Book review: ‘American Vikings’ by Martyn Whittock

On this side of the Atlantic, the Viking expeditions to North America became important primarily in the 19th century, used to integrate new Scandinavian immigrants into the United States but also to prop up modern myths about who first settled this continent, often to remove Native Americans as the original custodians of the land. More recently, Vikings have become a pop culture sensation — in movies and comic books, on TV, and on the American football field.

So it’s no surprise that there have been a bounty of English-language books published on the Vikings recently, including excellent ones by Neil Price, Cat Jarman, and Gordon Campbell (this last directly about the Norse and North America). Into this company, Martyn Whittock has just published “American Vikings: How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America.” Unfortunately, this most recent book falls short of the others. It utilizes little of the recent scholarship that has transformed our understanding of these people and, in search of a good story, winks far too often at long-disproven hokum and conspiracy theories.

Whittock is himself prolific — the author of numerous other books on the past, ranging from the historical Jesus, apocalyptic ideas through history, the English Civil War, the Mayflower, the Soviet police state, the Nazi regime and several other books about the Vikings before this one. Here, as in those earlier books, he deploys a light touch, with a breezy, conversational tone that moves the story very quickly. It reads almost like a transcript of a podcast, or as if you’ve been dropped into a conversation that had already started.

The book starts with three chapters on history, talking about how the Vikings got their name, who they were, what they believed and where they went. Much of this first section has been taken directly (or lightly edited) from his other books — for example, most of Chapters 1 and 2 are almost verbatim from Chapter 1 of his earlier “The Vikings: From Odin to Christ,” and there are many other examples. Then, “American Vikings” moves toward the Americas for the next several chapters, attentive to both the actual historical and archaeological evidence of Norse presence on the continent (there is quite a bit!), as well as the much more specious claims about those visitors that were made especially during the 19th and early 20th centuries. A brief chapter on the use of Vikings to prop up white supremacist and eugenicist ideas in the early 20th century then transitions to the final section of the book on U.S. pop culture and Vikings in the modern day (including very recent connections to the lies of QAnon).

These are all important topics to cover within a book on this subject, but they are often handled poorly. Whittock moves quickly through the history of medieval Scandinavia, which necessarily means that he’s had to make choices about the book’s content. This is fine. All written histories make choices about what’s included and what’s not. But the field of Viking studies has advanced massively in the past generation to a much more nuanced picture of a group that could revel in almost unheard-of brutality but also create exquisite art and trade across four continents.

As such, even as the book attempts to convey authority via citation and an evenhanded approach to the sources, its handling of existing scholarship doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. One need not be a subject expert to write on a subject but you do have to deal with evidence in good faith. Here, the author tends to gravitate toward experts who reinforce the book’s apparent guiding purpose of telling a thrilling story of widespread Viking presence in North America. Whittock often conveys an impression of certainty when it suits the overall argument, with footnotes leading, at times, back to websites of questionable merit or to extremely outdated scholarship. A bit more effort could have turned up other, more up-to-date work on any of these topics.

In addition, the book often says that settled questions aren’t really that settled. The book’s section on the Kensington Runestone (discovered in Minnesota in 1898) is shot through with innuendo and second-guessing. Though he acknowledges “the strength of the academic evidence against” the runestone, he stresses that some are still “convinced of its authenticity,” writing that “the jury is still out” and we should consider “if the stone is genuine.” But this runestone, along with all the others Whittock discusses, is 100 percent fake (see chapters 8 and 9 of Campbell’s “Norse America” for a better take on this fraud). There are a lot of falsehoods about the Vikings that have arisen in modern America and we don’t have to further spread them.

One thing “American Vikings” does get quite right is that this medieval group continues to exert a strong pull on the modern imagination. But the one-sided, often shallow portrayal here does both these historical figures and those interested in them a disservice.

How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America