Friday, March 10, I gave a seminar on Vikings in medievalism, explaining how our current ideas about Vikings were shaped by the renewed interest in medieval history in nineteenth-century Scandinavia. The ideas that came into place in this period were formed by a very particular context which blended romanticism, nationalism and scholarship. In Norway, for instance, one of the driving forces behind this interest in medieval history was the desire to provide nineteenth-century Norwegians with a golden age that could serve as a reference point in moulding the Norwegian nation-state of the 1800s, a period when Norway the weaker part of a union with Sweden. In Denmark, the interest in medieval history was in part moved by the loss of Norway to Sweden in 1814, and later pressure from expansionist Prussia which in turn resulted in the loss of Schleswig-Holstein in 1864.
While Swedish, Norwegian and Danish interests were moved by different impulses, these interests were nonetheless part of a wider phenomenon that appeared in many Western European countries. Consequently, despite the particulars of, say, Swedish medievalism, the Swedish ideas about the medieval past were part of a wider discourse and was therefore shaped by that discourse. This discourse also included input from Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Scandinavian diaspora in Canada and the United States.
The details concerning this historical developments are both interesting and numerous, and will hopefully be dealt with in a future blogpost, or perhaps several. However, in this present blogpost, my main aim is to share some of the reflections I made in the preparation for the seminar, and what I learned from the preparation process. It all started with some creative googling.
Even though the seminar was primarily focussed on nineteenth-century medievalism and how that medievalism shaped the modern ideas about the Viking, I thought this seminar would be a good opportunity to follow these ideas into the twenty-first century. I therefore decided to spend a couple of hours on the Internet, using very general search-terms that might yield some broader understanding of how pervasive and ubiquitous the figure of the Viking actually is in our day and age. One important foundational principle for this more or less aimless foray into cyberspace is the idea that the Viking is one of those reference points in a common register of what we might call ludic figures. These figures that are employed in cultural outputs because they are known by a very wide audience, and are therefore often used for play or gaming purposes. Examples of such ludic figures are pirates, ninjas, and cowboys, and such figures are often used in the same cultural expression, for instance if a film, a novel or a comic-book features pirates and cowboys in the same story, something which frequently happens. Because the Viking is a ludic figure, the Viking is often brought into play in cultural outputs, even when Vikings do not normally appear in the chronological or geographical setting in which that cultural output takes place. For instance, Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘The Knights of the Joyous Venture’ from his short-story collection Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) tells of Vikings reaching West Africa, thereby using the commonly-known figure of the Viking in a setting untypical of the Viking to create an entertaining story.
Knowing that Vikings are often fused with other such ludic elements popular in the common frame of reference, I decided to see what I could find, and how far afield I could follow the Vikings in the popular imagination. Since Vikings are not only used in entertainment and culture, but also for commercial purposes and in politics, I went on to cast a very wide net. My first port of call was Vikings and pizza. Remembering a pizzeria in York, UK, called Viking Pizza, I decided to dig a bit further, and learned that not only is this pizzeria still going – serving among other things its Viking pizza which is six toppings of your choice – but also that there is a nationwide chain called Vikings Pizza, whose website was blocked for Norwegian IP addresses, for some peculiar reason. This foray into modern food culture also brought to mind an advertisement campaign from my native Norway about twenty years ago, when a new brand of ham and tomato pizza made a claim that Vikings were the first to put tomato on their bread, on account of their contact with – the tomato-less – Vinland. Both these examples remind us that Vikings sell.
Moving on from culinary commercialism, I decided to try out various geographical connections. This yielded a throve of material. For instance, I found a picture of a reconstruction of a Viking ship in Sydney Harbour, taken in 2013, and learned of a collaboration between the Australian National Maritime Museum and the Swedish History Museum. Another antipodean find was a dart made in New Zealand called a ‘Viking hammer dart’, with decorations reminiscent of generic Norse knotwork patterns, and with an advertisement text that made a great effort in connecting the modern ideas about the Vikings – rampage and destruction – with this particular product.
Further geographically oriented searches produced a number of results pertaining to Vikings in space, including the 1963 novel Space Vikings by H. Beam Piper, and some short videos that dealt with the idea of Vikings in space. While I included Piper’s novel as a way to demonstrate how far removed from their chronological and geographical contexts Vikings could be used, it also served as a useful way to point out that this common imagination also yields real-life consequences, and in the mid-1970s the space probe programme called Viking was launched.
I also tried a few searches that connected Vikings with other ludic reference points, such as dinosaurs and robots, and the results were both varied and numerous, and provided good examples of just how ubiquitous the Viking is in the common imagination. Things did, however, take a weird turn, and not very long into my creative googling – I mean, my research. When searching for results in connections with Vikings at the centre of the earth – which was about halfway in my efforts – I got my first hit that pertained to literary pornography. The Internet being what it is, I guess it was inevitable that some of my searches should bring me into contact with pornography – thankfully, its literary kind – but the particular form was nonetheless unexpected. It was about this point that I became a bit despondent about my endeavours, and although I appreciate some forms of unbridled creativity, I had hoped to avoid certain of its incarnations.
At about the one-hour mark, I suspect, the overload of impressions and impulses had worn me out quite a bit, partly through the many encounters of Vikings in space and the various iterations of this theme, but especially due to the brief contact with erotic literature – erotic literature of a very weird kind. While at first I laughed heartily in my office when grasping what this result actually was, it was also something that hinted of a subtext and a subculture that employ these ludic figures in ways that are very far from my own comfort zone. My despondency grew even worse once I made some attempts to find useful material concerning the right-wing use of the Vikings, although that was an expected outcome since it always depresses me to do research on contemporary right-wing culture.
On the whole, the two hours spent more or less aimlessly looking into various nooks and crannies of the Internet served me very well in the seminar, and it generally gave me a much broader understanding of the Viking in popular culture, and as a contemporary point of reference. My endeavour also fortified my conviction that having a broad familiarity with popular culture is crucial to our scholarly efforts, because this familiarity enables us to explain why a figure such as the Viking has had such a forceful impact, and also to evaluate what kind of impact the use of this figure might have in future iterations. In short, we understand better the after-history of our subject when we pay attention to its use in our own time.
The kind of magpie approach that I used, however, has both its benefits and its drawbacks. On the positive side, I now have a much broader understanding of Vikings in popular culture. On the negative side, the quick deep-immersion into such a vast trove as the Internet very quickly became both very weird and very much, and I felt as if my brain were melting after a while. Instead of doing this brief but intense foray into the subject, it would be better to have a small team dedicated to a concerted effort of gathering material. One day, this might be done and result in some very interesting books.
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Similar blogposts:
Adventures in medievalism, part 1
Adventures in medievalism, part 2
Adventures in medievalism, part 3
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