So the Norwegian World Cup football team did a little publicity thing, posing as Vikings as a nod to their fierce, manly heritage:
Personally, I thought it was excellent stuff, well worth hearkening back to their storied heritage and national pride.
But you know what happened next, don’t you? Predictably, this:
The response to their creative send-off has split opinion in Norway, with woke critics arguing against the aesthetic due to the Vikings’ large-scale raiding, colonizing, pillaging and raping throughout their dominant era.
The images were ‘chauvinistic and exclusionary’, according to journalist Markus Slettholm of the newspaper Morgenbladet.
And he went even further in an interview with NRK, saying it is ‘reminiscent of what neo-Nazis were concerned about ten years ago’.
Jane Haug Skjoldli, a researcher and Norwegian academic recently argued that the Norway kits for the World Cup could be seen as ‘hyper-masculine and right-wing extremist’.
The shirts have rune-like writing on the back and Skjoldli said elements of it are ‘unfortunate and typical of neo-Nazi and fascist symbolic language’.
Of course, how triggering for the fainting goats on the Left. The fact that all these Bad Things happened, sheesh, over a thousand years ago has no effect on the tender sensibilities of today’s hyper-weenies.
Here’s one for the Norwegian team: guys, when you’re done with the World Cup, sail a longboat or two back into Oslo, do a little Viking pillaging and fire at the Morgenblatt building, and feel free to assuage yer base Viking instincts on Wossname Scolding or whatever her name is. (I don’t know what the Viking term is for “pulling the train”, but whatever.)
And if she’s ugly — I’m taking no bets, here — just do it for spite.
That noise you hear will be cheering and laughter from your ancestors in Valhalla.