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.
'The term 'Viking' was virtually unknown ...'
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.
Published: 2001-10-01
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