I went to meet the vikings exhibition and it was bad...

Recently one of my favorite museums - the National Museum in Copenhagen had rearranged its Viking age exhibition. Unfortunately the result is really just designed to entertain tourists and is reinforcing the wrong stereotypes about the Viking age.

Starting with the name witch quite lose use the word “Vikings” without any thought put into who they are showcasing ending with the selection of items on display this four room gallery is a disaster from a point of view of an archaeologist. Visually stunning but devoid of any true meaning photos dominate the gallery, accompanied by short texts in which curators try to smuggle some knowledge but are clearly loosing to do so. The disappointment is greater since the same museum at the time houses a genuinely more informative and educational exhibition about 20th c. Mongolia than it manages to pull off trying to present the last period of Danish prehistory. The fact that the museum arranged the start of the exhibition with the premier of quite frankly quite bad show “Vikings” is really just adding an insult to injury, as the show had in my opinion pushed the public awareness and research scope of new project at least 15 years back.



Starting with the world “Vikings” – it is a term without the meaning, it does not describe an ethnicity or the occupation. Material culture of Scandinavia, as well as burial rituals clearly point to large regional differences. It is a blanket term used to grab attention.

Then on the way in you see a large photo of a seer – reconstructed on a basis of the content of a grave with presumable staff for sorcery. These graves are highly problematic in my opinion – in short, their content does not match to the Icelandic sources describing semi nomadic life style of the presumable seeress, housing a large number of tools for domestic craft activates, items related to elite aristocratic spheres, not to mention their usually quite prominent position in the cemeteries. I am not going to write about the bersekers in horned helmets who are also there.



Than we can progress into more rooms filled with gold and inaccuracy quite well described by S.Sindbeak (https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/A40E54491325BC2E3951F975F6452708/S0003598X19000012a.pdf/meet_the_vikingsor_meet_halfway_the_new_viking_display_at_the_national_museum_of_denmark_in_copenhagen.pdf). Reinforcing the focus on the Vikings as the warrior aristocracy, which is just one facet of the quite diverse and dynamic society. There is no chronological progression, no description of processes taking place during this quite turbulent times.Artifacts and photos of artifacts from different places are just mixed to provide the most impact on audience. It is just a fan service for reenactors and Viking fanatics, however it resonates well with what dominates the current research agenda, that focuses on sensational, sacrificing the necessary ground work that should go into reanalysis of older excavations and towards developing more source critical approaches to the work with material culture. 



I am sure that these very fake images will sale very well but the damaged they do is probably not possible to fix. For years there were many attempts towards produce more nuanced picture of the Late Iron Age that are now in my opinion in serious trouble – from one side “sabotaged” by such a flashy uninformative exhibition, from other thwarted by the very sensationalist research that currently seems to have it center in universities in Central Sweden – what is surprising, taking into consideration the very moderate and highly theoretical approach that was characterizing the Swedish archaeology in late 90’ and early 00’. I hope that the strong reaction of scientific community will be enough to save the studies of the Late Iron Age in Scandinavia because right now we are catering to the lowest ideas of public imagination instead of trying to present new content in responsible and more "scientific" way. We should not try to create a "Viking" Disneyland which seems to be the idea behind the majority of recent viking themed exhibitions.