there’s been a lot of obnoxious pop history trends in the last few years but the bizarre total sanitization of vikings/pirates has to be one of the worst. like sorry to the queer neopagan anarchy symbol in bio twitter user community but like. are you aware both vikings and pirates enthusiastically traded slaves
and to be clear i’m not calling people out for liking the aesthetic or being into historical fiction or whatever i’m specifically talking about the genre of post that’s like “it’s crazy how most people think vikings were violent raiders when they were actually antiracist feminist sheep herders living in free love communes and operating dog shelters”
I think this comes from an inability people have to, like, be moderate on things.
The initial failure to be moderate comes the traditional received view, e.g. “the Vikings were all horrible barbarians who did nothing but raid and pillage and be evil”. Then someone comes along and, rightly, tries to question this view. They say “hey, the Vikings were just people like you and me. Maybe they even did some things that are worth admiring, you know. Maybe we’ve been treating them unfairly.” And this catches on, especially as the original power dynamics that motivated the received view start to fade (slander of Vikings has a lot less motivation when the Catholic church stops being so politically relevant). And people are often inclined to use these other, traditionally maligned societies as foils to critique their own society. And so it becomes widely accepted among the sort of people who consider themselves smart and thoughtful that the Vikings really weren’t as bad as they’ve been made out to be; they’ve been unfairly maligned. They were just people, like you and me.
Except here comes the second failure to be moderate, when the view slowly morphs into “the Vikings were right about everything, Viking society was so much better than modern society” etc. And that’s where you get these twitter leftists, who are somewhere down the second-failure-to-be-moderate telephone line.
Anyway, I’m responding to this post, and respond to many like it, in an attempt to preempt what I have often seen as an inchoate third failure to be moderate, a return to the received narrative that the Vikings just totally sucked, man. No, no! I’m not accusing OP of this specifically (I don’t think they’re guilty of it), but it is… in the air, around these parts.
Moderation! Moderation! Nuance! Be careful lest you become what you sought to destroy!
#tbh this is the hardest part about teaching any type of history bc people want to either valorize or vilify and like no!! #seek truth not goodness in the past #no society is free of sin and no society is free of merit #but that shouldn’t be your goal in learning about them - it should be understanding)
Hi, random stranger! 
