Norway plays the Ivory Coast tomorrow afternoon in the first knockout phase of the soccer World Cup, and one suspects the New York Times will be backing the Norsemen.
The Gray Lady has gone gaga for Norway’s “Viking Row,” a synchronized routine where fans mime the rowing of a Viking longboat to the bang of a drum. It’s caught on among the Norwegian players as well as politicians back in Norway, who performed the row in parliament last week.
For the last two weeks the NYT has been publishing breathless pieces about the zany Norwegians and their Viking antics. “The ‘Viking Row’ is in full flow” was one headline on June 18; five days later they described how it “has taken the World Cup by storm.” And their editorial office from the sound of things.
You would have to be a crotchety killjoy to complain about the Viking Row. It’s just a bit of humorous high jinks. Humorous but also a little hypocritical.
The man who claims he came up with the idea of the Viking Row is Ole Froystad, who goes by the nickname “Mr. Row Row.” He recently explained the thinking behind the stunt. “It’s about rowing for the team, making sure that we get the team to feel good… A thousand years ago, the Vikings rowed.”
That’s not all they did. Vikings also raped, pillaged, murdered and enslaved. From the eighth to the 11th century the Vikings terrorized Europe, from the British Isles in the north as far as Sicily in the south.
The Dublinia Museum in the heart of the Irish capital explains that “slaves were a valuable commodity in the Viking age… Vikings took Irishmen and Irishwomen as slaves.”
In the late 20th century a revisionist movement appeared that challenged the notion that Norsemen were bloodthirsty savages; they were simply misunderstood and were in fact “sophisticated merchants with exceptional navigational and engineering skills.”
Scottish archaeologists have pushed back on the revisionists, claiming that the evidence they’ve found in their excavations suggest the Vikings “ethnically cleansed” the Scottish islands.
One might say that some British colonizers in the Victorian age were sophisticated chaps, and ditto for the Spanish in the late 15th century. But just try saying that and see the fury that will be unleashed from… well, the likes of the New York Times.
Imagine if Spanish supporters had spent the last two weeks performing a “Columbus Row” in American cities in honor of the explorer who planted the Spanish flag in the Americas.
How would American’s liberal elite have reacted? Along the lines of those protesters who in 2020 toppled 30 statues of Christopher Columbus because, as the New York Times approvingly reported, of his role in “ushering in an era of mass colonization and oppression of Indigenous people.”
There was a time when English fans would taunt their German rivals whenever the two countries met on the soccer field. Thousands of fans pretended to be airplanes while humming the tune from The Dam Busters; this 1955 movie depicted the daring RAF raid in 1943 that successfully breached two Nazi dams in the Ruhr Valley.
But the powers-that-be in po-faced progressive Britain put an end to that in 2017 after England fans broke out into a rendition during a game in Dortmund. The governing body, the Football Association, condemned behavior it called “inappropriate, disrespectful and disappointing.” Chairman Greg Clarke. said such supporters do not represent the “values and identity we should aspire to as a football nation.”
What identity does English football aspire to? One of failure, judging from the team’s poor performances over the past 60 years.
England fans sing about World War Two because it was the nation’s finest hour – as the sun set on the Empire – and it that shaped their national identity. National identity is why Norwegians embrace the Viking spirit, reminding them of a time when they dominated the world.
But whereas the RAF were helping rid Europe of a murderous tyranny in 1943, the Vikings in their longboats were imposing one 1,000 years earlier.
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