6
Hey there Apricians. I've been a lurker here for almost two years and now I've finally decided to join in on the fun. Something that's been bothering me lately is the increasing tendency towards giving vikings a positive spin. Despite popular shows like Vikings playing up their traditional reputation as savage murderers, rapists and looters, concurrently there's been an attempt to create a counternarrative where the traditional view is flipped on its head.
This attempt to upend the traditional narrative - attributing all kinds of positive qualities to vikings while stripping them of their traditional negative, barbaric ones, so that vikings are described as mostly peaceful farmers and traders, intrepid explorers, skilled craftsmen, city-builders and even champions of women's rights who didn't behave worse than any of their contemporaries - has in the interest of providing a more balanced view in my opinion gone too far in the other direction and ended up just as imbalanced as that of their prior depiction.
Instead of being perpetrators of rape, murder and theft preying on defenceless villages and monasteries, they're increasingly depicted as victims of Christian expansion. Sometimes this revisionism is taken to such ludicrous extents that the Norsemen are portrayed as having had a "civilisation" in their own right, having been wiped out by Christian onslaught, rather than the historically verifiable view of the process of Christianisation being the first historical instance of civilisation-building in Scandinavia.
All of this popular press has resulted in what I would call a kind of "viking renaissance", particularly in the Anglo world. This resulting in people with a minimal amount of Scandinavian ancestry (or even none) running around claiming to be "vikings" and professing belief in Ásatrú. Could modern day anti-christian sentiments among various subsections of secularised populations be partly to blame for this viking fetishism seemingly prevalent in the Anglo world? Or is it an attempt to square the modern day progressivism and positive reputation of Scandinavia with their ancient forebears?
Bookmarks