that occupies most of the second room here, and here we try to take the things that we've developed earlier, in Scandinavia, in Britain and it might have been a single label or a couple of objects to show them, and give them space to breathe, give them a whole case along a certain theme, so you have a case that talks about how do people dress and how do, what was warfare like, how do people rule, how do people trade and really we go from quite narrow chronological approach to one that’s much more thematic, much more kind of discursive as well. This is a section where there isn't a right order to see things in, we’re quite keen for people to explore it in whichever way they want really. At the heart of this section is that Vale of York Hoard that I referred to you right at the very beginning – 700, well nearly 700 pieces of silver of gold and this fantastic cup that was all hidden inside, buried 928 AD, and this in many ways encapsulates a lot of the themes that we wanted within the exhibition. What you see here is a mix of Scandinavian ways of doing business and English ways of doing business. Hack silver is sort of chopped-up bits of ingots, arm rings and other things, it’s a very Scandinavian way of buying and selling, coins most of which were made in southern England suggesting trade and contact with English people. You see international collections, so there are, this coin is from the near East, the Arabic Caliphate, this cup is from France, you have material from Russia, from Ireland and a number of other places besides, again showing international connections, it sort of encapsulates everything that this section is about and it's an absolutely outstanding group of objects, with amazing workmanship and skill as well, and within this section the reason we try to set out these different themes out and give them space is there are quite different trajectories to these things. So in terms of the economy, something I’ll talk about in a couple of weeks’ time you see a move from this which is the Bedale Hoard to this, which is the Cuerdale Hoard, both of which are on display. This first or second generation Viking settler in Britain this may be third or fourth settler, and what you see is a mood from a Scandinavian way of doing business, ingots, neck rings, those sorts of things, to a much more English way of doing business. Much more coins, buying and selling using counting rather than weighing out things, and so it shows adaptation of Scandinavians to English norms, but if you were to look at other themes around the idea of dress you wouldn't see the same thing. Actually there you see English people adapting to Scandinavian ways of dressing, taking on brooch forms and clothing forms that would be quite familiar in Scandinavia which are perhaps slightly more alien to other parts of England and really interesting if you see lots of kind of hybrid things going on in this section, and this is a really lovely object and this really highlights belief. And this is a grave slab from York Minster, so covering a Christian burial in the 10th century and what you see here is a mixture of that Christian symbolism but then along the edge here you have the incorporation of Scandinavian myth - in this case you can see some two intertwining snakes and in the centre here a human figure holding a sword and what you see represented here are the snakes [entwined] and he has a saga and about this story, and what you see it's a mixture of sort of Scandinavian forms of belief with Christian forms of belief that were very common in England, kind of coming together to create something new, and really the idea behind this section is that the transformation isn't one thing, along those different themes and different areas you see quite different things going on and not everyone behaves in exactly the same way. Section six about what happens next, this sort of perfectly ready section towards the end. When does the Viking Age end? Does it end? Where does everyone go? If they were living here, what happens next? I mean traditionally we might, you know in our history books say that in England the Viking Age ends in 1066 when William the Conqueror comes along and all the Vikings disappear all of a sudden, but that doesn't work in Scotland where parts of Shetland remains part of the Norwegian crown until the 15th century. The cultural markers of the Viking Age last a very long time in England and in Scotland as well and that’s what this section talks about really; just to illustrate that, this is a little coin hoard buried in 1066 and all the coins tell us who made them and where, and most of them were made locally in York and they have good Viking names like [Outhgrim] and Thor and that type of thing, and if you look at coins that are made after 1066 [Outhgrim] and Thor don’t go anywhere, they're still making coins and the Viking influence continues for very long time, and in fact it continues in York until at least the 12th and 13th centuries. This is a seal matrix, this you can see in the centre there’s a little standing fellow holding a bag, and there are three coins above it and the matrix here reads [SIGILLUM SNARRI THEOLENARII], so Sig Snarri [Theolenarii] which translates to [Snarrus] the toll collector [Snarrus] is a Scandinavian name, this is a 12th century object. This is the influence and those people living on into the high medieval period really, and this high medieval period, 12th, 13th and 14th centuries is when the Lewis Chessmen were created as well and it is also the beginnings of sort of the first histories of the Viking Age, and when I say histories I'm really thinking about sagas here, sort of people writing much later but looking back to those first raids and dramatic beginnings of the Viking Age, and those sagas are how we have constructed many of our early histories of the Viking age, and I would imagine that when people think of a Viking the person they’re often thinking of is this one here, who is the Berserker in the Lewis Chessmen and it's the sagas written in the high medieval period, and objects like the Lewis Chessmen are created much later but looking back in time which have influenced many of our myths and histories about the Viking age. Section seven which I’ll briefly talk about is called Legend, and it brings that sort of histories right up to present day, looking at objects that surround us in 19th, 20th, and particularly in the 21st century, so Vikings are used to sell you everything from cars to beer, and you're surrounded by images of Vikings all of the time, and this is our way showing that and then comparing that with actually what we know about the Vikings archaeologically. And the very last section that we touch upon is really one that was designed to challenge people, to get them to think actually who were the Vikings, what does it mean to be Viking? And so we chose a very small number of objects and things that would be tend to be potentially deliberately challenging, so this big piece is stone here is a dedication stone to a church which has got by the name of someone called Grim, so a good Scandinavian name but someone who is also Christian challenging the idea that Vikings all must be Pagan. This is a comb case with a runic inscription that says [Thorfast] made me, challenging the idea that Vikings are illiterate; they’re not, they write and unkempt, they don't, they have lots of combs and spend a very large amount of time combing their hair we must imagine, and these are all ideas to give a kind of challenge to that, some of those perceptions that we have about the Viking age. And the last object that we've put at the very end of the exhibition and which in some ways is the one I started with as well is this, and this is a little bone plaque, human face, male with a beard and made in York in probably the late 10th or 11th centuries, and the reason we chose this is because so much of our understanding of the Viking Age is written by those outsiders, people looking in, or monks looking at those raids, or by people later writing from the 12th or 13th centuries looking back in time and what this is, is a contemporary image of someone who lived in a Viking Town in York; it's simple, it's not elaborate, but I think it’s quite a humble and powerful object and that's why I tend to start and finish my talks with it really. I won’t spend a lot of time, if that's the sort of the thematic approach, we did lots of different tools to try and communicate those ideas so you'll see like any exhibitions there’s lots of text, some of them are big panels 200 words or so, some of them are small labels, 70 or so words, and you'll see that there are different colours that correspond with different sections to try and orientate yourself. And a big part of what we wanted to do was just put objects at the heart of the exhibition, so everything is real, we don't use replicas or anything like that and we wanted, these are incredible collections, stuff you won't see elsewhere and we really wanted people to come away from it feeling wowed, actually this is stuff that I won’t have seen before and thus it's displayed sympathetically, so interesting mounts that aren’t just sort of flat, well-lit and that type of thing as well, the display of objects is absolutely key to the interpretation, and we try to layer the different levels of interpretation so we have those texts if you like to read you can do so, and some of that is quite short, some of it is quite long, we have what are called ‘It’s a facts’ where it’s a couple of sentences quite low down aimed at children, we have ‘digging deeper’ if you want to read a bit more you can read two pages about some of our really important objects in the exhibition. We have video if you want to watch or listen, and we also have fun spaces like this which is a story telling space which can be adapted and used in lots of different ways. We have dressing up which is obviously good fun, but also has a learning outcome; so we talk about dress about kind of weird-looking brooches and buckles and strap-ends and things like that, but actually they would have made you look quite different and so some of the different costumes here reflect that and it was a really big part of the exhibition, wasn't that we didn't want to curate an exhibition with all those complicated ideas and all the things I've already outlined and then do some fun stuff that will keep kids entertained whilst the adults are learning. What we really wanted to do was to take the interpretation for younger audiences and to really key it into a lot of those ideas as well, so that's where dressing up fits into that really, and similarly trying to convey some of those other ideas about where are the different Kingdoms and about the fact that England isn’t one, well Britain isn't one Kingdom, so we did that in the form of a jigsaw – a simple thing and very accessible and quite a simple way of conveying that idea. Or how do people have fun? Well we've got lots of gaming pieces and those sort of things in the exhibition and actually how would they have been used, so we re-create the gaming boards there. And you see lots of different sound and light on your way around as well - what you'll notice relatively little of and is hi-tech interactives. We haven't gone big in for lots of screens, lots of digital things, not because they're not useful or powerful, because they tend to break; so when you're touring across five venues and hoping to see hundreds of thousands of people touching them we tried to steer away from those as far as you can and have relatively chunky things, it's much harder to break a big bit of wood than it is an iPad. So the only real one you'll see particularly is the ‘how Viking are you?’ game at the very end and here we try to key into some of those ideas about what would people of worn, how do they trade, or what do they make, sort of what I call the cultural signifiers of Viking identity and that also allowed us to touch upon those issues but also to bring in some other things about language, about place names, sorts of other things that are slightly harder to represent with objects but which are an important part of the Viking story. Just spend a couple minutes talking about challenges and I’ll leave you with successes. The challenges - the major challenge is ones around spaces. So the images you see here are our galleries in York. We literally are curating around a 14th century abbey, and here you have much bigger, more open spaces. As it moves on there’ll be sort of more corridors, different gallery setups, and so that’s a real challenge, so when you see the exhibition you'll see that nothing's fixed to the wall, everything is free standing and can be easily assembled and disassembled and rearranged in various different exhibition. Everywhere you go to see this tour it will look different because of the challenges of spaces. The second challenge is one around audiences - different places in the country have different types of audiences and different contexts - how much will people already know about the Viking Age? Different types of visitors depending what type of venue they’re at as well. And so this meant that we had to create a narrative that would work as well in Scotland as it would in East Anglia or York, all of these sort of different places, and so when you read the narrative, the kind of the broad panel text, you will see that it isn't geographically focused on any particular place, it tries to do the entirety of Britain with the idea that in each venue more local context could be added to it, and that's why if you haven't already I‘d encourage you to go and see the Danelaw Saga exhibition as well, because it does that local context thing fantastically well. We tried to create sort of the skeleton of an exhibition for those reasons as well and it meant that to allow people to be creative with it as well, so here you have projections on the wall and some fantastic programming alongside it to add extra depth to that sort of skeleton that we created, out of necessity really. And the last thing I'll talk about very briefly is about the successes and there are two ways of thinking about this. The first of which is that the group of objects here are outstanding, fantastic pieces of the Viking age archaeology; they go into places that they probably have never been before and perhaps won’t for quite some time again in the future and are being able to be seen by people who otherwise would never have had a chance to see the Vale of York Hoard, or the York Helmet, or the Cuerdale Hoard, or some of these, or a Lewis Chessman, some of these iconic things that don't often get out of their major museums. They're being seen by tens of thousands of people and as a curator that’s incredibly satisfying, access to the collection, what I want to do is share with people, and that's really wonderful and it's inspired incredible creativity I think as well around programming, around other exhibitions, around schools work-shops, all those sorts of things and I think that’s a real success. I’m not saying that I can claim any credit for, you know that's each venue that’s bringing something new, different and exciting to it, but with with my sort of curatorial hat on I'm satisfied when I go back and think about those big ideas that we wanted to convey right at the very beginning. I think the exhibition ‘Viking Rediscover the Legend’ has some pretty challenging ideas in it, it's not simple, it's not the same thing you’ve seen before, it is a bit different, but I hope that those ideas are conveyed in a way that means that mixed groups, families, people who maybe haven't come to this sort of thing before will come out of it having one, enjoyed themselves, two having been sort of ‘wowed’, actually these are fantastic things, but thirdly having learned something new, something they maybe didn’t have before. I think on those terms it succeeds but I would encourage you all to go and have a look, and maybe I’ll let you be the judges of that. Thank-you very much. [Applause]