Vikings given new image

Press, 2 September 1981, Page 21

Vikings given new image

Horned helmet, mead slobbering down his big red beard on to the buxom wench at his arm as blood

drips from his battle axe. Nobody needed an improved image'more than the Viking. History’s second look at the Scandinavians of a millenfum ago shows they were not bloodthirsty plunderers. Well, not all of them.

“Some years ago the Vikings were mostly shown as warriors and tough brutes,” says Dr Elsa Roesdahl, a lecturer in medieval archaeology at Denmark’s Aarhus University, and one of the country’s experts on the era. “Now- we know that most of them were farmers who lived quietly at home. They were craftsmen and traders. We are getting a more varied picture of them." Is the cleaned-up Viking a concerted effort to revise history or a product of new findings?

"A bit of both," Dr Roesdahl admits. "There are newfindings, but there also were people who dared to think in new terms. Of course, their

By

WILLIAM MANN, A.P.,

from Copenhagen

conclusioris were the only conclusions that could be drawn from the findings of the last 30 years.” With the new image, the Vikings are enjoying unprecedented popularity among their descendants, the twenti-eth-century Danes. The public television channel has aired in recent months a number of programmes about the Viking era, including a British Broadcasting Corporation series on the new findings.

Dr Roesdahl said the Vikings “have been popular for quite a long time, but they are at their zenith now. There is a great demand for lectures on Vikings, and many books have been written about them in the last year.

"I think the Scandinavians are rather proud of what their ancestors did. It was a glorious past.”

A suburban annex of the National Museum in Copen-

hagen drew more than 175,000 visitors to a summerlong exhibit called “The Vikings in England” — the most popular attraction in the museum's history. A spokeswoman, Birthe says that the museum was not surprised. “To the Danes, the Viking age was a great age,” she adds. “Danes went abroad, and settled down. There was a Danish king of England, that sort of thing."

The exhibit was based largely on previously undisplayed relics from archaeological diggings at York, England. It recalled Canute the Great, the Viking who became king of England in 1017. and the rural serenity of the transplanted Scandinavians after their three waves of raids on England. It showed the Viking invaders expertise in house-building, the arts, agriculture, and other advanced traits of a civilised society.

It also pulled no punches in describing their earlier not-so-tranquil activities, but the visitors hardly minded. On one rainy Sunday, the museum was packed with hundreds of Danes avidlyreading how their ancestors raped, pillaged, and ransacked the English countryside. A popular feature was’a skeleton recovered from a grave in England and displayed as it was found. The skull was placed neatly between the legs. Over the last few years, Danish primary schools have evolved a similar two-sided approach to the Vikings, says Clau Buttenschoen, history consultant for the Ministry of Education.

The Danish system allows a teacher to choose texts to be used from scores of available books on the period. “In the old books there were a lot of horrible stories, but in the last 10 years we have changed from that to a more realistic presentation." Mr Buttenshoen says.

"We still mention those things, but the point is now whether they were mar-

auders or whether they were merchants in some w-ay. We try not to describe them as marauders but as merchants, farmers, explorers. But they also were warriors.”

He adds that current thinking holds that the Vikings were little different from other peoples during the eighth to eleventh centuries. "They were a product of their times.”

Viking revisionism is not confined to Scandinavian scholars. An Englishman, Peter Saw-yer, and archaeologists like David M. Wilson, director of the British Museum, were in the forefront of the movement. Wilson organised an exhibition at his museum that drew 462,000 visitors in five months last year, then took it on a successful international tour. It is now in Stockholm.

Sponsors say that the British exhibit set out to “encourage a reassessment of the often grisly image of the Viking warriors, and to focus on their achievement in art. culture, and exploration.”