A charity called the Brilliant Club offers support to disadvantaged pupils in non-selective state schools to enable them to aim high and gain places at leading universities. No one can quarrel with that. But guidance provided to the charity’s tutors raises concern about the way the scholars are being taught. They are being encouraged to believe that the Vikings were very diverse, were not all white northern Europeans, and that some of them were quite probably practising Muslims.
Decolonising the Vikings is, admittedly, a difficult task. They were very good at colonising other people’s lands
Decolonising the Vikings is, admittedly, a difficult task. They were very good at colonising other people’s lands, including large swathes of the British Isles, Normandy and the kingdom they founded in Kyiv, even if the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland were largely empty of people when the Vikings turned up. They were not all Danes, Norwegians and Swedes – a German took part in their discovery of North America and Estonians; Anglo-Saxons and Irishmen joined their expeditions or conducted raids in the same way as they did. Nor was every Viking the perfect blond, blue-eyed Aryan giant of racist mythology. Dark hair and brown eyes did not disqualify would-be Vikings. But the argument, in all its crudity, is about skin colour.
Some were slave-traders, and the argument is that they brought black slaves to Scandinavia, who eventually merged with the local population. White slaves are certainly part of the story. DNA evidence indicates that captive Irish women were taken to Viking Iceland and formed the backbone of the female population. The Vikings collected Slav captives, giving us the word ‘slave’ as a generic description of enslaved people, and they took them home to Scandinavia. No doubt their trading expeditions towards the Caspian Sea and the occasional raid on North Africa enabled them to obtain slaves from more exotic sources, though one would hesitate to describe Berbers as black, and still less Circassians from the Caucasus. Still, the obsession with whiteness, or rather non-whiteness, guides much of the agenda of those who wish to ‘decolonise’ the curriculum.
But, we are told, there would also have been Muslim Vikings. A few Vikings, no doubt, settled among such peoples as the White Bulgars who adopted Islam and lived not in Bulgaria but north of the Caspian. That, though, is not the evidence that is being cited. It concerns the objects they brought from such lands, such as coins carrying Arabic inscriptions in praise of Muhammad, and artefacts from Muslim workshops. These treasures, whether war booty or the profits of trade, are hailed as evidence that some Vikings living in Scandinavia practised Islam. The most famous eastern artefact to have reached Sweden is a miniature Buddha which was recently a star attraction in the Silk Roads exhibition at the British Museum. Oddly, no one is suggesting that this makes any of the Vikings into Buddhists. Yesterday, I was wearing a watch made in the delightful Danish town of Skagen. Does that make me a Dane? The day before, though, I wore a Japanese watch. So perhaps I am really Japanese.
Fortunately we do have evidence of encounters between Vikings and Muslims. Arab travellers were fascinated by the pagan rituals they witnessed, as they were by Viking drinking parties. In the early tenth century an Arab traveller called Ibn Fadlan witnessed a full-scale Viking funeral at which one of the dead warrior’s slave girls was ceremonially raped and throttled. Admittedly black skin is part of the story, but not in the way the Brilliant Club would wish: when the funeral party brought out the corpse ‘I saw that he had turned black because of the coldness of the country’. Ibn Fadlan is clear that the warrior had white skin when he died. No doubt this passage will be selectively hi-jacked to claim the warrior was black all his life.
One of the first requirements of a competent historian is the attempt to be accurate. When arrant nonsense is taught in the name of ‘decolonisation’ political ideology has taken over from history, and ignorance has triumphed over truth.
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