How Emotional (or Not) Were the Vikings?
It's a modern trope today they were unfeeling, but how did they express their emotions?
When my editor sent back the latest round of notes on my upcoming Viking-age novel, one comment made me pause. In reference to my protagonist, he joked, “He cries a lot, doesn’t he?” In a book spanning two years filled with trials, loss, and trauma, my protagonist sheds tears three times. I can see how, from a modern perspective, and given the representation of Vikings in media, a Viking warrior weeping even once might come off as an outpouring of emotion that threatens my readers’ preconceived image of the stoic, iron-willed Northman. And that’s exactly how I want it.
The feedback highlights a fascinating interpretative blind spot in how we view the past. We often project a modern, post-Romantic sensibility onto historical figures, assuming that ancient warriors were silent in their grief or that emotional displays in sagas were literary tropes rather than reflections of lived experience. But if we look more closely at the sources and recent scholarship, we f…
