In short, a clear thread may connect the Viking sokemen of the Danelaw to the intellectual ferment that produced the Petition of Right of the English Parliament in 1628 and, ultimately, the Bill of Rights in America.
There seems to be something essentially un-Scandinavian about blowing one’s own horn. One hears of – and is often amused by – the Irish braggart or the German braggart. But we rarely hear of Scandinavian braggarts. Not due to any ethnic superiority, but because of our ingrained cultural habits.
The makes Arthur Herman’s The Viking Heart a slightly awkward book to read, at least for fellow Scandinavians. (Herman explains that after he wrote the book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, a Norwegian uncle asked why he’d ignored that side of the family, so there seem to be exceptions.)
I’d heard the author interviewed on the radio, and got the impression that this was mainly a book about the Vikings. But it’s not. Though the Vikings get much of the page count, the author goes on to describe Scandinavian history (at home and overseas) up to modern times. We read about the Normans, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, the Swedish pioneers in colonial Delaware and New York, Charles Lindbergh and Norman Borlaug. The executives of both Ford and Chevrolet who engineered US industrial mobilization in World War II were both Scandinavian-Americans. Gutzon Borglum and Carl Sandberg. The list is quite long.
The ongoing theme is the titular Viking heart (sometimes also the Viking Legacy, a title already taken. Herman might have consulted that book profitably). The Viking heart seems to be a pretty amorphous concept, but in the end he identifies it as physical courage, commitment to cultural identity, “the instinct of craftsmanship” (a phrase from Thorstein Veblen, who grew up about 10 miles from my childhood home), Christianity (after the conversion, of course), “the Lutheran work ethic,” the power of individual freedom, and “a constant willingness to strive toward unknown frontiers in order to find a place for oneself and one’s family.”
I’m not sure how different that makes the Viking heart from a lot of other ethnic groups’ hearts – the Scots-Irish, for instance, could claim a lot of those traits, and they carried them off with more flair.
As always, when it comes to a subject about which I know quite a lot, I have nitpicks. There are a lot of minor errors in the chapters on the Vikings. The author doesn’t go as far as some historians in rejecting the evidence of the sagas, but he tends to find things credible that I doubt, and doubt things I consider pretty plausible (such as the existence of King Harald Finehair of Norway).
On the plus side, he is far more positive about Christianity and its cultural influences than many current historians.
He judges it a failing of the Scandinavian countries that they never fully adopted feudalism. That’s something we Norwegians have always been pretty proud of, in point of fact.
The book is quite long. I did learn things from it, when the story moved outside my wheelhouse. I appreciated it, but I’m not entirely sure the whole exercise was necessary.
That’s probably just my Norwegian diffidence talking.
Recommended, for those interested in the subject.