The Danes are coming - or, Adventures in medievalism, part 7

 

Every now and again I find myself baffled at how the past is used as a vessel to promote something in the present. Even though I have been exposed to some very curious and strange applications and abuses of the past, the wide variety in a given period's reception history never ceases to amaze me. My most recent encounter with baffling use of the past occurred in Odense, Denmark, just as I was making my way from the tram to the main building of the campus of the University of Southern Denmark. The incident concerned a sticker promoting some sport team or other - confusingly, this is not specified on the sticker, so it must be aimed at an audience already familiar with the iconography used on the sticker. As seen below, the sticker does speak for itself in a certain way, but also merits some further unpacking. 

The use of viking iconography - however anachronistic - to imbue a sports team with the aura of plunderers and rapists from the increasingly distant past is a familiar phenomenon. The Norwegian football team Viking and the American football team Minnesota Vikings are only some that join this unspecified Danish team in their employment of modern ideas about the Norse raiders. The purpose is usually the same, namely to make the players appear tough and unconquerable, because that is how modern popular culture has taught us to think of the vikings. The combination of stylised longships, the colours of the Danish flag Dannebrog - first used in the early thirteenth century - and the horned helmets of nineteenth-century artistic imagination telescopes history into a unified whole, which suggests the idea that this sports team stands in a direct genealogical relationship to the violent marauders of the past. 

This iconography plays into familiar references, and the use of these symbols and figures might simply be to bolster the self-image and have a bit of fun with well-known tropes. But self-images tend to reveal deeply held convictions - and also delusions - and such self-representations as seen in this stickers therefore should be taken seriously as a good way of measuring how our contemporaries understand - or rather, misunderstands - the past. Only by understanding this misunderstanding can we also map its effect in our own here-and-now.