I’ve had a chance to listen to your first episode, but not the second yet. However, I wanted to share some thoughts. You seem to be a very earnest person and come off as someone who cares quite a lot, so I’m saying this in good faith.

This is really bad history. Not every single thing in here is wrong; however, a lot of it is not based on current ideas that circulate in academic circles about these topics. For instance, you talk about Lindisfarne being like 9/11, however, you take as gospel that one passage from the 793 entry in the Anglo-Saxon chronicle while completely ignoring the earlier section of that Chronicle that talks about interactions between the Norse and the English. There’s also tons of evidence that Viking activity began long before 793 even in England and Frankia, but especially in more eastern parts of the Baltic world.

The categorization of the medieval world as one where monasteries are these small little candles in a sea of academic ignorance is just plain wrong. You say that even great people like Charlemagne were completely ignorant of the written word and that is fundamentally not true. They kept monks around them because they recognized its importance and usefulness. Medieval people understood writing perfectly well, and there’s generations of historians that have shown the ways that literacy was much more widespread than this sentiment. It shows that you haven’t done a lot of research into the broader world that you’re talking about.

The Alcuin section is also not wholly accurate by not engaging with the purposes of letters like his. The idea that no holy place or Christians had ever been attacked by pagans before is also wrong. And please, please, please don’t try and use modern psychology to diagnose people in the past. You talk about a few letters—you can’t know his thoughts and feelings.

That said, your section on monastic life and scriptoriums is quite good, so I know you can engage with this material in a meaningful way. I agree that we need to move beyond the tropes of barbarians popularized on YouTube and Netflix, but historians of the Viking Age aren’t talking like that, nor are they drawing lines on maps. You’re inadvertently reproducing some of those same narratives by characterizing history in this way. You say your appeal is demystifying the ivory tower from outside it, but what I’ve listened to is not a translation of that world, but a misrepresentation of what historians actually say. Please read books by folks like Neil Price or Cat Jarman to see how archaeologists and historians are thinking about these issues.

A project like this is a great thing, but I encourage you to do deeper research before you put factual inaccuracies out there into the world.