I Don't Like Vikings That Much

 I considered not doing a Saturday Note this week because I’m having a busy weekend, but it looks like instead it’ll just be late and more rushed than usual.

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I Don’t Like Vikings That Much

Alright I alluded to this in my Book Diary post on Odinn’s Child, and probably this could have been picked up in any of the comments I’ve made about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla (which I have yet to review, and for that I apologize), but: I have trouble with Viking protagonists in historical fiction. And it’s probably a bit weird that I only just formulated this in my head, all things considered--one would think I would have realized this much earlier. But no, I’m not a huge fan of Vikings as protagonists, or in general.

It is a bit odd considering that I really like Norse mythology. It’s great! I eat that stuff for breakfast! I can hand out tons of Norse mythology book recommendations on the fly. It’s one of my favorite sets of mythology. But I don’t like the people who actually worshipped the Norse gods because, quite frankly, they sucked.

And a lot of people don’t want to deal with that.

I’ve said this multiple times, but the main problem that I had with Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is that the game doesn’t really want to reckon with the notion that going around raiding, pillaging, and burning people’s houses while colonizing their lands makes you the villain. The Norse heroes that are leading these raids are presented not just as heroic among their fellow Norsemen/women, but to their Saxon allies as well. Odinn’s Child doesn’t do that much better in this regard, though it does lampshade that the willingness among pagan Scandinavians to fight everyone gets them in trouble more than they really need to.

Many of these examples come with unhealthy doses of “we’re hardy, real men, who are always honest and straightforward, unlike those hypocritical Christians who say they’re all about love but hate us!” And again, complaining about the Christians disliking you while you’re actively pillaging, conquering, and enslaving their lands and people is so stupid that it hurts me to read this as if it’s supposed to be sympathetic.

One of the oddest things in AC: Valhalla though is that this pillaging only takes place among Europeans? There is (spoiler) a section that takes place in Vinland, or North America as we call it now, and the Norse there have met the Native Americans and promptly… ignore them? The player character, and one other Norseman, meets and talks to them. The other guy, Olaf, is considered a weirdo and criminal for bothering to talk to the Native Americans there, and trying to establish trade. But other than that, there’s nothing. No hostility, no violence, no trade, absolutely nothing. And the anachronistic Norse colony here is set up by one of the villains, whose clan opens the game by trying to sell the protagonist into slavery. The villain has set up a work camp to excavate a First Civilization site, and he hasn’t tried to interact with the people who actually live there? Either to ask for a guide, or to enslave, or anything?

And I’m not saying he should have done that, but it’s very out-of-character.

I think there are possible ways in which one could write sympathetic and interesting Viking characters. There’s the lovely cast of Olaf’s crew in Sea of Trolls, who are memorable and sympathetic, but when they first show up it’s to raid Jack’s village, and they take him and his sister captive. And they bond, eventually, especially on a quest to Jotunheim to face off against an even bigger evil. But upon the journey’s end, they’re like, “We’ll drop you off and then maybe next time we’re raiding we’ll swing by and visit!” Jack is horrified that they’re going back to raiding, and their response is, “Yeah, we’re Vikings. That’s what we do.” And it’s again emphasized that yeah, they’re not good people.

Ranger’s Apprentice post-Battle of Skandia and the spin-off Brotherband Chronicles dodges this altogether by making it so that the Skandians (the in-universe Nordic peoples) no longer raid as part of a treaty, and instead hire themselves out as bodyguards and naval patrol.

There’s also the Skelligans in The Witcher 3, who take raiding and inter-clan feuds very seriously, and as Cerys points out, both of these have prevented their kingdom from actually developing into something other than a bunch of bullies that bother the major kingdoms of the Continent on the international stage. If she becomes queen, she reforms the kingdom into being actually productive and drops all that raiding crap. And mind you, this is already a setting that’s full of gray morality, and so none of the Skelligan behavior is portrayed as being particularly noble, in the same way that barely anyone on the Continent is.

But essentially, it boils down to this: if your protagonist is a Viking, you have to own up to the fact that he or she is someone who is part of a culture that pillages and colonizes other peoples as part of their career. Vikings are, for whatever reason, a group of white colonizers who are somehow still romanticized in fiction, and very often without any lampshading that these are, by their job description, very bad people. And when fiction tries to feature Viking characters as protagonists and doesn’t do that, especially while still keeping the pillaging and such, is dishonest and stupid and I just hate it all around.

So I wish writers would stop doing it.

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