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The Viking image

A winged-helmeted Viking, introduced as a radiator cap figure on a new Rover car in 1920, marks a telling moment in the 400-year process of cultural rehabilitation of the Vikings. The chronicles of medieval England had always portrayed this 'luther [wicked] folc of Denemarch' as bloodthirsty, violent and rapacious - 'wolves among sheep'. As such they hardly represented an image with which most car manufacturers would wish to associate themselves. So how did a Viking end up on that radiator cap?

The first coherent challenge to the many anti-Viking images promoted by early chroniclers emerged in the 17th century. Pioneering scholarly editions of what were believed to be texts of the Viking Age began to reach a small but influential readership in Britain. These works revealed an altogether more civilised profile of early Scandinavian culture, with its coherent system of ethics, highly developed (albeit pagan) spirituality, and discernibly democratic instincts and structures. During the 18th century other colourful tales of Old Norse myth and legend also attracted readers.

And yet, for all such early stirrings of interest, it was Victorian Britain that really invented the Vikings as we now know them. The term 'Viking' was virtually unknown until the beginning of the nineteenth century (the first Oxford English Dictionary reference dates from 1807), and yet during that century the figure of the Viking, Vikingr, Vikinger, Vikingir, Vi-king, Vik-ing, Wiking, Wicking, Sea-King, Sea-Rover, Northman and Norseman came to feature prominently in numerous paraphrased sagas, prize essays, popular lectures, poems, plays, pious novels, papers in learned journals, and the like.

Archaeologists, in turn, began to dig up and dust off Britain's Viking past: neglected cairns were opened, fragmented grave slabs reassembled, and ancient jewellery pored over. Dialect enthusiasts were now eager to identify a Viking-Age origin for rural idioms and proverbs encountered in their fieldwork. Runic inscriptions yielded up (or had wrenched out of them) their long-hidden secrets, real or imagined. New grammars and dictionaries of the Old Icelandic language enabled the Victorians to grapple with primary texts, supported on occasion by contact with distinguished Icelandic scholars resident in Britain.

The Victorians

Queen Victoria  © These emerging Viking enthusiasts knew no barriers of class or geography across the English-speaking world. We find a wealthy American matriarch in Rhode Island, commissioning stained glass windows celebrating the Norse discovery of America - designed for her new mansion by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones; or we come across a stout citizen of Middlesex, assigning an exotic Old Norse mythological name to his modest suburban residence; or a Lincolnshire vicar, earnestly tracing local rural songs back to pagan Danelaw traditions.

Queen Victoria's court did not go untouched by these northerly cultural breezes. There were claims that Victoria was descended from Óõinn that the entire Hanoverian royal family was related to Ragnarr Hairy-Breeches, a mighty Viking chief; and that King Haraldr Bluetooth was an ancestor of the Danish-born Princess of Wales. The Queen's principal physician, Sir Henry Holland, was a trail-blazing Iceland explorer, and under his influence a native Icelandic scholar was received at court, where he recited an eddic-style Icelandic poem. The poet claimed it was the first such performance by an Icelandic 'skald' since Gunnlaugr Wormtongue visited King Æthelred the Unready in the 11th century.

We learn, too, that Victoria's principal organist at St George's Chapel at Windsor set to music songs from The Pirate, Sir Walter Scott's haunting novel of 1821, about the still powerful Viking voices and values in the post-medieval Orkney and Shetland Isles. Earlier, one of the then Princess Victoria's chaplains at Windsor, the Reverend William Strong, had dedicated his translation of Bishop Esaias Tegnér's Frithiof's Saga (of 1834), 'a [Viking-Age] Scandinavian Legend of Royal Love', to the young Princess, 'a living impersonation of the graces and attractions, of the inflexible rectitude and fine sensibility, of the conscious dignity and patriotic devotion ...ascribed by the fiction to the Royal Maiden of Norway'.

Frithiof's Saga

Illustration from 'The Song of Frithiof' Retold in Modern Verse'  © Frithiofs saga was a telling choice of text, for it highlights those real and mythic Viking qualities to which Victorians so warmed, and with which they so identified. Based on a 14th-century Icelandic saga, Bishop Tegné's poem did for the old north what Tennyson was later to do for Camelot; it animated a previously neglected medieval culture, making it seem arresting, attractive and (even) exemplary. Victorian and Edwardian notions of Vikingism came to be substantially constructed around this (now) long-forgotten poem which attracted, astonishingly, some 16 English language versions during the 19th century.

Frithiof, worthy son of a loyal yeoman Viking, successfully wooed the daughter of King Beli, his father's trusted friend. With the death of both patriarchs, the socially unequal match is sabotaged by the demure Ingeborg's jealous brothers. As a token of peace she is offered to an aged but predatory neighbouring king; and Frithiof is sent off on a voyage - ostensibly to collect taxes, but in reality to perish at sea.

Witches of the deep conjure up a tempest to destroy the hero's magic ship, and during the storm Frithiof reveals many of the qualities that the Victorians admired in, and projected onto, their Vikings: he is bold, brave, laconic, poetic, and a source of inspiration to his terrified crew. Moreover, safely back on dry land, 'stalwart' Frithiof reveals other virtues: in his marriage to the (by now) widowed Ingeborg, in his defeat of the royal princes, in his election to leadership, and in his willingness to accept the new Christian religion, we find a paradigm of Victorian values. Frithiof the Viking becomes the acceptable face of constitutional monarchy, democratic accountability, social Darwinism, upward social mobility, and family values spirituality.

Vikings as role models

Detail of illustration from 'The Song of Frithiof Retold in Modern Verse', showing a stylised Viking helmet.  © By the beginning of the 20th century, children's book illustrators had furnished Frithiof with all the necessary designer-label fashion accessories of the successful Viking hero: long blond locks, decorated horned helmet, flashing sword, elaborate cross-gartering, and a dragon-headed longship hinting at the remarkable archaeological realities eventually revealed by the excavation of the Gokstad and Oseberg Viking vessels. The engravings in George Stephens's 1839 translation of the Frithiof tale established the principal elements: the lavishly appointed hall, the pagan temple (Victorian enthusiasts regarded old northern pagan piety as preferable to modern scientific rationalism), the rune stones, and the longship (a symbol of high-technological energy and enterprise). It was, of course, out of just this cluster of positive images that Rover found their Viking 'sea-rover' radiator cap, and (eventually) their trademarked longship, which flourishes to this day.

Such symbols were also intended to signal the broader old northern virtues which some enthusiasts identified at the heart of British nationhood. They believed that Viking blood flowed in Victorian veins, and that the time had come to celebrate this. In the words of George Dasent, assistant editor of The Times, Professor at King's College, London, and in 1861 translator of The Story of Burnt Njal:

Such sentiments reached out to the young males of Middle England, challenging the previously unquestioned supremacy of the nation's Graeco-Roman cultural inheritance. We find them celebrated on the final page of RM Ballantyne's Erling the Bold: A Tale of the Norse Sea-Kings (1869), one of several saga tales for Victorian schoolboys:

Modern-day Vikings

A modern vision of a Viking  © Inevitably, such perceptions of the Viking Age have undergone significant transformation since then. Gone are the days when A-level text books included digested versions of Njál's Saga (1917) or Old Norse myths (as late as 1944). Also gone is the grim contemporary reality that lay behind the bleak words of a British Museum-based correspondent, writing to a scholar in Iceland in the dark days of 1941:

Yet, precisely because of its capacity to undergo cultural transformation, reconstruction, and reassessment, the old north retains its power to attract and intrigue. A number of the qualities that once attracted Victorians to the Vikings remain stubbornly seductive, and new emphases have also emerged. It has not harmed the modern Viking cause that, in a devolutionary era, the old Norsemen exerted their greatest influence in the highlands, islands and regions of Britain rather than in London - for once, Wirral, Wigton or the Wash Estuary can be as important as Westminster.

Our modern sense of the Viking Age has embraced recent insights into old northern narrative and poetic art, representations of women, runic inscriptions, attitudes to the environment, and links between language and nationhood. We can also relish the colourful redeployment of familiar Viking images within popular culture: from Viking Heritage museums to websites promoting runic healing; from cartoons and children's television to the advertising of products as diverse as axes, beer, bricks, bacon, executive coaches, golf courses, liquorice, sailing tackle and water beds.

Happily, the stiff upper lips of the mythic Viking Age can still raise a modern smile. Thomas Bartholin would certainly have approved. He was the 17th-century Danish scholar and antiquarian who first set the standard for translating old northern culture into comprehensible post-medieval shapes and meanings. Many Victorians and Edwardians ran hard with the same popularising baton, and in the 21st century there are still competitors aplenty, eager to explore the old north and make it their own.

Find out more

Books

Viking America: The First Millennium by Geraldine Barnes (DS Brewer, 2001)

The Norse Muse in Britain, 1750-1820 by Margaret Clunies Ross (Trieste: Edizioni Parnaso, 1998)

The Rewriting of Njál's Saga: Translation, Politics and Icelandic Sagas by Jón Karl Helgason (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1999)

The Pirate by Sir Walter Scott (with introduction by Andrew Wawn)(Kirkwall: Shetland Times Press, 1996)

The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Andrew Wawn (DS Brewer, 2000)

Vikings and Gods in European Art by David Wilson (H¿jbjerg: Moesgaard Museum, 1997)

Encyclopaedia of the Viking Age by John Haywood (Thames & Hudson, 2000)

Penguin Historical Atlas of the Vikings by John Haywood (Penguin, 1996). Detailed maps of Viking settlements in Scotland, Ireland and England, Iceland and Normandy.

Links

. Build a Viking village, write your name in runes and discover the secret of Norse ships.

. Take a tour of some of the British Museum's best artefacts on the web.

. Commemorating the 1,000-year anniversary of Leif Eriksson's arrival in North America.

Places to visit

. Important collections of Viking material, as well as displays relating to religions and beliefs from all over the world.

. Provides a fascinating insight into Christian life in Anglo-Saxon England just before the Viking Age.

. Explores many aspects of daily life in Viking York in the tenth century.

About the author

Andrew Wawn is Professor of Anglo-Icelandic Studies at the University of Leeds. He is particularly interested in the rediscovery of Old Icelandic Literature in post-medieval Britain.