#vikingers

[racefortheironthrone]

Having watched "Vikings," "Vikings: Valhalla," "The Northman," etc... and now wondering what was physical physique was like for real Vikings? Wondering if they were that into the CrossFit lifestyle in real life as they are in modern TV and movies?

Oof, that's a dangerous amount of Vikinger propaganda to take in all at once. You might want to watch "The Last Kingdom" to balance yourself out...

No, it's not. That's not what anyone's physical physique looked like in a premodern era that did not have access to cheap and abundant protein, modern gyms and professional trainers, a soupçon of performance-enhancing drugs, and a dangerous amount of deliberate dehydration and dieting in order to get those ab muscles to really "pop."

An actual professional soldier - although as I've stated, Vikingers were primarily pirates, slavers, and merchants - would have a certain amount of fat over their muscles, because it turns out that it protects your organs. If you want an example, albeit an exceptional one, of what that kind of build looks like, take a look at Hafthor Bjornson (the actor who played the Mountain):

Big and strong, absolutely - but not "shredded." He's got a healthy layer of fat on his abs (which helps to prevent him from suffering a rupture when he's lifting something extremely heavy) and the rest of his torso and limbs.

Also, you wouldn't really see Vikingers' physique most of the time, because on the job they'd be wearing chainmail to prevent themselves from being stabbed, and on the job and off the job, they'd be wearing fairly thick woolen clothes because they lived in colder climates where shirtlessness is not conducive to good health.

[racefortheironthrone]

Since we're on a Viking bent at the moment, how did they come to be badasses within popular culture?

This is an excellent question!

I think Western pop culture has a weakness for historical warrior cultures in general - there was a big fad for samurai starting in the 70s thanks to Kurosawa films becoming crossover hits, there was a big moment for Spartans after Zack Snyder's film in 2006, there was another one for Romans between the HBO show in 2005 and the Starz Spartacus shows in the early 2010s - for complicated cultural reasons that keep historians like Bret Devereaux busy.

Vikingers had been around as a thing in pop culture off and on for decades - there was The Vikings in 1958 with Kirk Douglas and or the 13th Warrior with Antonio Banderas in 1999 - but it tended to be hit-or-miss one-offs rather than a general pop cultural trend until relatively recently. Sustained interest in Vikingers really does kind of trace back to the huge success of the History Channel show which ran from 2013-2020 - which is funny, because originally it was a pretty naked attempt to find something that would tap into the Game of Thrones audience, for all that Hirst hates the comparison- which prompted others to tap into the same audience with Assassin's Creed: Valhalla and The Last Kingdom and God of War, and so on. It's rare that one show hits big enough to cause a trend, but I do think you have to hand it to them in this case.

So why did Vikingers hit so big?

Part of it is that they come pre-packaged with visual iconography (the dragon-ships, the distinctive helmets and shields and axes, the rather inaccurate hairstyles, etc.) and mythology (Norse mythology has the virtue of being decently well-known enough that people recognize who the gods are, but not well-known enough that people complain if you make shit up that wasn't in the Eddas), so a lot of the "branding" has already been done for the creators.

I think another big part of it is that Vikingers kind of act as a cultural Rorschach test that allows people to see what they want - you can go all the way along the spectrum from right-wing Neo-Nazis seeing them as Aryan supermen destroying Western decadence through the will to power to left-wingers thinking that the Vikingers were progressive because they were relatively gender-egalitarian and didn't like Christians very much.

And finally, I think that Vikingers have the benefit of being far enough back in history and niche enough a historical subject that it disarms a lot of people's critical faculties. Here's what I mean -thanks to decades of historical research and activism, more recent and prominent examples of slavery and/or colonialism no longer make for protagonist fodder in pop culture. There's a reason why Benioff and Weiss' "Confederates Win" tv show got canned before it started, and there's a reason why something like Zulu could not get made today (and that's a good thing). But just like the Spartans after 300, the Vikingers are seen as "ancient history" and because their oppression was visited on white people rather than POC, you can show them raiding Lindisfarne and colonizing a third of England (although you'll notice showrunners generally leave out the trans-continental slave trade) without anyone asking if this is problematic.

[racefortheironthrone]

Do you consider the Battle of Stamford Bridge and the death of Harald Hard-Ruler to be the end of the Viking age?

That's a tough question, because it really comes down to whether you view the Normans as being in historical continuity with their Vikinger ancestors (and for how long) - after all, the Normans were running around conquering southern Italy and Sicily and Malta and Cyprus and big chunks of North Africa and the Byzantine Empire and the Holy Land Levant for hundreds of years after Stamford Bridge.

But what I would say is that the death of Harold Hardrada at Stamford Bridge marked the end of an era in which England was part of a broader empire that stretched from Ireland to Sweden. As British history teachers have been boring their students to death for generations by saying, after 1066 England's orientation shifted from that Scandinavian world to its northeast to focusing on France and dreams of a continental empire of its own.

[racefortheironthrone]

Given that a lot of the backlash against Viking glorification centers on them owning slaves, why don't we get a similar backlash against Medieval Christendom for owning slaves too (before and after the Vikings, even into the Italian Renaissance). Isn't there a pagan prejudice under this? I find the idea that Christians never owned slaves, or never enslaved fellow Christians, a more toxic unexamined idea by comparison. Something the Last Kingdom doesn't tackle.

Fuck off with your whataboutisms in defense of slavers. The owning is bad enough, but it's the slave trade where the real evil lies with the Vikingers.

Yes, Medieval Europeans (I find their religion irrelevant) did own slaves...thanks in no small part to the Vikingers, who sold them slaves on a trans-continental scale. Who do you think supplied the markets of Constantinople known as the "Valley of Lamentations"? Why was Dublin the biggest slave market in the world in 1000 CE?

The Vikingers were bastards, full stop.

[racefortheironthrone]

Re: Viking propaganda in fiction, do you think The Northman should count as propaganda? It's extremely open and graphic about the mass enslaving and raiding that the northmen had going on, down to the fact that Amleth's quest to save his mother was ultimately hollow given she was 100% onboard with the plan to murder her rapist slave owning husband. Arguably none of the Norse characters come out looking as anything other than anti-villains (or outright villains) at best.

Yes, but it's also the case that Amleth looks really cool and ripped and the fight scenes are really cool, and sometimes that can trump the intended message and contribute to propaganda. Pace to Martin Scorsese's intended messages about gangsters and Wall St. crooks being really bad people, but if you go to great lengths to make the crimes look really fucking cool and the comeuppance is drab and washed-out, it's not a very effective communication of said message.

I'm reminded of a time when a liberal tv news show (Donohue? Ted Koppel? 60 Minutes? Don't remember) did this segment criticizing Reagan's "Morning in America" commercial by reading statistics about unemployment and poverty over footage of the commercial. Reagan's communications director calls them up and says "thank you." Baffled, they say, "what do you mean thank you? We just savaged you." And he replies, "yeah, but you played the commercial over and over again, and it's the visuals that people are going to remember."

Sorry, back to The Northman. I dunno, maybe we could call this a revisionist Viking movie, in the same way that (according to the huge number of messages I got about Vinland Saga - yes, I hear you people, I'll give it another try, I'm just saying that the show's opening doesn't exactly fit with its message) Once Upon a Time in the West was a revisionist Western movie.