Myth Wikinger – tooth fairies from the north

Braided braids, undercuts, tattoos on the face and on the body, eyeshadow and shoulder skins », the magazine“ Middle Ages Digital ”summarizes the Viking cliché well. They stand for Nordic masculinity, in a wild chic toughness, for drinking -resistant rituals and a self -determined life. The freely gravitating naval engines today serve men as an ideal of beauty and are therefore also popular tattoo motifs. Horned helmets, dragon boats and muscle-packed guys are not only emblazoned with metal fans on upper arms and calves. The northern people themselves were not tattooed – and not all Vikings. The colored image is the product of media fiction.

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Symbol of social carwinism

Word has now got around that the Hörner helmets are an impractical invention of the Richard Wagner operas. There are no other facts about the people who lived in the north of the European north from the 8th to 11th centuries. For example, most of them were not Vikings. Because the term “Viking” did not refer to ethnicity or people, but a profession. Vikings went on a long journey and as a dealer, made a commercial turnover or prey as a warrior.

The unscientific collective drawing for all Northern Europeans of that time only came up later. The word “North Germanica”, with which the German National Socialists in particular tried to fantasize an old warlike descent line. In the 19th century, the romanticization of Scandinavian history began, Völkische circles discovered their medieval culture for themselves until the Nazis took them completely in the service of their propaganda.

The Nazis constructed an arc from the mystical men’s folk of the Aryans via Germanic and Vikings.

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The racist Okculte Guido von List, for example, fantasized from 1900 an agreement, the part of which is said to have been the Vikings. He invented a pseudo-rune alphabet-the supposedly magical “armanen runes”-that still use esoteric circles today. From this, the National Socialists for their symbolic repertoire used the “SS” sign consisting of two so-called “Sieg” runes. Through Germans and Vikings, they constructed an arc from the Aryan’s mystical people in the present in order to historically legitimize the supposed higher ranking of white people. According to this idea, Vikings embodied the purity and strength of the “Nordic breed”, they became historical symbols of Nazi social arginism.

Even outside of extremely right circles, Vikings have become the supposedly original, warlike and emphasized figures to be identified. The tattoos are particularly responsible for this, without which modern Viking representations seem unthinkable. However, these are not fact -based, as the archeology Jakob Kristján Þrastarson from the University of Iceland recently founded in a thesis. In “The Tattooed Warrior of the North” he pursues the body change in the Nordic societies based on written and material sources.

Historical humbug

For the first time, the Viking picture trained on the Wagner operas came to the cinema in 1928 with the Hollywood production “Viking”, with the German title “The devil of the North Sea”. This was followed by an up and down of the enthusiasm, for example, “Die Viking” (1958) with Kirk Douglas remained memorable with a boot burial at the end. The youngest Viking wave began with the animated film “Targeted dragon tamered” from 2010, whose new edition is currently running in the cinemas. The Viking optics have been reinforced due to the “Vikings” TV series since 2013 to the must-staged masculinity. Allegedly, it is based on real history, which does not apply in terms of content and fashion, as Jakob Kristján Þrastarson works out.

Over six seasons, the series, which was showered with prices, compresses events from 300 years to a period of 30 years. The entertaining soap opera in historical robe is chronologically twisted and aesthetically distorted. Tattoos are used to issue ripening processes of the figures in a striking manner: there is a tattoo for every participation in war or the fight with a bear. Although the adventure film “The Northman” designed another, corrective picture in 2022, it is clear in public opinion: A Viking is a berserk of men, also because “Vikings” was advertised with historical authenticity.

The computer game adaptation “Assasin’s Creed-Valhalla” made it on and anchored the typical Viking picture even more in pop culture. “Live, fight, think, conquer like a Viking,” attracts the advertising of the game. In the perspective of a “real” Viking, one experiences his attitude to life, which consists in a warlike conquest after another. “Life is fight”, the viewer is shown here. Brutality seems without an alternative. Of course, it is only a game, but it equates struggle and Vikings with the many other corresponding media representations. The historian Tobias Enseleit speaks of media “superpreader”. These could also “break through established representation traditions” and would be created by the fact that they channel cross -media flows of representation, bring them into something convincing homogeneous and in this way further spread under the label of the authentic with great radiance “. If the image of tattooed Vikings floors around with undercuts, you can consequently even build hairdressing and tattoo arts in the computer game.

As I said, the humbug is historical. Tattoos can be demonstrated in Europe at many times, the oldest evidence is the Ötzi glacier mummy in South Tyrol, but there are no valid evidence of this among the Scandinavians of 8 to 11 centuries. An Arab traveler who met the Eastern Scandinavian Rus wrote from patterns who covered her body. But this is an individual report that also leaves open whether the patterns were only painted on. There are no other sources. Modern tattoo artists are not convincing that some archaeological objects such as a needle or combs are sometimes interpreted as a tattoo device. So while the tattooed Viking is myth, another body modification was actually fashionable, namely tooth jewelry. Men filed horizontal lines into the incisors and presumably emphasized them with soot. Such decorations have been found on 130 men’s skeletons, the reasons of which the researchers have not yet known.

Warrior with swastika

The fact that Vikings are popular as a tattoo motif today can be dismissed as harmless that people are historically not documented by Viking patterns can be seen as fashion. But the boundaries to nationalist to extremely right agenda are fluid, may be served without intention and unwittingly. This has to be addressed alone because Viking motifs are used again and again from the right. Clothing brands such as Thor Steinar and Eric & Sons – the latter is called “Viking Brand” – build their entire image on it. The English right rock band Skrewriver worked with set pieces of Northern mythology and found imitators. An influential German Nazi band is called Sleipnir after Odin’s horse. The neo -Nazi network Blood & Honor also uses these motifs. Beate Zschäpe, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Bönhardt visited a Viking festival in 1997 that the Thuringian Homeland Security organized.

This proximity to the right can also be seen in Viking or medieval markets- especially in Eastern Europe, but not only there. “The impressions merge:” Thor-Steinar- or Doberman’s t-shirts with Viking motifs on the one hand and swastika-loaded Viking costumes on the other hand come up as much that history and right-wing livestyle look like an aesthetic unity, “warns the brochure” Nazis im Wolfspelz “of the archaeological open-air museum Oerlinghausen. The text addresses a lack of awareness of the problem even among historical brokers based on the Germanic performer group Ulfhednar: »The public presentation of a pizza-sized› my honor means loyalty ‹tattoo at the opening of one of the greatest early medieval exhibitions of recent years in Paderborn, the exuberant, programmatic use of hook crosses at Ulfhednar and much more. A particularly striking example are some combat shields of the group on which the swastika is projected onto bombastic dimensions. «Only after discussions about their different rights was Ulfhednar no longer commissioned by state museums.

The same can also be found in Viking representations, without describing the scene as a right. However, parts of it are too uncritical towards gray areas, and the right ideas together with a large part of the audience take off as harmless fun and entertainment. History images are always made for the present. If the Viking fantasies convey problematic, then science must correct and build a counter image. Because where Vikings become unquestioned camouflage of neo -Nazis, the popularity of false wikingerto tattoo is the least problem.