Updated April 20, 2022 2.5K votes 470 voters 46.7K views
Over 400 Ranker voters have come together to rank this list of 13 Of The Dumbest Things Pop Culture Has Us Believe About Vikings
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Vote up the viking tropes you've seen most often.
Pop culture loves Viking tropes. Far from presenting the Viking world in accurate terms, the worst Viking movies, TV shows, and video games peddle the same old stereotypes about the Vikings that often have nothing to do with historical realities.
Even the word "Viking" is a little inaccurate. Technically, "Viking" only refers to Scandinavian seafarers, though it has been commonly used to describe all people with roots in Nordic cultures from the 700s to the early 1100s. But despite their origins in Scandinavia, Vikings traveled far and wide, and their world stretched beyond modern-day Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. This diverse Viking world was incredibly complex.
But you wouldn't know it from the Viking-themed stories that saturate film, television, and video games. From the image of the burly, blond warrior to inaccurate Viking funeral tropes, these overused stereotypes perpetuate misguided and wrong-headed ideas about some of history's most fascinating and enigmatic groups. Ultimately, pop culture does historical Vikings no favors by woefully oversimplifying and misrepresenting their world.
Dead Vikings Were Set Out To Sea In A Burning Ship
The Trope: A ship bearing the corpse of a fallen Viking warrior or king sails out to sea before an archer loses a burning arrow on the ship and sets it aflame.
Why Is It Inaccurate?: Important Vikings, surrounded with their "grave goods," really were cremated on ships. But these ships didn't sail in open water. Instead, ship pyres were burned and buried on land, where archaeologists continue to find them several centuries later.
Notable Offenders: Though a fantasy series, Game of Thrones borrows from multiple pre-modern cultures, including the Vikings. It depicts a funeral wherein a corpse-bearing ship is set out into water and then lit up with an arrow. Similarly, the 1958 film The Vikings and 2007's Beowulf depict floating, burning ships as a funeral pyres.
Video games such as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt feature similar scenes.
Notable Offenders: The television show Vikings depicts Viking men with beards and long or braided locks. Even in the animated film How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Hiccup's final transition to adulthood is partly signaled by his bushy beard.
Everyone In Viking Society Was An Incredible Fighter And Loved To Show It Off
The Trope: A Viking is a Viking because he is an incredible fighter.
Why Is It Inaccurate?: Not everyone in the Viking world was a fighter. In fact, many of the Vikings who settled in Britain and North America, for example, came with the intent to farm. Vikings were also merchants who were deeply embedded in trade networks that stretched all the way to Asia.
Notable Offenders: Film and television series, from Valhalla Rising to the History Channel's Vikings, almost always depict Vikings as warriors. Similarly, video games, such as War of the Vikings, reiterate the image of fighting Vikings.
The Trope: A Viking is never fully dressed without a winged or horned helmet.
Why Is It Inaccurate?: Though there is a little bit of evidence that a limited number of - very high-ranking - Vikings may have, on occasion, worn something resembling a horned helmet, Vikings certainly never wore these helmets in battle, since they would get in the way of combat.
The idea that these objects were part of the official Viking kit only emerged in the 19th century. Carl Emil Doepler served as the costume designer for Richard Wagner's Ring cycle, a series of operas based on Norse mythology. Doepler based his dramatic helmet designs on Greek, Roman, and Germanic helmets, rather than actual Norse ones. But the inaccurate image was evocative enough that it stuck.
Notable Offenders: Horned helmets appear in many depictions of Vikings, including Pathfinder, Asterix and the Vikings, andthe How to Train Your Dragon series. Mel Brooks' History of the World: Part I even spoofs the inaccurate depiction of horned helmets.
Vikings Only Made An Impact In European History By Raiding Communities
The Trope: As raiders, Vikings were nothing more than barbarians who pillaged and destroyed European communities.
Why Is In Inaccurate?: The Vikings didn't just carry out raids. They also became involved in the politics of Europe. For example, Cnut reigned as the Viking king of England and Rollo established Normandy.
Moreover, Vikings didn't just raid communities in Europe. They actually made it all the way to North America, which they attempted to colonize with Viking settlements.
Notable Offenders: Viking raids feature in The Vikings. Though Pathfinder depicts Vikings far from Scandinavia in North America, Viking raids are a consistent theme.
Vikings Were Outsiders To The Rest Of Europe Because They Still Believed In The Old Gods
The Trope: Vikings were nothing more than pagan boogeymen to the rest of Christian Europe.
Why Is It Inaccurate?: To assume that Vikings were outsiders would be to ignore the cultural, economic, and political influence they had on Christian Europe. Vikings even became incorporated into one of the highest levels of Christian governance when the Varangian Guards protected Byzantine emperors.
This trope also assumes that all Vikings continued to follow an unalloyed version of their faith. Missionaries Christianized many Nordic communities by 1000 CE. There is also evidence that Vikings who settled in Moorish Spain adopted Islam as their religion.
Notable Offenders: The Disney film The Island at the Top of the World centers on the discovery of a lost community of Vikings, set apart from the rest of the world. One of the ways they are set apart: their old-fashioned religion.
Films also typically draw stark contrasts between Norse religion and Christianity. Viking ruthlessness is contrasted with Christian piety in 1958's The Vikings. Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring presents Old Norse religion as a mysterious, potentially dangerous force in an increasingly Christian world.
