Background

The Vikings are everywhere we look in contemporary society, from film and TV representations, to adaptations of Norse myth, to tourism initiatives and the branding of companies and products across Europe and beyond. The way the Vikings have been perceived has changed rapidly in recent years, but differences also exist in the way they are used in the current day: Vikings can be used to sell everything from grooming products to digital technologies, cars to life insurance. They are held up as both pioneers of gender equality and examples of primal masculinity, as outward looking adventurers and proto nationalists. They are used both to express political opinions and to satirise them, and have played a key role in defining European identities.

This project asks the question what do the Vikings mean to us today, and how have past interpretations of the Viking Age - both scholarly and popular - come to influence how we think about this formative period of European history.

This of course brings challenges too. NorseMap will be asking the public to help us to gather the vast data on the uses of the Vikings, and to reconstruct a complex history of reception over the last 200 years. It will be the first project to comprehensively map the legacy of a historical phenomenon, and it needs your help to do it.

Objectives

The main objective of NorseMap is to map the reception and legacy of the Vikings over the past 200 years helping us to explain why this period of history has evolved to play such an important role in the creative arts, commerce, tourism, and politics.

NorseMap aims to:

• Harness public interest in the period to gather information about the different ways the Viking past is represented across Europe
• Reconstruct a complex reception history, and demonstrate how perceptions of the period developed differently in particular national and local contexts
• Understand how new ideas about the Vikings move from scholarship into public discourse, and how misconceptions spread online
• Write a new history of the Viking legacy, emphasising the role that they have played in the construction of European identities

Methodology

NorseMap will adapt methodologies from large-scale citizen-science initiatives and apply them to the documentation of cultural heritage.

This will involve the development of a mobile app allowing contributors to document examples of Viking heritage that they encounter, exchange knowledge, and follow mobile-assisted heritage trails.

NorseMap will also trial different group sourcing initiatives inviting the public to help collect data from various online sources and archives, and to interpret that data in collaboration with the project researchers. AI will be used to help parse large data collections.

All data collected by the project will be added to the NorseMap archive, and connections between different items plotted: this will form the basis of a broad map of contemporary uses and perceptions of the Vikings. Traditional archival research will complement this public collection: the project researchers will reconstruct the historical pathways that have led to the different perceptions of the Vikings in the present day, providing depth to the evolving map.

The investigations of NorseMap will be centred on three main strands of reception: 1) literature & art, 2) branding & the cultural economy, and 3) politics & identity.

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.