This is a great and scholarly piece — and it has a noble purpose, in its effort to refute a spectacularly stupid attempt to haul vikings into the characterisation of Trump as a fitting rival to Putin. But there's a problem: the entire piece is really about Icelandic society in the thirteenth century. None of this really describes vikings and their habits, and indeed we know just enough about some of the real vikings of the eighth to eleventh centuries to know that some thoroughly unpleasant, aggressive, dominant figures did very nicely for themselves. To believe they would have been marginalised — on the basis of tales about Icelandic culture form several hundred years later — is simply to ignore the testimony of history.
This is a great and scholarly piece — and it has a noble purpose, in its effort to refute a spectacularly stupid attempt to haul vikings into the characterisation of Trump as a fitting rival to Putin. But there's a problem: the entire piece is really about Icelandic society in the thirteenth century. None of this really describes vikings and their habits, and indeed we know just enough about some of the real vikings of the eighth to eleventh centuries to know that some thoroughly unpleasant, aggressive, dominant figures did very nicely for themselves. To believe they would have been marginalised — on the basis of tales about Icelandic culture form several hundred years later — is simply to ignore the testimony of history.