Why the Vikings are winning the culture war

The young woman’s screams were drowned out by the sound of drums. No older than her teens, she had been drugged and raped before being tied down and strangled by four men, while repeatedly stabbed by the older woman in charge.

This was the scene in perhaps the most famous accounts of life among the Vikings, written by a traveller and diplomat called Ahmad ibn Fadlan after his mission in 922. Sent by the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, ibn Fadlan was part of a delegation to deliver a message to the ruler of the Volga Bulghars, and along the way he had spent time with a people he called al-Rusiyyah, known to historians as the Rus’. These were the eastern Vikings who settled along the rivers flowing into the Black Sea, drawn to the riches of Constantinople and the Islamic world. He wrote extensively about a group he labelled ‘Allah’s filthiest creatures’, but the most memorable and disturbing part of his account recalls the funeral of a Rus’ chief.