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The homeland of the Scandinavians includes Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The most prominent raiders amongst these three kingdoms were the Norwegians and the Swedish. Typically, the Swedes raided and explored the East, settling in the Kievan Rus, and were the first Vikings to open trade with the Middle East. The Norwegians raided and explored the west, founding settlements in Greenland and Iceland. 

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The first Viking Raid was Lindisfarne in the year A.D. 793. These raids were major historical events that struck fear and retaliation into every nation touched by Norse raiders. With that said, many more raids occurred in England, along the Iberian coast, on the road to Constantinople, and many more following the Seine and Volga Rivers.

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Iceland and Greenland are the most famous exploratory expeditions and Iceland is the most important place in regards to Viking culture. Iceland was the last Nordic settlement to convert to Christianity in the year 1,000 A.D. Only 66 years before the official end of the Viking Age. Its discovery in the year 986 A.D. is the most important expedition to the preservation of Viking mythology, language, oral tradition, and culture due to the time it remained Nordic and resisted conversion. Look to Snorri Sturluson's Poetic Edda, Prose Edda, and Codex Regius for more information.

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You might wonder why there's a point in the U.S. Those of you who know of the Viking expeditions into Eastern Canada known as Vinland might yet be confused by the date. 2017. The 'Unite the Right' rally was a supremacist rally that saw the death of a 32-year-old woman and the injury of nineteen others via vehicular manslaughter. All those injured were rallying against the supremacist rally. What does this have to do with the Vikings? Observe their flags. Notice the curiously shaped letter some fly. That is the Othila rune used here to represent the separation between races. In reality, the rune represented a plethora of different ideas like inheritance and exile. This is not the first example of cultural appropriation. For this, we return to an era mired in vile ideology.

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The propaganda posters shown above were used by the Nazis to claim descendancy from a supposedly superior, Germanic warrior race. While this is not the first time the Vikings were misrepresented, it is the first time that the Vikings were idolized as a symbol of white supremacy. Here begins the concept of collective guilt. Because others like the supremacists in Charlottesville portrayed Scandinavians in this way, modern-day Scandinavians shirked their history and culture to avoid backlash and felt a 'collective guilt' in instances where they felt proud of their heritage.

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The Day, August 14-15th 1943, Germanic Norway (Norwegian)

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Understanding how cultures and ideologies can be changed as time passes, especially when these changes in scholarship or via media are made outside of the respective culture, is imperative to make informed decisions and formulate accurate opinions. Ask yourself how many cultures have been silenced. How is history being used against us? Second-guess the nuances of historical perspectives and don't take what a historian is saying at face value, because the thousands of Christian scholars who wrote down the Viking culture did so with a bias against them. The legacy of the Vikings is one of the most egregious and obvious examples of how time and ulterior motivation can lead to a grossly misrepresented culture. Other, less obvious examples to think about are the Native American and Israeli Jewish cultures.