The term “Viking Age” was invented at a time when there was a strong desire for renewed national pride in several of the Scandinavian countries.

In no time, the term – along with “Viking” – was abused to promote ideas that the Vikings of the past would not have been able to understand.

Obviously there have been both imbeciles and lunatics among the Vikings, a thousand years ago, but modern day meatheads are pulling them into an ethnicist narrative that would have made no sense to them.

It’s called “Nordicism”, and surfaced for the first time in the 1930’s.

It’s the belief that Scandinavians are a purebred superior ethnic group, that should rule the world, or at least be left alone to stay “uncontaminated”.

Hitler used this in his propaganda, and now neo-nazis, like Nordiska Motståndsrörelsen (“the Nordic Resistance Movement”) or Jacob Chansley, the self-proclaimed “QAnon Shaman” from Arizona, are doing the same.

Obviously they haven’t read a single page about Vikings before jumping on the wagon of inspiration: Tall, blond, strong, violent, homophobic, racist misogynists.

Oddly enough, it is always the least attractive members of an ethnic group who shout about their ethnic superiority.

Let us get this straight…

• Some Vikings were tall. Some were not.
• Some Vikings were blond. Most were not.
• Most were strong, as they worked hard with primitive tools.
  Like everybody else…
• Warring and raiding was violent; for Vikings as for everybody else.
• Homophobic? We don’t really know, but they did blót to Æsir that was gender-fluid…
• Racist? Ethnicists? The concepts of “race” and “ethnicity” wasn’t invented. A different skin colour was a curiosity, nothing more or less.
  Hostility, alliances and slavery took place without distinction of ethnic groups, skin colours, language and religion.
  – if a Scandinavian sell white slaves to Africans he is a really-really bad racist 😂.
• Misogynists? Well, it was a patriarchal society, but women were held in higher esteem in the iron age, than in the centuries that followed. Misogyny was imported from other parts of Europe, with Christianity.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a tendency for Scandinavians to refrain from using Viking symbols – and even their own flag – so as not to be mistaken for mentally disabled racists.

Fortunately, this trend has changed and normal sane people have taken back the symbols.

The more people learn about Vikings, the less Viking symbols become associated with racism – on the contrary!

The Vikings of the Iron Age were curious, ready for change, eager to travel and learn, and spread and collected DNA 3000 kilometers in all directions (horny bastards).