When we rowed like Vikings during the Football World Cup, we used our history to create a sense of togetherness. Not unlike how the Vikings themselves used their own past.

During this summer’s World Cup, the whole world could watch us Norwegians draw on a part of our history. The Viking-inspired rowing in the stands in the USA attracted attention – mostly positive, but also a bit of irritation.

For the Danish-Norwegian archaeologist Julie Lund, mixed feelings arose as she watched – and eventually also took part in – this ritual surrounding Norway’s World Cup matches.

“On the one hand, all the alarm bells were ringing, because references to the Viking Age have often been associated with far-right forces,” says Lund, who works as a professor at the University of Oslo.

“At the same time, there was an element of someone else reclaiming the Viking Age and turning it into something popular and accessible. I took part in the rowing myself. I thought it was both embarrassing and unifying at the same time,” she says.

Even though the rowing did not necessarily have much to do with life in the Viking Age, she still found the phenomenon interesting. Especially since her own research is about how people in the Viking Age used their history and their past.

Just as Norwegians today use the Viking Age and other elements from history in different ways, she believes we must assume the same about people who lived in the Viking Age.

Far more than power

Still, Lund believes that, until quite recently, her field has tended to interpret every use of the past as an expression of power. Large burial mounds, elaborate axes and spears, beautiful jewellery – everything has confirmed the same explanatory model: this was a person with power.

“But it is far too simple to say that people in the Viking Age used the past only for power or manipulation. We see, for instance, very different uses of the past in different social groups,” says Lund, who has recently published the book Time and temporality in the Viking Age.

Lund and her colleagues have studied what the Vikings left behind across Scandinavia. They have examined burial grounds, such as the large Hunn burial site in Østfold, and Viking hoards, such as the substantial hoard from Hoen in Buskerud.

“Opening graves and finding hoards from the Viking Age gives us insight into how they related to their past. If we simply assume that the one who had the most in their grave was the richest and most powerful, then we’ve simplified things dramatically,” says Lund.

Read more about the finds at the Hunn burial ground in Østfold

And, she adds:

“We actually cannot know that.”

From the Roman Empire to Scandinavia

Instead, the researchers see clear signs pointing in other directions – towards a completely different way of engaging with the past.

“We can see that there was a group of women who safeguarded and preserved certain objects, not for a hundred or two hundred years, but for as long as five hundred years. These objects were circulated and used; they were looked after and reworked.”

Exactly what this is about is not easy to know, but five hundred years is a very long time in this perspective.

She talks about a Roman intaglio, a gemstone with an engraved pattern, which made its way from the 4th century Roman Empire, via the Frankish Carolingians, and into the Hoen hoard from 10th-century Norway.

At the same site, a trefoil brooch was found that had originally come from France, where it had served as a fitting on a sword scabbard.

“These are most likely alliance gifts, given to people at the very top of the social hierarchy. But in Scandinavia, the scabbard fitting is given a pin and turned into a fine piece of women’s jewellery,” says Lund.

In the North, the objects take on completely new functions over the course of the centuries.

“They could have melted them down. That would have been easy. But these were the objects they chose to keep,” Lund points out.

Lund draws a comparison with our own relationship to the past and to historical objects. She talks about a division of an estate where old, valuable paintings are left hanging untouched on the walls, while the heirs argue over the cinnamon shaker the family always used when they ate rice pudding on Christmas Eve.

“We are, of course, very aware of some of the ways we use the past, but there is also a great deal of engagement with the past that we don’t reflect on,” says Lund.

A burial ground ready to set sail

The archaeologists have also studied stone ships, a prehistoric form of grave in which large stones are placed over the burial and form the outer lines of a ship.

“We know this form well from the Bronze Age and from the Migration Period. Then, right at the end of the Viking Age, they start constructing them again. But they are oversized. They have made them even larger than the Vikings’ ships,” Lund explains.

In this, she also sees another way of using the past. Suddenly people are copying, or rediscovering, elements from history that have not been in use for many hundreds of years.

“The past is once again used concretely, as with the Roman intaglio, but also as a reference to the past.”

If we only see this as an expression of power, we miss a very important question, according to Lund: why does this make sense to these people?

“The ship stands ready to sail. We cannot ask them why, but we gain insight into how they viewed the world and how they saw themselves.

“The rowing during the World Cup was not about power; it was about identity, self-understanding, and community. The effects of drawing on the past in the Viking Age may resemble the effects today. Back then, it may also have been about fostering togetherness and inclusion,” says Lund.

The Viking Age is much more than the chieftain and his men

Nonetheless, it has been easy – perhaps too easy – for Lund’s predecessors to interpret all engagement with the past in the Viking Age as an expression of power.

“We search a great deal for the chieftain and his men because we know them from the texts. But also because that confirms our prejudices about what the Viking Age was. We have learnt a lot about the Viking Age, but we still tend to fall back on the same models of social organisation.”

After several years of closely studying what people of the time left behind, Lund has reached different conclusions.

“I have seen very many examples of what used to be labelled simply as power, which I think we have been able to show also involves all sorts of other things,” she says.

Exactly what those things are, we may never know, and Lund keeps returning to the point that there is much we do not know, and cannot know. That does not, however, dampen the desire to get closer to possible answers.

“We cannot stop being curious. We gain a sense of what mattered to some people in the Viking Age. Even though we don’t get the answers, we still gain a more nuanced picture of what was going on in people’s minds in the Viking Age,” says Lund.