Were The Vikings Really That Bad?

The first Viking exhibition in three decades at the British Museum in London seeks to set the record straight on these seafaring warriors:

Nico Hines explores how the Vikings got such a bad reputation:

It seems this was a rare era in which history was not written by the victors; mostly because the victors couldn’t write. It was left to monks and Christian churchmen to craft the only contemporary accounts of many of the Vikings’ raids, and Vikings did attack churches, which held no sacred mystique for them. They were simply seen as easy, wealthy targets, confounding local conventions of the time.

“These accounts are dressed up in the language of religious polemic,” [British Museum curator Gareth] Williams said. “Many [of the stories] were borrowed from earlier accounts—from classical antiquity. The violent reputation and particularly the reputation for atrocities was created then, but the Vikings were probably no worse than anyone else.”

Mark Hudson is captivated by the Viking ship in the final room of the exhibit:

Only about a quarter of the original dark timbers are present, fitted into a modern metal frame, but the sheer scale of the craft and the dynamic sweep of its curving bows are immensely impressive. For the Vikings, we are reminded, the sea was a route rather than a barrier. Theirs was a culture that resided in waterborne movement rather than in the monuments that come with settled culture. If that’s a difficult idea to get across in an exhibition, which will inevitably be all about objects, the thought of this magnificent ship slicing through the freezing northern Atlantic waves – seen in a looping film at the end of the room – gives a shiver-inducing sense of what Viking travel must have been like.

But Jonathan Jones found the exhibit dry:

Why not weave their tales and the histories written by their enemies into the mix of archaeological stuff to give it warmth and context? The refusal to do so cannot be an oversight. It looks like an archaeological dogma: only material objects painstakingly excavated are to be relied upon as evidence. The rest is romantic twaddle, apparently.

For instance, where are the gods? The picture stone showing a ship arriving at Valhalla is one of just a handful of images of mythology in this exhibition. There’s more about bowls and bracelets than about Thor.

Jones might like the following promotional video more than the substantive one seen above: