The strange attempt to find Muslim Vikings

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, 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.