Yay to the Vikings of the World Cup

2026-07-11

Writing for Jacobin, the leftist magazine, in an article titled Norway’s Vikings Are Reclaiming Valhalla at the World Cup, Mímir Kristjánsson notes:

The fundamental requirement of multiculturalism is a diversity of cultures. For multiculturalism to work, nations and regions all over the world have to preserve their distinct cultures. The alternative to this is not progress but a global monoculture driven by hypercapitalism and American cultural imperialism. For the Nordic countries, this means that we have to fight to preserve our language, our heritage, and our history in a world that is ever more dominated by the English language and global internet culture. And this is precisely what we at least attempt to do when our national football team dresses up in runes, and our fans cosplay as Vikings.

I am on a similar wavelength as the author. National identity is nothing to be ashamed of, not even if Nazis or other groups have at times appropriated some of its artistic representations and values. This is true for Norse culture as it is for the Greek one. From the time of the Romans we have had to contend with the figment of ideology known as Greco-Roman culture, which later transmogrified into this vague, ostensibly singular Western tradition that claims the Hellenic city-state as its progenitor while being inwardly antithetical to everything the ancient world stood for.

To the point about the Vikings, every tribe, every nation has a bloodied past and is destined to commit further violence in perpetuity. Such is the inescapable nature of humankind: to eat we have to kill, to have shelter we must eliminate all threats from its milieu, and to guarantee safe spaces in our societies we need to apply sovereign authority with extreme prejudice.

The polite society, talking through the intelligentsia in its ivory tower, is so used to hearing its correctness that it has forgotten what it means to be human. Such is the comfort it lives in that it does not realise how all of its world is underpinned by originary, ongoing, and latent violence: the necessary violence to establish a settlement, the violence that secures access to resources, the violence that keeps enemies away, the violence of law that safeguards order.

It is thus that we have a civilisation to speak of, for stability and its concomitant predictability provides the luxury to pursue activities that go beyond the struggle for survival, such as art, science, and philosophy. And if we ever rediscover the vitality of revolution that will aim to free us from the excesses of the oligarchs it, too, will be carried out in violence.

This is not to glorify brutality nor to debase morality. It is a mere description of how things stand. You are reminded of all this as soon as you set aside the books and work the land: nature will quickly reveal its norms. We still have to operate in accordance with practical reason, which entails restraint of the highest form. Otherwise, we fall in the vicious cycle of irresponsibility and bloodlust, of massacres that beget massacres, which is how radical uncertainty takes hold and civilisation is undone.

There is nothing inherently suspect with football fans adopting superficially nationalistic forms of expression. It is a sign of maturity and emotional stability to not take oneself too seriously, to knowingly incorporate historically inaccurate representations in one’s patterns of behaviour, and to even have the audacity to be absurd where necessary. This is how we recapture the spirit of ethnic traditions which understand quotidian affairs, sport, art, and religion on a continuum of work, play, and human creativity, of metaphor and didactic story-telling, else mythology.

Narratives with a clear ethnic origin and target audience help cultivate in people a sense of belonging. They thus contribute to the formation of a framework within which social life unfolds and the individual is given a clear role they can thrive in. People feel lost when they have no structure around them that they identify with. They turn inwardly and withdraw to their self where they can only find the twin ills of overthinking and powerlessness. Those lead to an implosion into depression or explosion into criminality.

The social whole has cultural particularities the same way a group of friends develops its own private language and inside jokes: it is for the sake of strengthening its bonds not being exclusionary per se. Ethnicity connects the past to the present while giving a clear outlook for the future. It makes people feel rooted in their locality. What rootless moneymen detest the most is communities which honour their ways; communities which necessarily subsist in a defined land that they consider their homeland, as it echoes the stories of their ancestors. Such communities do not submit to the crude reasoning of the balance sheet and will not sell their soul in pursuit of profit or prestige. Therefore, they instil in people a sense of duty towards the collective, which is expressed as solidarity.

Coming back to the Vikings of this World Cup, may the best side win and everybody have fun in the meantime.