The Roman Empire at times extended all the way from England to the Persian Gulf. It included various Celtic people, North Africans, people from the Balkans, Turkic people and people from the Middle East. At no point did these people become ethnically homogenous but they all very much Romanized.
The British Empire spanned the globe.
In more modern times the Austro-Hungarian Empire included a dozen or more ethnic groups and languages.
Would we describe being Roman, a Briton or an Austro-Hungarian as a "job"? I don't think so.
I think this is the articles point. We would not consider being Roman a job, but we would consider being a Legionary a job.
The article is arguing “Viking” is more “Legionary” than “Roman.”
In other parts of the world, plenty of people romanticize ancestry with Ghenghis Khan too.
Everyone loves being seen to be on the ‘winning’ side sometimes, (and there is always a counter-culture minority!) and when sufficiently remote in time, no one is going to really ‘feel’ the atrocities. Then it’s all about marketing and current social whims.
If the Nazi’s won, the current 80/20 pro/anti ratio would be flipped no question.
You don’t have to go very far back in history to see that humans have some pretty dark tendencies.
Strange, being in North America, I've yet to meet anyone identify themself as having viking blood, but we refer to Scandinavians as being of viking ancestry all the time.
Mentioning "vikings" and "pirates" and "ICE agents" is fine.
Why the political correctness though?
There has to be for everyone so let's also use another example... And I know I'm going to be downvoted (double standards are wonderful).
The mayor of NY, Mamdani, said publicly that it was now time for american to "learn about the life of Muhammad". Many muslims proudly name their first born son after their prophet. Shall I list here the great deeds he did during his life? Owning sex slaves, engaging in slavery (of both white and black people: and the word "slave" comes from "slav" -- slavic people -- aka white people), slaughtering infidels, etc.
I encourage everybody to listen to the great words of the mayor of NYC and go buy a quran and read it to learn about the life of Muhammad, so they can then make up their mind about whether people naming their sons Muhammad should be proud or not.
Literally the most common name in the world is the name of a pedophile (of course due to the fact that lying to infidels is permitted, some are going to dispute the age of the youngest of his many wives he had sex with but nobody contests that he had sex slaves and that he was killing infidels). And that's the most common name in the world.
> Like, beyond it not being an ethnicity, you're identifying specifically with violent raiders who killed peaceful monks, even if that's romanticized by media.
Oh I fully agree.
The following is true too:
"Like, beyond it not being an ethnicity, you're identifying specifically with violent patriarcal human traffickers [who trafficked way more people, for way more centuries, than europeans ever did] who killed peaceful people, raped their wives and daughters, enslaved them, ... even if that's totally romanticized by media."
But somehow that's acceptable because? What exactly?
What does this even mean?
Yearning for Valhalla is more a specific type of extremely online poster / podcast bro / FBI director kind of behavior.
It’s well known, to the point of near-cliche, that the word “Viking” didn’t refer to a nationality or ethnicity. It meant something akin to “raider”. The ethnic group is usually referred to as the Norse, at least until they start differentiating into the modern nationalities of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese.
The actual finding here seems to be the discovery of the remains of some Viking raiders who weren’t ethnically Norse. Fair enough. There are also examples of Norse populations assimilating into other cultures, such as the Normans and Rus. Likewise, the traditionally Norse Varangian Guard accepted many Anglo-Saxon warriors whose lords didn’t survive the Norman conquest. So it’s not too surprising that someone of non-Nordic descent might be accepted into a Viking warband.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
Compare Ancient Greek [w]oikos, and all the various ves, vas, wieś, which can be found all over Eastern Europe.
> And comparing DNA and archaeology at individual sites suggests that for some in the Viking bands, "Viking" was a job description, not a matter of heredity.
barrenko•1h ago