Critique of "Vikings": a Saga of the Northern Mercenaries, by Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen

In the popular imagination, the Vikings were associated with the adventurous epic of the barbarians and bloodthirsty pirates of the north, worshipers of the pagan gods Thor and Odin. Their aesthetics, with furs and helmets with horns, ships of rowers shaped like dragons, Viking villages in deep fjords and razias in which they passed by knife to the peoples who enslaved and raped their women, were fixed in Kirk Douglas's "The Vikings" (1958).In r…