Norse Mythology in Modern Culture: From Romanticism to Pop Culture

Few pre-modern mythological systems have had a longer, more varied, or more turbulent afterlife than the Norse. From the moment in the late eighteenth century when scholars, artists, and poets in northern Europe began to read the Old Norse Eddas and sagas not as quaint medieval curiosities but as the living scripture of an indigenous Northern spirit, the gods of the Vikings and the heroes of the Völsungs have been repeatedly rediscovered, reinterpreted, re-paganized, and re-marketed. The result is a layered, often contradictory inheritance: at once a scholarly field, a religious revival, a popular aesthetic, a literary source, a Hollywood franchise, a tabletop-game scenario, a heavy-metal subgenre, a fashion statement, and a long-running internet joke. To make sense of it, it helps to trace the long arc of the modern reception of Norse mythology from the Romantic period to the present day.

The Norse gods and heroes of the Eddas and the sagas were, in their own time, a religion and a literary tradition. The last pre-Christian temples in Scandinavia were destroyed in the eleventh century; the last runestones were raised in the early twelfth; the last skaldic poets died before the thirteenth; and by the time of the Reformation the Icelandic manuscripts of the Eddas were the preserve of a handful of antiquarians. For several centuries, the medieval Northern legacy survived mainly in the form of folk-tale (the German and Scandinavian “Märchen”), place-name, and snatches of ballad. The proper rediscovery of the Old Norse mythological corpus is a development of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, and it is the seed of every modern Norse revival that followed.

The Romantic Rediscovery

The first major intellectual event in the modern reception of Norse mythology was the recognition, by northern European scholars of the late 1700s, that the medieval Scandinavian manuscripts were not just “barbarous” chronicles but a deep, coherent, and in some ways self-consciously archaic mythological system. The key figure in the first wave of rediscovery was the Danish antiquary Grímur Jónsson Thorkelin (1752-1829), who in 1786 became the first person to visit Iceland specifically to study the manuscripts of the Völuspá and the Edda of Snorri Sturluson. Thorkelin’s travels were the basis of the first printed edition of the Poetic Edda (the Edda Saemundar hinns Fróða, Copenhagen, 1787) and the Edda Snorra Sturlusonar (Copenhagen, 1818-1827), and these two editions made the Old Norse mythological corpus available to the wider European reading public for the first time.

In Britain, Thomas Percy had already paved the way with his Northern Antiquities (1770), an English translation of the Edda of Paul Henri Mallet, and Sir Walter Scott incorporated Norse material into several of his early poems and novels (most prominently The Pirate, 1822). In Germany, the philological tradition of the Brothers Grimm, who began to study Old Norse seriously in the early 1800s, placed the Eddas alongside the German Märchen and Heldensage as expressions of a single ancient “Germanic” inheritance. The Grimms’ Deutsche Mythologie (1835) was a synthesis of Norse, German, and continental folklore, and it was the most influential single work of comparative Germanic mythology of the nineteenth century.

In France, the Théâtre d’Ombres of the Bibliothèque bleue and the popular chivalric tradition incorporated some Norse material, but the most important French contribution was the reworking of the Volsung legend by François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire and the satirical treatises of the philosophes, who used the Eddas as a stick to beat Christian doctrine. In Scandinavia itself, the most important Romantic event was the work of the Swede Esaias Tegnér (1782-1846), whose long poem Frithiofs saga (1825) was an international best-seller, translated into some twenty languages. Tegnér’s poem drew on the medieval Friðþjófs saga ins frœkna (the Saga of Fridthjof the Bold) and presented a Nordic hero of pre-Christian Iceland as a Romantic ideal — pious, brave, and sublimely in love.

In Germany, the next great event in the Romantic reception was Richard Wagner (1813-1883). Wagner’s four-opera Der Ring des Nibelungen (the Nibelungenlied cycle: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung) drew on a wide range of Old Norse and continental Germanic sources: the Völsunga saga, the Edda of Snorri, the Nibelungenlied, the Þiðreks saga af Bern, and the German Märchen and Sagen. Wagner’s Ring is not a faithful reproduction of Norse material — it freely reorders, combines, and invents — but it is the single most influential modern reworking of Norse mythology. Wotan (Odin), Brünnhilde (a Valkyrie from the Völsunga saga), Siegfried (the dragon-slayer of the Völsunga saga), the Norns (the weavers of fate), and the valkyries are all derived, in one form or another, from the Old Norse sources. The premiere of the completed Ring at the Bayreuth Festival in 1876 became the great public event of nineteenth-century Germanic cultural nationalism.

In Britain, the Ring and the Eddas found an early admirer in the essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), whose On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840) devoted a long and much-quoted chapter to Odin as the “founder” of the Northern nations. Carlyle’s Odin is the prophet of kingship, of law, and of the unity of the divine with the social, and his chapter did more than any other single English-language text to introduce the Eddas to a general Victorian reading public. Carlyle’s influence in turn shaped the more scholarly Germanophile reception of the Eddas, and through them the late-Victorian conception of the ancient North as the cradle of a heroic, pagan, “manly” religion.

In the later nineteenth century, the Germanisches Wörterbuch of the Brothers Grimm (begun by Jacob Grimm in 1838 and continued by his brother and their successors) and the Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache of Daniel Sanders (1860-1865) fixed the linguistic frame for the rest of the modern reception. The dictionaries, the Eddas, the Völsunga saga, and the new philology of Karl Simrock, Wilhelm Grimm, and Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte Fouqué (Der Held des Nordens, 1808-1810) made the Old Norse world a familiar and reliable source of material for European authors and composers.

William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelite Norse

The Victorian revival of the medieval and the Northern was not only a German affair. The British Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its wider circle absorbed Norse and Germanic material extensively. The most important single figure was William Morris (1834-1896), the textile designer, poet, novelist, and printer, whose translation of the Völsunga saga (with Eiríkr Magnússon, 1870) was the first major English-language rendering of the Norse Volsung legend and the foundation text of the later Victorian reception of the Völsunga saga in Britain and America. Morris’s own retelling of the Volsung legend, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876), is a long, alliterative, and often powerful reworking in the manner of an Old English poem, and it had an immediate impact on writers from Algernon Charles Swinburne to W. B. Yeats.

Morris’s medievalism in art and design was also an important channel for the Northern inheritance. The patterns he designed for wallpaper, fabric, and tiles (often based on the interlace and animal ornament of the Urnes and Borre styles of Viking Age art) became widely imitated, and the Arts and Crafts movement that Morris helped found, and the Art Nouveau style that grew out of it, both drew on the same Northern sources. The revival of “dragonesque” ornament in the late nineteenth century — the interlaced, ophidian forms of the Glasgow School in Scotland, the early work of the Vienna Secession, the work of the American Louis Comfort Tiffany — is in significant part a revival of the Viking visual vocabulary that Morris’s designs popularized.

The Morris translations of the Völsunga saga and the Edda were widely read in late-Victorian Britain. They shaped William Butler Yeats’s early work (including the Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, 1888, which draws on the same Northern sources), and they were the model for J. R. R. Tolkien’s lifelong interest in the Eddas, the Völsungs, and the Finnsburgh Fragment. Tolkien’s own famous translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925) and his edition of The Lay of the Cid and other medieval English works (1920-1940) belong to the same tradition of medieval revival, but with the key difference that Tolkien’s own fiction — The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Hobbit — was a wholesale re-imagining of the Northern mythological material.

Tolkien and the Literary Inheritance

The single most influential figure in the modern literary reception of Norse mythology is John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973). Tolkien was a professional philologist, professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, and a self-described “Northern” (or “Gothic”) medievalist. He read the Völsunga saga, the Edda, and the Beowulf manuscript from his teenage years, and his fiction draws deeply on the Northern inheritance.

The Norse elements in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are many and well-documented. The names of the dwarves in The Hobbit (Thorin, Balin, Dwalin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, Gloin, Fili, Kili) are taken direct from the Völuspá’s dvergatal, the list of dwarves. The names of Gandalf, Glamdring, Orcrist, and many of the place-names in the Lord of the Rings are drawn from Old Norse, Old English, and Old High German sources. The wizard Gandalf (“wand-elf” in Old Norse) is named for a specific figure in the Völuspá (one of the dwarves). The enchanted sword Glamdring (“sword of the wrath” or “foe-hammer”) is from a thirteenth-century list of swords in Old Norse. The two “scourings” of the Shire echo the social hierarchies of Old Norse kingship. The ents, the talking trees, derive in part from the dryad of Old English literature and in part from the wild men of the Norse Saga of the Ynglings and the Eddic Völuspá’s vision of the new world.

The deeper structural parallels are even more striking. The One Ring is, in important ways, an Anglo-Saxon and Norse inheritance: the cursed ring of power in the Völsunga saga (the Andvaranaut) and in Wagner’s Ring (the ring taken from Alberich the Nibelung). The figure of Gollum echoes the Norse and Germanic tradition of the outlaw and the wight. The story of Aragorn, son of Arathorn, has much in common with the Fjölsvinnsmál and the Völuspá’s vision of a returning hero. And the entire moral structure of the Lord of the Rings — the slow corruption of power, the long defeat, the long vigil, the eucatastrophic return of the king — is consonant with the Norse Eddic view of the world as a place in which the gods themselves are doomed to a final defeat at Ragnarok, but in which a new, green world will arise after.

Tolkien was also, deliberately, a mediator of the Northern inheritance to a wider twentieth-century audience. The huge commercial success of The Lord of the Rings (a million copies sold by 1970, and many more since the Peter Jackson films of 2001-2003) has, perhaps more than any other single modern work, made the Old Norse mythological world a familiar part of the global cultural imagination. The names Asgard, Midgard, Valhalla, Ragnarok, Heimdall, Mimir, and the Norns are now common reference points across the world, and they are common reference points in large part because of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

For a fuller account of the Tolkien-Norse connection, see Norse Mythology in Tolkien and Fantasy Literature.

Comic Books, Thor, and the Marvel Universe

While Tolkien was the dominant literary influence of the twentieth century, the dominant popular influence of the postwar period was the Marvel Comics version of Thor. The Norse character first appeared in Marvel Comics in Journey into Mystery #83 (1962), written by Stan Lee and Larry Lieber and drawn by Jack Kirby, and the character has been a mainstay of the Marvel Universe ever since.

The choice of a Norse hero for a 1960s comic book was deliberate. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were looking for a hero who would feel both ancient and modern, and the Norse gods allowed them to do an “outsider” version of the superhero genre: a god of thunder who had been exiled to Earth, who spoke like a Shakespearean actor, and who was clearly more powerful than the human heroes. The choice was also a reflection of the postwar popularity of Viking fiction in America, of the public recognition of the name Thor (largely a result of Wagner, the Eddas, and the Saturday-afternoon matinee Viking film), and of the comic-book industry’s growing interest in non-typical-American heroes.

The Marvel Thor in his early incarnation was a relatively loose adaptation of the Eddas. Lee and Kirby took the names, the hammer, the chief antagonists (Loki, Surtur, Hela, the Enchantress), the place-names (Asgard, Valhalla, Bifrost, Mjolnir), and the broad plot — Thor is the son of Odin and the goddess of the Earth, in exile among humans — and they grafted onto them a science-fiction framework in which the gods are sometimes represented as powerful aliens or as beings of a more advanced order than the human. The early Thor stories are remarkable for the visual power of Jack Kirby’s Asgard, with its vast columns and floating bridges, and for the earnest and archaic tone of Stan Lee’s Thor dialogue. The supporting cast — Odin, Frigga, Balder, Sif, the Warriors Three (Fandral, Hogun, Volstagg), Heimdall, and Loki — quickly became a recognisable mythological family for several generations of readers.

The Marvel Thor is also notable for its use of Norse imagery as a long-running visual vocabulary. The hammer Mjolnir, the helmet of winged horns, the swirling helmet, the rainbow bridge, the great battle between gods and giants, the apocalyptical Ragnarok — these were all re-imagined for a mass readership. The character has been adapted, with mixed success, into animated series (The Marvel Super Heroes, 1966; The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, 2010-2012), live-action television (the short-lived The Incredible Hulk Returns, 1988, with Steve Levitt as Thor), and the enormously successful Marvel Cinematic Universe films of the 2010s and 2020s: Thor (2011), Thor: The Dark World (2013), Thor: Ragnarok (2017, directed by Taika Waititi), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Avengers: Endgame (2019), Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), and a large number of supporting appearances in the wider MCU.

For a fuller account of the comic book and pop culture reception, see Norse Mythology in Marvel and Pop Culture.

Film, Television, and Stage

The Viking and Norse myth have been the subject of many films and television programmes. The earliest significant film is Vikings at the North Cape (Drott på Nordkap), a 1912 silent short. The most influential pre-war feature is The Viking (1928), an early sound-era Viking adventure set in the medieval period. The most influential postwar work is the Swedish-American film The Vikings (1958), directed by Richard Fleischer, starring Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, and Ernest Borgnine, and with a famous musical score by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Antoine Duhamel; the film was a major box-office success in Europe and America and shaped the popular image of the Viking for a generation.

The Hammer Films cycle of the 1950s-1960s included The Viking Queen (1967). The broader cycle of “Sword and Sandal” (or “Sword and Sorcery”) films of the 1960s-1980s included some Norse-themed material but is more strongly associated with the Conan the Barbarian and Beowulf traditions. The first major Beowulf film was Beowulf (1999, with Christopher Lambert) and the first major English-language Beowulf film for the 21st century is Beowulf (2007, directed by Robert Zemeckis with motion-capture animation), which drew on the Old English poem and on the Heaney translation. The 2007 film was a landmark in motion-capture technology, although its departures from the source text were sharply criticized by classicists.

The Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur directed Vikings (2013-) for the History Channel, a Canadian-Irish historical-drama television series whose first four seasons were the most-watched programme in the history of the History Channel. The series drew on the sagas of Ragnar Lodbrok, Bjorn Ironside, and other early Viking kings, and its popular impact on the global image of the Viking was substantial. Other important 21st-century films include The Northman (2022, directed by Robert Eggers), Valhalla Rising (2009, by Nicolas Winding Refn), and The Last Kingdom (BBC, 2015-2022, based on Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories).

The theatrical staging of Wagner’s Ring has continued throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. Major productions include those of the Bayreuth Festival (where the Ring has been staged almost every year since 1876), the Metropolitan Opera in New York (which has staged the Ring several times, with famous cycles by Herbert von Karajan in the 1960s, by the Otto Schenk/György Lepage stagings, and most recently by a high-tech staging by the Canadian director Robert Lepage), and a great many regional and national opera houses around the world. The recent high-profile stagings include the Richard Jones cycle at the London Coliseum, the Stefan Herheim cycle at Bayreuth (2022), the Die Walküre of 2022 at the Bayreuth Festival, and the controversial Valhalla staging by Niels Landén at the Royal Danish Theatre.

Video Games and Interactive Media

The Viking and Norse mythological world has been one of the most popular settings for the modern video-game industry, especially from the late 2000s onwards.

God of War (2005-2022) is a series of action-adventure games developed by Santa Monica Studio and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The first four games of the series (2005-2010) draw on Greek mythology, and the most recent games, God of War (2018) and God of War: Ragnarok (2022), draw on Norse mythology. The 2018 game and its sequel introduced a more somber, less blood-soaked version of the Norse cosmos. The protagonist Kratos, having survived the destruction of the Greek pantheon, finds himself in the Norse world, where he fathers a son, Atreus, and enters into a long relationship with the Aesir gods of Asgard, especially with Baldr, Thor, Odin, and Freya (in the Marvel cinematic version of Freya, the goddess of the Vanir). The 2022 God of War: Ragnarok is set during the apocalyptic events of the Norse end-times, and the player must navigate the final war between the gods and the giants, the death of Odin, and the destruction of Asgard.

Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (2020) is an action role-playing game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft. Set in 873 CE, the game follows the Viking Eivor through the conquest of Anglo-Saxon England. The game incorporates a wide range of Norse and Anglo-Saxon mythological material, including Yggdrasil, the nine worlds, the runes, the Valkyries, the dragons, the Huldra, and the Einherjar. The mythology of the game is presented in a long “Animus anomaly” sequence at the end of the main story, in which Eivor discovers the truth of the Asgardian “gods” as the Isu (a precursor race in the wider Assassin’s Creed mythos).

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (2017) and its sequel Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II (2024) are action-adventure games developed by Ninja Theory and published by Xbox Game Studios. The two games draw on the late Iron Age and early medieval North, and they incorporate themes of psychosis, the Celtic and Norse underworld, the wandering of the dead, and the death-by-vengeance of the Hervarar saga. The 2017 game features a fictional “Pict” warrior Senua who travels to Helheim to retrieve the soul of her dead lover. The 2024 sequel moves the story to Viking Age Iceland, where Senua confronts a Norse colonial settlement and a great variety of Norse and pre-Christian folklore.

Skyrim (2011) is the fifth installment of the Elder Scrolls series, developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks. The game is set in the northern province of Tamriel, “Skyrim,” where the player character, the “Dovahkiin” or “Dragonborn,” must confront the dragon Alduin the World-Eater and the ancient Nordic “Dragon Cult.” The game uses a wide range of Norse and Norse-derived mythology, including dragons, runes, the dragon shouts, the “Thu’um,” the Skaal of the far north, the “Word Walls” of the ancient Nords, the daedric princes, the “Dragon Aspect” powers, and the climactic battle at the Throat of the World, the highest mountain in Tamriel. The game’s representation of dragons (most prominently Alduin, Paarthurnax, Mirmulnir, Durnehviir) is heavily indebted to Old Norse dragons such as Nidhogg and Jormungandr.

Jotun (2015) and Jotun: Valhalla Edition (2016) are hand-drawn, action-exploration games developed by Thunder Lotus Games. The player is the Viking warrior Thora, who has died an inglorious death and must prove herself worthy of Valhalla by defeating five mighty Jotun (giants) in five elemental Norse landscapes. The 2015 game and its 2016 expansion are notable for their accurate use of Norse mythology, their hand-drawn art, and their focus on the female warrior.

Valheim (2021), an open-world survival game developed by Iron Gate AB and published by Coffee Stain Studios, is set in a procedurally generated world based on the Norse “ten realms.” The player character, a fallen Viking warrior, must survive in this world, build longhouses, fight the Jotun, sail the seas, and ultimately defeat the world’s five great bosses (Eikthyr, the Elder, Bonemass, Moder, and Yagluth). The 2021 Early Access version of the game was an enormous critical and commercial success, and the game has been cited as one of the most successful examples of the modern Viking aesthetic in the medium.

Smite (2014) is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game developed and published by Hi-Rez Studios. The game features a wide variety of mythological gods from many pantheons, and the Norse pantheon in Smite includes Odin, Thor, Loki, Freya, Heimdall, Hel, Fenrir, Jormungandr, Ravana (an Indian deity sometimes associated with Norse-North Indian migrations), and many others. Smite has been a major venue for the popular and competitive reception of Norse mythology since its release.

Other significant Norse-themed games include The Banner Saga (2014-2018, Stoic Studio), Nioh (2017, Team Ninja, with some Norse elements alongside the Japanese), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015, CD Projekt Red, with significant Norse elements in the Skellige isles), Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia (2018, Creative Assembly), Mount & Blade: Viking Conquest (2014), Vikings: Wolves of Midgard (2017, Games Farm), Tyranny (2016, Obsidian Entertainment), and Beowulf: The Game (2007, Virtuos).

Heavy Metal, Folk, and the Norse Sound

The Viking and Norse aesthetic has been a major presence in modern popular music, especially in the heavy-metal genre. The most important subgenre is the so-called Viking metal, which originated in the Scandinavian metal scene of the late 1980s and 1990s, and which combines black-metal and folk-metal elements with explicit Old Norse and Viking themes.

The single most important single band in the genre is Bathory (formed 1983 in Stockholm, Sweden), the project of the Swedish musician Tomas “Quorthon” Forsberg. Bathory’s Hammerheart (1990) and Twilight of the Gods (1991) are widely credited as the first full-fledged Viking metal albums, and they established a long tradition of concept albums based on the sagas, the Eddas, and the historical Viking Age. Other important bands in the genre include Amon Amarth (formed 1992 in Tumba, Sweden), whose long concept albums are mostly set in the Norse mythological world; Enslaved (formed 1991 in Haugesund, Norway), whose albums Vikingligr Veldi (1994) and Frost (1994) are landmark works; Einherjer (formed 1993, Haugesund); Windir (formed 1994, Sogndal, Norway); Moonsorrow (formed 1995, Helsinki, Finland); Týr (formed 1998, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands); Turisas (formed 1997, Hämeenlinna, Finland); Wardruna (formed 2003, Bergen, Norway); Heilung (formed 2014, Copenhagen, Denmark); Falkenbach (formed 1989, Germany); and Burzum (the solo project of the controversial Norwegian Varg Vikernes).

The contemporary “neo-folk” scene is a related tradition that draws on the Northern and the early medieval (and especially on the runic and Eddic material). Key artists include Heilung (whose work is a multilingual, ritual performance art combining Old Norse, Old English, and reconstructed Proto-Germanic), Wardruna (whose albums Runaljod – Gap Var Ginnunga (2009), Runaljod – Yggdrasil (2013), and Runaljod – Ragnarok (2016) are explicitly based on the Elder Futhark runes and the Eddas), Einar Selvik (the leader of Wardruna and the live drummer for the History Channel Vikings soundtrack), Hagalaz’ Runedance (the solo project of the German artist Andrea Haugen), Havukruunu (Finland), Runahild (Norway), and Danheim (Denmark).

The heavy-metal and folk scenes are not the only musical venues of the modern Norse inheritance. The American Manowar (formed 1980, Auburn, NY) is a major figure in the “true metal” subgenre, and their Warriors of the World (2002) and Gods of War (2007) draw on Norse, Celtic, and broader European mythological material. The American Amon Amarth, the Swedish Amon Amarth, the Norwegian Borknagar, and the German Equilibrium are also major figures.

Tabletop and Role-Playing Games

The Viking and Norse setting has been a long-standing favourite of the tabletop roleplaying and wargaming industry. The most significant of these is The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (1982, by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone), a single-player “fighting fantasy” book in which the player’s character descends into a dungeon to find a magical artefact, and which draws on Tolkien-influenced fantasy material with some Viking themes. The first Viking-themed roleplaying game is RuneQuest (1978, Chaosium) and its associated setting Glorantha, which includes the western Viking-like “Esrolian” region of the world. The first Viking-themed fantasy RPG is Tunnels & Trolls (1975, by Ken St. Andre), whose Sword of Air and Star Rovers include Viking material.

The most successful Viking-themed roleplaying game is Viking RPG (1982, by Ken Rolston), a small-press game set in the world of the Borreby Viking Age. The most successful Viking-themed tabletop strategy game is Twilight Imperium (1997, Fantasy Flight Games), a long-running space-opera game with strong Viking elements, and the more recent Blood Rage (2015, CoolMiniOrNot), a card-based game set in the Norse end-times. The most successful Viking-themed board game of the last decade is Vikings Gone Wild (2017, Sit Down!), a strategic tabletop game in which the player builds a Viking settlement and raids others.

In the role-playing game world, the major settings with extensive Norse material include GURPS Vikings (Steve Jackson Games, 1995), Viking Role-Playing Game (GURPS, 1995), The Dark Eye (German, 1984, with extensive Viking material in the Fasar setting), Pendragon (with extensive Norse material in the Dourstone setting), RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha (Chaosium, with the Esrolian region), Vikings: The RPG of the Norse Lands (CMP Games, 2004), and the Warhammer Fantasy Battle setting (Games Workshop, with extensive Norse-inspired material in the Norsca region).

In the Magic: The Gathering (Wizards of the Coast) and Hearthstone (Blizzard Entertainment) card-game worlds, the Norse-themed sets and expansions are numerous: Alliances (1996) and Ice Age (1995) in Magic are the earliest major Norse-themed sets, and Kaldheim (2021) is the most recent.

Fashion, Design, and Branding

The modern Viking aesthetic has been extensively used in fashion and design, often in connection with extreme sports, military, and “masculine” branding. The Norwegian clothing company Helly Hansen (founded 1877) and the Swedish outdoor-clothing company Fjällräven (founded 1960) have used Norse-influenced branding extensively. The Icelandic wool-clothing companies 66°North and Icewear are also significant.

The most influential fashion-and-design use of the Norse aesthetic in the 2010s-2020s has been in the tattoo and jewelry industry, where the valknut, the Mjolnir, the Algiz rune, the Sōwilō rune, the Web of Wyrd, the Vegvísir, the Ægishjálmur, and the Troll Cross have all become widely used. The trend has been associated with various subcultures (heavy-metal fans, bikers, white-power identitarians, post-Christian Asatru adherents, generic “Viking enthusiast” millennials), and the visual vocabulary is often taken up without regard to its original significance. The role of the tattoo industry in spreading the Norse aesthetic is sometimes compared to the role of the Celtec industry in spreading the Celtic one, and the same critiques of appropriation, distortion, and political ambivalence apply to both.

The world of the fitness industry has also used the Viking aesthetic extensively: the brand Gorilla Wear (Netherlands), the “Viking training” schools, the CrossFit “Viking” workouts, and the “Berserker” gym gear are all examples. The outdoor-clothing industry’s Viking aesthetic includes the Fjällräven Kånken backpack, the Helly Hansen Lifa base layers, and the 66°North Vatnajökull coat.

Neo-Paganism: Asatru, Heathenry, and the Revival

The longest-running of the modern Norse revivals is the religious one. The earliest modern attempt to construct a modern “Heathen” religion based on the Eddas and the sagas was the so-called Völkisch religious movement of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germany, most prominently represented by the Theosophical-influenced Ordo Fratres Völvas and by the Germanische Glaubens-Gemeinschaft (founded 1907). These movements drew on the Eddas, the Völsunga saga, and the Nibelungenlied as the sacred texts of a “Germanic” religion, and they were an important precursor to National Socialist cultural policy in 1930s Germany. (The Stahlhelm, the SA, the SS, and the Hitler Youth all used the runic and Eddic material; the SS in particular used two Sig runes for the Schutzstaffel, the SS divisional runes, the Tyr rune for the Tyr-kampf, and the Sonnenrad sun-cross for the various SS divisions.)

After the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, the modern Heathen movement was gradually rebuilt outside Germany, most prominently in Iceland (the Ásatrúarfélagið, or “Icelandic Heathen Society,” was founded in 1972) and in the United States (where a number of small Heathen groups were founded in the 1970s and 1980s, including the Asatru Folk Assembly of 1994 and the The Troth of 1987). The main modern Heathen traditions are:

Ásatrú (sometimes Heathenry or Forn Siðr): the loose contemporary term for the Northern-Indo-European reconstructionist religion, drawing on the Eddas, the sagas, and the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson. Ásatrú emphasizes the practice of the blót (a seasonal offering), the sumbel (a sacred toast with a mead or ale drinking-horn), the veneration of the Aesir and Vanir gods, the use of the runes, the practice of galdr and seiðr as described in the Eddas, and the kin (the extended family or fylkja) as the basic social unit.
Theodism (also called Theodish Heathenry or Þéodisc Geléafa): a more structured and hierarchical form of Ásatrú, founded in the United States in the 1970s by the Swedish-American immigrant Stefn Thorsman and the Englishman William “Mægen” Bain, and developed in the 1980s and 1990s by Garman Lord (the pen name of a former Marine, John W. Garman). Theodism is a “tribalist” Heathenism that emphasizes the Fyrnsidu (“old custom”), the witanagemot (“meeting of the wise”), the thing (an open-air court or assembly), and the thegn (a noble or chief).
Vanatrú (sometimes Vanic Heathenry): a more recent Heathen movement that emphasizes the Vanir gods (Freyr, Freyja, Njörðr) over the Aesir, and that draws on the late-Icelandic and modern “Galdr” tradition. The movement is associated with the Vanaheim Fellowship and with various UK and US groups.
Lífhugar and Skaldic traditions: a more recent (2010s-2020s) and more literary Heathen movement that emphasizes the skaldic (poetic) tradition and the practice of galdr as a form of poetic composition.
Forn Sed (in Danish) or Forn Siðr (in Old Norse): the Scandinavian continental and British Heathen reconstruction, associated with the Forn Sed Denmark (founded 2003), the Forn Sed Norway, and the Forn Sed Sweden groups. The Forn Sed movement is a less organized, more locally varied form of Heathenry that emphasizes the regional, the family, and the household.
Wiccan-influenced and neo-shamanic “Viking” groups: a more eclectic 1990s-2010s movement that blends Wicca, Druidism, Ásatrú, and modern neopaganism into a “Viking” form of practice. This is the most common form of “Viking” practice in North America and the UK, and it is also the form that is most often criticized by the more traditionalist Heathen movements for syncretism and historical inaccuracy.

For a longer account of the modern Asatru movement, see What is Ásatrú: Norse Neopaganism.

Internet Culture and the “Viking” Meme

The modern Viking and Norse aesthetic has been extensively used in internet culture, especially since the 2010s. The most important cultural product is the “Viking” meme, in which the stock visual vocabulary of the Norse inheritance (helmets with horns, braids, mead, longships, “skol!” toasts, valknut tattoos, Mjolnir pendants) is used to denote toughness, masculinity, authenticity, or any of a number of broadly positive social values.

The “Viking” meme is closely related to the longer-running “M’lady” mockery of early-Renaissance courtly conduct, in which self-described “chivalrous” men on the internet perform an exaggerated politeness to a sometimes-unwilling “M’lady,” and the woman in the joke replies with an exaggerated “U M’LORD” or, in a more confrontational version, a refusal. The “M’lady” mockery is, in significant part, a parody of the “M’lady” meme that originated in the early 2010s with the “Nice Guys of OK Cupid” Tumblr, and it has been extensively associated with the so-called “Manosphere” of the 2010s. The relationship between the “M’lady” mockery, the modern Viking aesthetic, and the various Heathen identities is complicated and contested: some users are sincere Asatru, some are sincere satirists, and many are in between.

The other major internet-cultural use of the Norse inheritance is in the “Berserker” fitness and “Viking workout” subcultures, in which a vigorous, often-extreme physical training is described in Norse or Viking terms. The CrossFit “Berserker” and the Hörðr of Reykjavik are examples. These subcultures are sometimes associated with the “Viking” meme, sometimes with serious Asatru, and sometimes with the white-power identitarian scene.

The Twitch.tv streaming community has also used the Norse aesthetic extensively. The most prominent Norse-themed streamers include Ragnarok Online (a 2002 South Korean MMORPG that is still in operation) and The Vikings (an English-language streaming community that broadcasts the History Channel Vikings show and discusses the historical and mythological material).

The Late-Victorian and Edwardian Imagining of the North

After Carlyle, Tegnér, and Wagner, the Northern inheritance was diffused through a wide range of late-Victorian and Edwardian works. Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) used Norse material in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) and Rewards and Fairies (1910), most memorably in the story of the Viking earl Sigurd who, like the older gods, is forced to become a kind of Anglo-Saxon national ancestor. Andrew Lang (1844-1912), the Scottish folklorist and editor of the Coloured Fairy Books (1889-1910), incorporated Norse material into a wide range of anthologies and children’s books. Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe (Norway) and Svend Grundtvig (Denmark) collected and published the Scandinavian Märchen that became the basis of the modern “fairy-tale” canon, including many of the most famous (the Nøkken, the Nisse, the Huldra) that derive from the older Northern inheritance.

In the visual arts of the late nineteenth century, the Northern inheritance was visible in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris), the Nazarene movement in Germany, the Arts and Crafts movement (William Morris again, Charles Robert Ashbee, Walter Crane), and the Symbolists of the 1890s (Arnold Böcklin, Edvard Munch, Ferdinand Hodler, Gustaf Fröding, the German-Austrian Wiener Werkstätte of Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, and the young Gustav Klimt). The Vienna Secession of 1897 used the “Northern line” extensively, and the early Wiener Werkstätte pieces, especially the metalwork and the jewelry, drew directly on the Jellinge and Ringerike styles of the late Viking Age.

In the Edwardian period the Northern inheritance was consolidated by the great Icelandic-English scholars. William Morris had already worked with Eiríkr Magnússon on the Völsunga saga and the Story of Sigurd. Sophus Bugge (1833-1907), the great Norwegian philologist, made fundamental contributions to the Old Norse corpus, including the famous (and still-controversial) theory of a substantial Indo-Iranian and continental Celtic influence on the Eddas. Finnur Jónsson (1858-1934), the Icelandic scholar, produced the standard editions and lexicons of Old Norse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and these works are still the foundation of the modern field.

Museums, Exhibitions, and the Public Display of the North

The institutional, public reception of the Norse inheritance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was also considerable. The great Scandinavian national museums — the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, the Swedish History Museum in Stockholm, the Cultural History Museum in Oslo, the National Museum of Iceland in Reykjavik — were all founded in this period, and their early collections were built on a close partnership between antiquarian scholarship and national-cultural assertion. The same period saw the founding of the Society for the Preservation of Icelandic Monuments (Fornleifasjóður), the Society of Northern Antiquaries (Det Kongelige Nordiske Oldskriftselskab), the British Viking Society, the Icelandic Literary Society (Bókmenntafélagið), and the American Scandinavian Foundation (1911).

Major exhibitions of Viking material in the twentieth century included the Viking Exhibition at the British Museum (1971), the Viking Exhibition at the National Museum of Denmark (1979), the Viking Exhibition at the Minnesota Historical Society (1980), the Viking and the North: An Exhibition in Honor of the Bicentenary of the Royal Asiatic Society (1983), the Viking Exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution (1997), and the Viking: Life and Legend exhibition at the British Museum (2014) and the National Museum of Denmark (2013-2014). The 2014 British Museum exhibition was the largest Viking exhibition ever mounted, with over 5,000 objects, and it attracted over 1.2 million visitors. Its accompanying catalog, Vikings: Life and Legend (2014), edited by Gareth Williams, Peter Pentz, and Margrethe C. Stang, is the most accessible single modern account of the Viking inheritance for a general audience.

The 21st-century museum boom has continued, with major exhibitions at the Cité de l’Immigration in Paris (2014), the Pergamon Museum in Berlin (2015), the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine (2017), the Yorkshire Museum in York (2017), the Jorvik Viking Centre in York (since 1984), the Lofotr Viking Museum in Borg, Norway (since 1995), the Ladby Ship in Denmark (since 1938), the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark (since 1969), the Viking World Museum in Reykjavik (since 2017), and many more. The cumulative effect of this public-display tradition is that “the Viking” has become one of the most-illustrated and most-visited historical cultures in the modern museum.

The Saga-Tradition Reception: William Morris and Beyond

The most important literary reception of the sagas in English was the work of William Morris and Eiríkr Magnússon in the 1870s and 1880s. The Morris-Magnússon translations, in particular The Story of Grettir the Strong (1869), The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs (1870), Three Northern Love Stories (1875), and The Saga of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue (1869), were the foundation of the entire late-Victorian and Edwardian saga-translation tradition.

W. G. Collingwood (1854-1932), the English antiquary and artist, made major contributions to the saga-reception with his edition of The Saga of King Sverri of Norway (1902) and his translations of the Icelandic sagas in collaboration with Jon Stefansson (1899-1902). Jessie L. Weston (1850-1928), the Scottish folklorist, made important contributions to the saga and Grail-legend scholarship with her The Legend of Sir Gawain (1897) and The Legend of Sir Perceval (1906-1909), and her work was an important source for T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), which contains an explicit reference to the Grail-legend (“the fire and the rose”).

Magnússon and Morris together also produced editions of the Hávamál, the Völuspá, and other Eddic poems, and the Story of the Volsungs in particular is still in print. Jesse Byock’s modern translation of the Völsunga saga (1990, Penguin Classics) is the most accessible modern English edition.

The 20th-Century Novel and Short Story

The early 20th-century novel and short story drew extensively on the Old Norse inheritance. William Morris’s late romances (especially The Well at the World’s End (1896) and The Wood Beyond the World (1894)) drew on the Eddas and the sagas, and these books are widely considered the founding texts of the modern fantasy genre. Lord Dunsany (Edward Plunkett, 1878-1957), the Irish fantasy writer, drew on the Northern inheritance in The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) and The Gods of Pegāna (1905). E. R. Eddison (1882-1945), the English civil servant and writer, drew on the Northern inheritance in The Worm Ouroboros (1922) and the Zimiamvia trilogy. Mervyn Peake (1911-1968), the English writer and illustrator, drew on the Norse and Icelandic inheritance in the Gormenghast trilogy (1946-1959), and the Gormenghast world (with its vast, decaying, cyclical, ritual-laden castle) has many features in common with the imagined architecture of the Völsunga saga and the Eddas.

C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), the Oxford-Irish fantasy writer and friend of Tolkien, drew on the Northern inheritance in The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Space Trilogy (1938-1945), and (most explicitly) The Last Battle (1956) and Till We Have Faces (1956), the latter being a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth with a strongly Northern flavor. Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), the American writer, drew on the Norse inheritance in the Earthsea cycle, and the Wizards of Earthsea in particular (most memorably A Wizard of Earthsea, 1968) is heavily indebted to the Eddas and the Völsunga saga for its images of the long quest, the true name, the doorway of the world, and the shadow on the other side.

The 20th- and 21st-century fantasy writers who draw on the Northern inheritance include George R. R. Martin (the A Song of Ice and Fire cycle, 1996-2011, and the Game of Thrones TV adaptation, 2011-2019), Brandon Sanderson (the Stormlight Archive, with its Radiants, Voidbringers, and Stormfather), Patrick Rothfuss (the Kingkiller Chronicle, 2007-ongoing), Andrzej Sapkowski (the Witcher cycle, with the Niflgaardian and Skellige settings), Joe Abercrombie (the First Law trilogy, with its Northmen setting), John Gwynne (the Bloodsworn trilogy, with its Norse-derived setting), and Katherine Arden (the Winternight trilogy, 2017-2019, set in medieval Muscovy with strong Norse-derived material). Each of these works in its own way re-imagines the Eddas and the sagas for a modern reading public.

The Black-Metal Controversy and the 1990s

The 1990s was a particularly troubled decade for the modern Norse inheritance in popular music, especially in the Scandinavian black-metal scene. The Norwegian black-metal scene, centered on the Mayhem band and its associated members, was the site of a series of church-burnings, violent crimes, and a murder (the 1992 murder of the Mayhem guitarist Euronymous, or Øystein Aarseth, by his former bandmate Varg Vikernes, a.k.a. Count Grishnackh). The black-metal scene was explicitly Norse-themed, with stage names and album titles drawn from the Eddas and the sagas, and the use of the Norse inheritance by the scene was a major source of public controversy. The 2018 documentary film Lords of Chaos (directed by Jonas Åkerlund) is a dramatization of the events, and the 2020 book Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground (by Didier Pasamonik, original 2003) is the standard factual account.

The Varg Vikernes case is the most important individual incident. Vikernes was a Norwegian black-metal musician who had been associated with the Mayhem band, and who murdered Aarseth in August 1992. He was subsequently convicted of murder and of several church arsons, and was sentenced to 21 years in prison. His 1997 album Filosofem, recorded in prison, was a major work in the black-metal canon, and his post-prison Burzum releases (1997-present) have continued to draw on the Norse inheritance. Vikernes’s case is often cited as an example of the way the Norse inheritance can be drawn on in dangerous ways, and the modern Heathen movement has explicitly distanced itself from the Black Circle and from the wider NSBM (National Socialist Black Metal) scene.

Festivals, Books, and the Wider Revival

The contemporary Norse revival in popular culture is also supported by a long tradition of books, festivals, and conferences. The Ásatrúarfélagið in Iceland has organized the Icelandic Heathen Festival (Hátíð Ásatrúarfélagsins) annually since 1974. The The Troth has organized a major U.S. Althing in the U.S. since 1990. The British Heathen Society has organized an annual Gathering of the Kindreds in the UK. The Forn Sed Denmark has organized an annual Vinterblot (winter sacrifice) festival since 2003.

A great number of modern books draw on the Norse inheritance, in both scholarly and popular forms. The Penguin Classics series has published a wide range of translations: the Völsunga saga (Jesse Byock, 1990), the Prose Edda (Anthony Faulkes, 1987), the Poetic Edda (Carolyn Larrington, 1996, 2014), the Heimskringla (Lee Hollander, 1964), the Saga of the Volsungs (Ronald G. Finch, 1965), and the Saga of Grettir the Strong (Jesse Byock, 2009). The Oxford World’s Classics series has published the Völsunga saga and the Egil’s saga. The Everyman Library has published the Heimskringla and the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson.

The most important modern scholarly work is the Dictionary of Northern Mythology (1991, 1996) of Rudolf Simek (translated by Angela Hall), the Handbook of Norse Mythology (2001) of John Lindow, the The Viking World* (2008) of Stefan Brink in collaboration with Neil Price, the Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (2001) of John Lindow, the The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology (2016) of Jesse Byock, the Myths of the Norsemen (1962) of Roger Lancelyn Green, the Norse Gods and Giants (1969) of Ingri d’Aulaire and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, the D’Aulaires’ Book of Norse Myths (1967, reprinted 2005), the Myths of the Norsemen (1960) of H. A. Guerber, the Viking Mythology: Tales of Odin, Thor, and Loki (2017) of Peter A. Kerkhof, and the Edda (2011) of Anthony Faulkes.

The podcast scene has also adopted the Norse inheritance. Notable Norse-themed podcasts include The Norse Mythology Podcast (since 2017), The History of Vikings (since 2018), Viking Age Podcast (since 2016), The Way of the Viking (since 2018), The Valkyrie’s Voice (since 2019), Heathen Talk (since 2018), and The Northern Realms (since 2019). The YouTube scene includes a number of prominent Norse-themed channels, including Jackson Crawford (the Old Norse specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), The Norse Mythology Channel, and Overly Sarcastic Productions.

The 21st-century Minecraft phenomenon has also adopted the Norse inheritance: the game has included Norse-themed updates (the Nether Update of 2020, the Caves and Cliffs of 2021, the Wild Update of 2022, the Trails and Tales of 2023), and there are a number of player-built “Viking” servers, most prominently the VikingNordic server (since 2014) and the Norsecraft server (since 2015). The Skyrim of the Elder Scrolls (described in the video-game section above) is itself a kind of full-immersion Norse-world, and the 2011 Skyrim has been one of the most popular video games of the 2010s and 2020s.

The Future of the Norse Inheritance

The Norse inheritance in modern culture is unlikely to fade. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has continued to release Norse-themed content in the 2020s, the God of War and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla franchises have continued to release major updates and sequels, and the Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls VI (announced 2018, expected late 2020s) is expected to draw on the same Norse-influenced material as the 2011 Skyrim. The PlayStation and Xbox platforms continue to host Norse-themed games, and the Twitch.tv and YouTube platforms continue to broadcast Norse-themed content.

The religious revival is also likely to continue. The Ásatrúarfélagið in Iceland is the country’s largest non-Christian religious organization (as of 2024, with over 5,000 members, more than the Icelandic Zionist community). The The Troth in the U.S. has more than 2,000 members in 2024, and the Forn Sed in Scandinavia has a similar number. The Temple of the Heathens in the U.S., the Wiccan Church of Ásatrú in the U.K., and the Folk Ásatrú in various countries are also growing.

The academic field of Viking studies, Old Norse philology, and Norse mythology continues to be a vital and growing area. The Viking Society for Northern Research (since 1892), the Modern Language Association’s Old Norse Division (since 1893), the International Saga Conference (since 1971), the North Atlantic Saga Conference (since 2004), and the European Association for the Study of Religion (since 2012) all continue to organize regular academic meetings, and the International Journal of Old Norse and Viking Studies (since 2014), the Scandinavian Studies journal (since 1911), the Viking and Medieval Scandinavia journal (since 2005), and the Journal of Northern Studies (since 2007) continue to publish peer-reviewed scholarship.

For the foreseeable future, then, the Norse inheritance is likely to remain a major presence in Western culture, both as an academic and literary subject, as a religious tradition, and as a popular and commercial aesthetic. The same gods, the same heroes, the same stories, and the same symbols are likely to continue to be re-imagined and re-told in the centuries to come.

Place Names, Day Names, and the Lingering Inheritance

The deepest and least visible layer of the modern Norse inheritance is the set of place-names, day-names, and personal names that survive in modern English, modern Scandinavian, and modern German. The days of the week in English and in the Germanic languages are the most obvious example. Wednesday (Old English Wodnesdæg) is named for the day of Woden (the Anglo-Saxon form of Odin); Thursday (Þunresdæg) is the day of Thunor (the Anglo-Saxon form of Thor); Friday (Frigedæg) is the day of Frige, an Anglo-Saxon goddess identified with Freya; and Tuesday (Tiwesdæg) is the day of Tiw (the Anglo-Saxon form of Tyr). The Scandinavian languages have a more transparent set: Danish and Norwegian Onsdag, Torsdag, Fredag, and Tirsdag are literally “Odin’s day,” “Thor’s day,” “Freya’s day,” and “Tyr’s day.”

Place-names with a Norse origin are also abundant. In northern England, the -by (from Old Norse bý, “farmstead”) of Whitby, Derby, Grimsby, Selby; the -thwaite (from Old Norse þveit, “clearing”) of Satterthwaite, Applethwaite, Wadsthorpe; the -thorpe (from Old Norse þorp, “outlying farm”) of Cleethorpes, Cleethorpes, Scunthorpe; and the -ness (from Old Norse nes, “headland”) of Inverness, Skegness, Dungeness. In the North Atlantic, the -ness of Reykjanes, Vestmannaeyjar (the “Westmanna islands”), and Stokksnes; the -fjord of Ísafjörður, Reyðarfjörður, Hvalfjörður; and the -ey (island) of Vik, Akureyri, Grímsey. In the New World, the Norse-influenced place-names of the Canadian Shield (the Longship of Newfoundland, the Vinland of some enthusiasts, the Anse aux Meadows of the only confirmed Norse site in North America), in Greenland (the Brattahlíð of Erik the Red, the Garðar of the Norse Eastern Settlement, the modern Narsaq, Qaqortoq, Paamiut).

The personal names of the modern North are also heavily Norse-influenced. In Sweden, the most common names of recent decades include Sigrid, Astrid, Ingrid, Gunnar, Sven, Erik, Olaf, Ragnar, Bjorn, Ivar, Sigurd, Freya, Linnea, Saga, Vilma. In Norway, the corresponding list includes Sigrid, Ingrid, Gunnar, Sven, Eirik, Olaf, Ragnar, Bjorn, Ivar, Sigurd, Saga. In Denmark, the corresponding list is Sigrid, Ingrid, Gunnar, Sven, Erik, Olaf, Ragnar, Bjorn, Ivar, Sigurd. In Iceland, the list of approved names (mannanöfn) is strictly regulated by the Icelandic Naming Committee (Mannanafnanefnd), and only names that can be declined in Icelandic and that are attested in Old Norse or modern Icelandic are allowed. As a result, Iceland has the most “Norse” of any modern onomastic tradition: the names of the Icelandic soccer team are a long list of -sson and -dóttir patronymics, and the names of the Icelandic children are an unbroken tradition from the Landnámabók (the medieval Icelandic book of settlements).

Sports Mascots, Brand Names, and the Wider Inheritance

The most visible single modern use of the Viking or Norse inheritance is in sports mascots, brand names, and other commercial products. The list of professional and collegiate sports teams with Viking- or Norse-derived mascots is long: the Minnesota Vikings (American football, since 1961), the Vikings of the European football leagues (notably the Viking FK of Stavanger, Norway, founded 1899), the Vikings of various minor-league teams, the Norse of the Northern Kentucky Norse (American college sports), the Vikings of the Augustana Vikings, the Bethel Royals (not directly Norse, but the “Vikings” is a common alternate), and the Valhalla Vikings of various other institutions.

Brand names that use the Norse or Viking inheritance are also numerous. The Viking brand of kitchen ranges (now part of the Sub-Zero Group), the Viking line of power tools, the Viking brand of bottled water, the Viking brand of office equipment, the Lego Viking series of construction toys, the Vikings brand of bar and grill, and the Viking brand of safari tour operator. The list goes on and on, and the consistent use of the “Viking” name is a sign of the durability of the Viking brand in the modern Western imagination.