Should We Admire the Vikings?

Subsequent cultures have misinterpreted a civilisation that was open and tolerant, reflected by their vast footprint across continents.

Guests from Overseas (1901) by Nicholas Roerich

Almost everyone has heard of the Vikings, and most of what they've heard is remarkably consistent. Even now, the stereotype remains resolutely violent, maritime, and male, with a tangent promoting the 'Viking woman' as uniquely empowered by comparison with her sisters in neighbouring cultures. As they say in Scandinavia, this is a 'modified truth', and it has a long pedigree.

The Vikings are of course people of the past, dead and gone for over a millennium—but at the same time, they inhabit a curiously haptic kind of history, one that appears to return whatever pressure is applied to it. Medieval writers were among the first to put their fingers on the scales of hindsight, beginning a chain of confirmation bias that still continues. Those scholars and churchmen reinvented their pagan ancestors either as nobly misguided forebears or, later, as agents of the devil. In the manuscript illuminations of Romance literature, with a kind of Orientalist prejudice they became Saracens, enemies of Christ depicted with turbans and scimitars. For the dramas of Shakespeare's England, the Vikings were taken up as violent catalysts in the early story of the kingdom's greatness. Enlightenment thinkers reinvented them as noble savages, a vision enthusiastically adopted by the nationalist Romantics of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Searching for their own emerging identities, Victorian imperialists scoured Scandinavian literature looking for suitably assertive Northern role models, expressing the manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxons through their Nordic cousins. The logical end of that trajectory came a century later, when the Nazis appropriated the Vikings in pursuit of their racist fictions, elevating them as a spurious Aryan archetype; their modern successors still plague us today. Different again, elements of the broad Pagan community seek a spiritual alternative that draws inspiration from Viking religion, with Tolkienesque flavourings added to a cloudier Old Norse brew. All these and many more, including today's academics and the audiences for historical drama, have taken the fragmentary material and textual remains of the Vikings and recast them in moulds of their choosing. At times it can seem that the actual people have almost disappeared under the cumulative freight they have been made to bear. One recalls Brideshead Revisited and Anthony Blanche, "Oh, la fatigue du Nord".