American Vikings by Martyn Whittock

American Vikings: How the Norse Sailed into the Lands and Imaginations of America
By Martyn Whittock
Pegasus Books 2023

American Vikings, Martyn Whittock’s new book and the spiritual sibling of his 2018 The Vikings: From Odin to Christ, looks not just at the persistent speculation that the Vikings reached the New World long before Columbus but also at all the ways the Viking image has permeated American culture, ranging from movies to TV shows to comic books.

Not all of that permeation is fun and positive; the specter of psychotic modern racist movements like QAnon is never far from whatever Whittock’s discussing, since the “anarchic threat” of these movements. “The answer to why the Vikings have this appeal to modern radical-right nationalism in the USA (and elsewhere) is rooted in the belief held by some members that the early Scandinavian Viking Age culture represents a primordial European society that was all white and racially unmixed,” he writes at one point, morosely pointing out that “Vikings have, once again, become part of political mythmaking.” 

He touches on all kinds of mythmaking, from The Mighty Thor from Marvel Comics to Viking Prince from DC Comics, from the Vikings TV show on the History Channel to reflections on the vaguely Viking-garbed so-called QAnon Shaman who helped to assault the US Capital on January 6, 2021. 

Some of these quick discussions, maybe most of them, feel the peculiar kind of quick that comes from cribbing in unfamiliar territory (also sometimes they feel curiously incomplete; Barack Obama and science fiction great Fred Pohl are mentioned, but not Thomas Pynchon, who went to all the bother of writing a book called Vineland), and this can serve to undercut the credibility of what’s necessarily the book’s central question: did the Vikings actually reach North America? 

They settled Iceland in the 9th century, moved west and began to settle Greeland in the 980s. There are deeply questionable artifacts in Maine. And famously there are mentions in the great Icelandic sagas: in the Saga of the Greenlanders, a character named Bjarni Herjolfsson is blown off-course on a voyage to Greenland and glimpses (several times) an unknown, heavily-wooded mystery land to the west of all known lands. Leif Ericksson, son of the famous Erik the Red, buys Bjarni’s boat and seems to replicate his mysterious encounter – and the sagas describe places that seem to resemble known locations like Newfoundland or Baffin Island. 

Evidence of all kinds has been accumulating for many decades, and Whittock examines most of it with genial accessibility. Readers might find themselves wishing Whittock either dug deeper into the various rune-carved stones and other clues and maybe paid less attention to American Gods and Hägar the Horrible or else dug deeper into those disturbing QAnon echoes (and explicitly Viking memes that now illustrate some of the filthiest racism on the Internet). As it is, American Vikings sometimes feels distracted but is always entertaining. American readers might be surprised to learn how Viking they’ve always been.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.