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David Dumville: Let’s tell the bloody truth about the Vikings

From the late eighth century until the 1950s, no one regarded their lifestyle choice as other than evil
David Dumville
25 February 2014

As a medievalist I am often asked: “Would you like to time-travel to the period you study?” And always, I think: “Dear Lord, no!” There would be innumerable hazards, not the least of which would be meeting Vikings, whose activities are chronicled for some 400 years.

From the late eighth century until the 1950s, no one who thought of Vikings regarded their lifestyle choice as other than evil, notwithstanding their evident adventurousness, bravery, ambition and can-do outlook. They transformed the politics, social structures and economy of much of Europe. After the Viking Age — from the 13th century — their behaviour, adventures and wickedness were hammed up by generation after generation of writers.

The inspiration behind the Vikings: Life and Legend exhibition, which opens at the British Museum next week, is resolutely realistic. Even in a bloodthirsty and barbaric age, Vikings induced terror. The Viking lifestyle — and it was a way of life, not an ethnic group — was driven by a desire to get rich quick. Whether that involved robbing tombs, trading slaves or committing massacres, they did what was necessary to become rich and famous. This exhibition tells us what we have always known. Why, then, is it worthy of particular notice?

In the aftermath of the Second World War, what we call political correctness — invented in Boston and Stockholm in a mixture of revulsion at the Holocaust and the guilt of those who avoided Nazi conquest and atrocities — pervaded academic life. There is a Cambridge lecturer whose webpage suggests that to present Vikings as bloodthirsty ruffians was to reduce the self-respect of modern Scandinavians by demeaning their ancestors. While even in most of the Scandinavian countries, such an outlook would be regarded as hilarious, views of this sort have had a profound effect on scholarship about the Viking Age.

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Beginning in the Fifties, British historians began to call into question the received history of the Vikings. By the Seventies this revisionist view had become dogma. Even in recent years vast sums of public money have been awarded for research projects advertising themselves as being at the cutting edge of thought in seeking to demonstrate that Vikings and the Viking Age were not what we thought.

This new exhibition punctures nonsense of this sort simply by presenting a solid dose of reality — from mass graves to loot from churches. Perhaps at last we shall return to reality.

That Vikings are in general not coterminous with Scandinavians, medieval or modern, is a good (if obvious) place to start. The word Viking is not an ethnic term: it indicates a lifestyle. No sensible modern Scandinavian need feel demeaned by the enthusiasms of their ancestors. We can, if we like, admire the achievements of Vikings while noting that in their own time they induced almost unparalleled terror.

The political challenge is to prevent history from repeating itself. No good is done in this respect by covering up the crimes of a bloody era or by seeking to convince us that no nun was ever raped by a Viking and no baby was ever impaled on a spearpoint.

David Dumville is professor of history at the University of Aberdeen. Vikings: Life and Legend is at the British Museum from March 6 until June 22.