Perry: These are all things that tell us a lot more about ourselves than about the Middle Ages. I try to complicate this vision of Vikings as all about dominance and conquest.Ĭhu: It seems that we’re drawn to idealized versions of medieval times one way or another - some forms of fantasy that depict those times as a romantic ideal, a “simpler time” filled with pageantry and honor, and then Game of Thrones subversions that focus on rape and mutilation and horrible suffering, but rarely anything in between. You can also tell the story of medieval democracy in Iceland, for instance, with a very non-authoritarian, collaborative element - where violence still played a very prominent role. That’s not the story that the racists want to tell and they’re not gonna listen, but people asking “Is this true? Is their way the only way to do it?”, you can really work with that. The story to me is that the greatest Nordic civilization is this wonderful Kievan polyglot, polyethnic society. You can try to make it that way, but the story in Russia is really state-building, collaboration with Slavic peoples, connections to the Eastern Mediterranean, both the Islamic and the Greek Orthodox world - and quite a diverse Islamic world at that. The Viking experience in Russia is really not the story they want to tell. They often intermarried local populations, they very quickly adopted local religions when it was useful. Perry: hen I hear people talk about Nordic fantasy as white supremacist, I like talking about the diverse ways the Vikings interacted with people around the world.
Posted by Patrick at 12:21 PM * 983 commentsĪrthur Chu interviewed medievalist and journalist David Perry on TechCrunch:
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