In January 2018, President Trump expressed a preference for immigrants from affluent nations such as Norway, as opposed to those from what he termed ‘shithole countries'. The indignant response was on a global scale. Photos of beautiful African sunsets and wildlife were posted. One Norwegian woman tweeted: ‘We are not coming. Cheers from Norway.'
Trump was not the first to misuse Scandinavian countries as a poster child for racism. The Nazi ideology of Aryan supremacy rested on the premise of the Nordic race as superior to all others. Particularly disturbing was the ‘Lebensborn' programme initiated by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, to secure the racial purity of the Third Reich. The programme was particularly active in Norway, where around 10-12,000 children were born to Norwegian mothers and German fathers. The roots of this ideology lay in Nazi perceptions of Scandinavia's past. When Norway and Denmark were occupied, SS recruitment posters appeared, featuring Viking warriors and dragon-headed longships. As war raged, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his son bemoaning ‘that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler' for ‘ruining, misapplying, and making forever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light'.
Shadows of the past persist. The modern growth of Odinism and Ásatrú – the modern worship of Norse pagan gods such as Odin, Thor and Freyja – has been shadowed by an ideological subculture that emphasises racial heritage and ethnic separatism. In US prisons, Odinism and white supremacy are bedfellows.
Such ideas of racial and cultural purity would have been alien to the inhabitants of the medieval Nordic world. They may have come from the northernmost fringes of Europe – and in the case of Icelanders, from the middle of the North Atlantic – but Norse travellers reached every corner of the known world.
Blond men in boats
Thanks to chronicles and letters written by Christian holy men, perpetuated by modern books, cartoons and films, an enduring Viking stereotype is engrained in our collective cultural imagination: blond men in boats with beards and battle-axes, sailing slate-grey seas under northern skies. There is some truth in this. Technically speaking ‘viking' simply means ‘raider' (which is why we tend to use the broader term ‘Norse' to describe medieval Scandinavian peoples, their culture and language). From the late eighth century onwards, the coastal and river monasteries of the British Isles and Western Europe were vulnerable to hit-and-run attacks from seaborne Scandinavians.
It is likely that, for most of us, the first image that springs to mind is not traders bumping over the desert sands to Baghdad on camelback or indeed of men of Norse descent out on the Russian steppes, worshipping the Slavic gods of thunder and lightning. It is also probably not bored Christian converts carving runic graffiti into the stone of Hagia Sophia, the magnificent basilica in Constantinople (now Istanbul). But, as is often the case, truth is far more interesting than fiction. Over the centuries, Norse men and women set out from their homelands bound for distant lands. Through activities such as trading, raiding, fighting, colonising and settling, their travels took them west to Greenland and the edge of North America, north beyond the Arctic Circle, east down the Russian waterways and south to the Mediterranean and the Holy Land. The medieval world could be a brutal place and the Norse played their part in making it so. But they were cultural chameleons, adopting local habits, languages and religions.
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