Violence and Historical Authenticity: Rape (and Pillage) in Popular Viking Fiction

Abstract

Add to and suddenly it has a certain air of knock-about fun. --David Mitchell (2009) The phrase rape and pillage has become almost synonymous with Vikings. In newspaper headlines, guidebooks, textbooks, romance novels, cartoons, and museum exhibits, rape and pillage acts as shorthand for any and all Viking crimes, whether real or purely fictional. Paradoxically, phrase has become enshrined in rhetoric of debunking, or at least problematizing, simplistic notion of bloodthirsty Vikings. A popular introductory textbook explains that dominating popular perception of people who flowed out of Scandinavia in Viking Age is image of blood-thirsty warrior bent on slaughter, and pillage (Forte, Oram, and Pedersen 2005, 299). More popular writing employs a similar rhetoric; in an article reviewing new British Museum Vikings exhibition, Simon Armitage (2014) writes for Guardian: [T]hose simply seeking raping and pillaging berserkers of legend may be surprised. The question of Viking brutality or its absence is one that has been debated for over fifty years, led in particular by work of Peter Sawyer (1962). But in all these debates over Viking brutality, what seems never to be critiqued is use of phrase rape and pillage to denote an often unspecified range of Viking war crimes. For image of Viking is one that is firmly ensconced in our modern imagination. On film, in romance novels, and in a range of modern media, hairy Viking warlords women inside wreckage of their burning villages. They carry off beautiful women with graphic and detailed threats of in captivity. Drunken, feasting Vikings grope and leer at buxom mead-hall wenches or scantily clad slave girls, and grizzled old Vikings reminisce about their glory days of raping and pillaging. It thus becomes clear that part of answer to how phrase rape and pillage came to be associated with Vikings must involve an exploration of how and violence against women has come to be so closely identified with Vikings and Viking raids. In what follows, I will attempt to chart evolution of trope of Viking rape, and how has come to be so closely associated with popular image of Viking. In process, I also provide some discussion of evolution of phrase rape and pillage and attempt to demonstrate how its polemical usage in early nineteenth century lent itself neatly to its later use in depictions of Viking and abduction. The figure of Viking often represents a very specific form of masculinity, one that encompasses notions of dominance, and other aggressive traits. Recent research has touched on role of imagined Viking in naturalizing patterns of dominance in present day, as in Anglo-American narratives of conquest and colonialism (Kolodny 2012), or in early twentieth-century Germanic ideologies of racial superiority (Irlenbusch-Reynard 2009). It is not surprising that they should also come to be associated with domination of women, and with extreme blurring of lines between consensual and that constitutes modern culture. (1) Vikings, with their giant battle-axes and muscular good looks, perfectly symbolize the aggressive-passive, dominant-submissive, me-Tarzan-you-Jane nature of relationship between sexes in our [rape] culture (Herman 1994, 45). With its close correlation to broader sex and violence, phrase rape and pillage has come to encapsulate this paradox and perfectly describe a violent, dominant form of male sexuality. The phrase is used in a remarkable range of texts and genres, from Danish guidebooks to modern romance novels. Not confined to descriptions of literal Vikings, phrase is used to evoke a particular brand of male sexuality even in present day. The hero of modern-day romance novel, Gena Showalter's Catch a Mate, for instance, is introduced in strongly medieval terms: From behind he was gorgeous. …