Should we Cancel the Vikings?
I took my eldest son to Lindisfarne last month for a family history lesson: it was here that the first recorded meeting of his parents’ two ancestral tribes took place.
I wouldn’t say it is one of the happiest of moments from the point of view of the English side of the family. At dawn on 8 June in AD793 a fleet of Viking ships landed on this eery island, linked by a narrow causeway to the Northumbrian coast, slaughtered a bunch of monks who tended the century-old grave of England’s most venerated saint, Cuthbert, and filled their ships with booty and slaves.
Imagine if I blew up the Jelling Stones, or dropped a piano on a Peter Schmeichel. We are talking that level of national desecration but, based on my recent straw poll of Danes, only about half of them know about the first Viking raid and just how seismic it was for the English. As they strive to be woke about most things - colonialism, gender identity, mink rights and so on - the Vikings’ exploits abroad are a bit of a blind spot, it seems.
At the time, word of this sacrilegious act spread across Europe. The reputation of the Vikings as bloodthirsty slavers who raped and ransacked, or extorted money with that threat wherever they went, was born, and endured for the next couple of centuries.
I know that attempts are often made to depict the Vikings as touchy-feely farmers, occasionally laying down their plows to plait each other’s hair or make nice brooches, in very rare instanced being forced to murder foreigners due to forces beyond their control, but according to University of Uppsala professor, Neil Price, the Viking world was basically a ‘slave economy’. The Danes’ ancestors were the school bullies of the known world, the big kid with heavy body odour and early stubble, who you dreaded sitting next to you at break-time because he would always give you a dead leg and take your crisps.
I thought about this again a couple of days later as I crossed the street in Aarhus. Since 2019, the crossing lights there have had a viking design. But what suddenly struck me, after my Lindisfarne trip, was that the man on the crossing lights is not just a viking, he’s an armed viking. He’s not one of the hair-dressing jewellery-makers; Denmark’s second city chooses to use a cheeky little, axe-waving, slaving rapist as a street crossing symbol. It’s a bold choice. Imagine if Madrid used the silhouette of a Conquistador, or Berlin used… well, you know.
Obviously, I know why Aarhus has done this. The Vikings are a much-loved global brand. From Melbourne to Michigan, popular culture is obsessed with them, in computer games like God of War; films like last year’s (dire) movie The Northman; and Netflix seems to have based its business model on Viking-themed dramas and even comedies.
Is this why the Vikings are excused their misdeeds, or is it because they attacked and enslaved other white Europeans, the people whose descendants would later be complicit in enslaving Africans? Is this why the Vikings have thus far escaped cancel culture’s stringent gaze, unlike other peripatetic psychos from history - the British, for instance?
From the early 1600s for about the same amount of time as the Vikings, my ancestors stole, exploited, murdered, enslaved and oppressed a good chunk of the world. These days many Brits have mixed feelings about it: we pull down statues of the slavers, and act awkwardly towards those institutions, families and posh actors who are still seen to benefit from the legacy of empire. This month the Guardian newspaper launched its Cotton Capital series, ‘fessing up to its founder’s connection to slavery, for instance, and there is renewed focus on the British royal family’s connections to the trade. These days I’d find it hard to imagine any museum launching a celebratory exhibition about the British Empire, set-designed by a flamboyant cosmetics entrepreneur, as happened recently at the Danish National Museum.
The Danes are beginning to reckon with their own colonial exploits too, of course - throwing plaster statues of bad men into the sea and suchlike. And I would imagine there are still a few wealthy Danish landowners who wake every morning wondering whether this will be the day attention turns to their dubious ancestors. There is, I think, a particularly strong case for a rethink when people, or institutions, still benefit from positions of power and wealth which are rooted in the 18th century slave trade.
But, what is the cut-off point for the reassessment of more ancient wrongdoing, I wonder? Perhaps pre-Enlightenment bad guys - the Romans, say - should get a free pass because they ‘didn’t know any better’?
Like most visitors to Pompeii, I’ve sniggered at the saucy frescoes in the brothel preserved by Vesuvius’ ash in AD79, but the truth is, the people who worked there were sex slaves, many of them probably children. Ancient Egypt and Greece, the marauding Mongols and Alexander the Great - should we add them to the list?
Where do we draw the line? Is it with the arrival of Christianity? But why should Christian’s have a monopoly on morality?
As Danish friends often remind me, the British attacked Copenhagen twice in the early 19th century. That wasn’t nice of us. I am sorry about that. Should we pull down Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square? Does liberation from the Nazis by Field Marshal Montgomery in 1945 compensate? Probably not. It doesn’t work like that, does it? It’s all very complicated…
Here’s my simple solution: education.
Terms like ‘cancel culture’ are childish and reductive, and the word ‘woke’ has been so overused and abused it is redundant. Let’s put them aside once and for all. Schools should teach all aspects of a nation’s history, but also view the bad stuff in the context of the times. It is worth pointing out for instance that the Danes were first to ban the slave trade, and there was outrage in British society at what the East India Company got up to back in the 17th century too. We fought a war against the Americans in an attempt to stop the slave trade.
And of course we shouldn’t ‘cancel’ the Vikings. That would be ridiculous. They were bold and brave and of their time, and are the eternal stars of Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus, the aforementioned National Museum, Roskilde’s Viking Museum, Trelleborg Viking fort and so on. I am sure they will all continue to stage block-busting Viking-themed exhibitions. But it’s a question of emphasis. There are so many other amazing aspects of Danish history and society that you might highlight too. Less bloodthirsty, less slave-ey, less rape-ey aspects. The aim should be to make sure the next generation understands its history in all its shades of grey.
Which brings me back to my trip with my eldest son to Lindisfarne.
As we were entering the museum there, a man with a clipboard conducting a survey of visitors asked us where were we from.
‘Denmark,’ answered my son, adding with a cheeky wink: ‘But don’t worry, I’m not going to murder anyone!’.
To judge from the man’s frosty response, he did not find this amusing.
Humour, it is said, is tragedy plus time. But in the case of Lindisfarne and the Vikings, clearly, it is still a little too early to start making jokes about the first Scandinavian tourists in north east England.
END