Sorry – the Vikings really were that bad

Sometimes the really obvious take on history turns out to be the right one. For generations, we all assumed that the atrocities perpetrated by the Germans in Belgium at the outset of the first world war and enthusiastically reported in the British press were Allied propaganda. Yet recent research suggests that quite a lot of it was true.

Well, the same goes for the Vikings. For almost half a century, the academic line on Vikings has been that our old idea of them as raping, pillaging bastards who’d sack a monastery as soon as look at it was a childishly transparent bit of propaganda, perpetuated by Christian monks who were obviously biased against the pagan Northmen. As a recent Cambridge conference put it, ‘Vikings shared technology, swapped ideas and often lived side-by-side in relative harmony with their Anglo-Saxon and Celtic contemporaries.’ So much for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

An admiring editorial in the Guardian duly observed of the Vikings that ‘Men wore stylish baggy trousers and jewellery, as well as spending a lot of time on their hair.