Crying At The Viking Ship Museum
When your Fantasy Self shows up as...a ninth century ship.
This piece is long! I have been working on it for five years! And it is dedicated to my dad!
In the summer of 2019, my father and I went on vacation to Northern Europe. He has both Northern German and Swedish ancestry, so we decided to go to these fatherlands. In addition to Germany and Sweden, we also traveled to Denmark and Norway.
It was a great trip, one I will remember for the rest of my life. And mercifully, everything mostly worked out. We both nearly had panic attacks at the Vasa ship museum in Stockholm when there were crowds of tourists blocking the fire exits, and Dad got trapped in an automatic door at the spy museum in Berlin. But otherwise, we loved it.
Everywhere we went, we were mistaken for locals. Other tourists asked us for directions, or to translate labels on water bottles.
In Copenhagen, a middle-aged man passing by us in the street offered a convivial comment to my father (I believe he was remarking on the hot weather) in Danish, and my dad nodded and said “yeah.”
One morning in Stockholm, my dad and I were in the breakfast room of the hotel at a communal table. We are not morning people, so we were eating our Swedish pancakes and muesli in silence. My father, unbeknownst to me, was trying to work out in his head why the mango juice he’d poured for himself tasted so funny--it later turned out that he’d been drinking rosehip soup, but assumed it was mango juice because of its rich orange color. Someone had knocked the label off the table. An older British woman next to me clucked at her husband: “Harold! You have to put the jam in between the pancakes! That’s what she’s doing. That must be the proper way!” And she gestured at me. I caught Dad’s eye, and we continued the ruse, eating the rest of our meal without speaking.
All of this could be chalked up to phenotype. I take after my dad. His eyes are sky blue and mine are a darker blue-green, and he is tall and until recently, white-haired. My hair is light brown but turns blonde in the summer, just like his did, and we both have a war of milk and blood in our cheeks. Our bone structure is the same. For me it has been a great joy to resemble my dad so strongly because it gives me a sense of irrefutable belonging. There is no question that I am my father’s daughter. And when he looks at me, I can tell he is proud.
On our second day in Oslo we walked to Museum Island, which was about three miles from our hotel. Nothing worries my dad so much as buses, trams, and other conveyances of which he is not in control. I’ve always spent a lot of time anticipating what my dad wants and needs and what he’s afraid of. I’m sure I would make a fantastic executive assistant. Anyway, we walked there, all three miles, in the muggy overcast heat of Oslo in July.
There are three ships in the museum, all dating from around the ninth and tenth centuries. The most spectacularly beautiful is the Oseberg ship, which is the first one you see. It dates from around 820 AD and is made of oak and fastened with iron. This ship is big—I couldn’t fit it all in one photo no matter where I stood. It has ornate carvings on the prow and the stern, and could hold thirty oarsmen.
This ship was repurposed from its seafaring to become the burial ship for two women, who were pretty important in their community, because they were buried with a lavish number of gifts, including four sleighs, five beds, and fifteen horses. But nobody knows who these women were or why they were buried with such extravagant honor. One of them was about seventy, the other about fifty.
As I beheld the Oseberg ship, I started to cry. Just a few tears. Then we moved to the Tune ship, which is not as well preserved, but it was probably much larger and faster than the Oseberg ship. The lights dimmed, and on the blank wall above the Tune ship, the museum started projecting a video, heavily CGI, that dramatized the lives of the people who rowed these ships. Mystical flute music played, accompanied by swelling strings, and in the movie, gruff men in helmets and beards set off in the ships, battling the high seas.
This made me cry again, which was pretty embarrassing because this young boy kept looking at me quizzically from across the room. He thought the video was stupid, and he was right.
But then I went back over to the Oseberg ship. It filled me with joy so sharp it pierced my heart. I could not stop openly weeping in a room full of people while looking at this ancient ship.
I had no idea where my tears had come from. I have been trying to figure it out for five years.
An Historic Interlude Into The Viking Age! Are you not THRILLED?
After this formative experience, I fell into an informal but dedicated study of the Viking Age. I am prone to intellectual hyperfixations and this became one of my preoccupations for years afterwards. (The other was Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, I made a nonfiction narrative podcast about them. To answer your question, no, I do not watch television, I’d rather be making things). And that’s how I learned that the cultural idea we have of Vikings is warped.
That in itself is its own essay. But the most basic misconception is this: ‘Viking’ is not an ethnicity, nationality, or clan. The word ‘Viking’ refers to a profession, that of sailing to pillage and plunder foreign lands. A man was only a Viking as long as he was at sea carrying out his raids. When he returned home, he became again just a regular farmer.
That is why there is a Viking Age and not a Scandinavian or a Nordic Age. For one thing, the Icelanders and the Finns would probably be offended to be called ‘Scandinavian’ because they are not Scandinavian. For another, the Viking Age refers only to the specific time in which the men who went a-Viking rapidly expanded their area of operations. In a two hundred year period, they made it as far South as Sicily, as far East as Iran, as far West as Newfoundland.
Thor Was More Important Than Odin, Kind Of
The Viking Age basically ends with the adoption of Christianity, though many people continued to worship the old gods anyway. Thor was the most popular god among Viking men, according to archaeological evidence. In English the day Thursday is named after him (it originally was Thor’s-day). In the Icelandic sagas, and in current day Scandinavia, Thor is over-represented in male first names. There are all kinds of derivatives: Thorstein, Torbjorn, Thorvald, Thorleif, Tor Einar, and so on. People built a lot of shrines to him--probably more than they did to Odin the All-Father. And therefore, if we look at Thor as he is presented in surviving Norse myths, we can learn a lot about what mattered to an actual Viking.
Thor is immensely strong, reliable, and brave. He is a huge red-bearded man with dark blue eyes whose hammer, Mjolnir, makes the thunderclap sound. Sometimes he is a bit dim-witted, much to his feckless brother Loki’s delight, and sometimes his temper gets the best of him. But he is above all a fierce warrior who terrifies his enemies. He was someone you wanted in your corner, someone who earned your loyalty rather than your awe. Given that being a man in the Viking age was often dangerous and always grueling, Viking men probably looked to Thor as a role model instead of Odin, who is all-knowing but imperious.
Odin also invited ambivalence because he wanted the best warriors to be on his side, waiting with him in Valhalla for Ragnarok. Valhalla is where warriors go in the afterlife. In other words, if Odin liked you, he kind of wanted you dead so that you’d be on his team in the spirit realm when the time came. Thor on the other hand, he’d prefer you were alive so you could help him the next time there were problems in the giant realm, Jotunheim. (There are always problems fomenting in Jotunheim, even today).
Odin is as unreliable, mysterious, and distant as any earthly father, with his one functioning eye trained on eternity. He’s like Yahweh with more personality and a bumbling penchant for bad disguises. Thor is more straightforward. He never asks his men to do anything he wouldn’t do. Thor typified the traits needed to survive in the Viking world: tribal loyalty, bravery, brute strength, determination, endurance, and above all, raw nerve.
Why I Was So Moved By An Artifact of History
I somehow mapped those qualities onto the ship itself. What’s weird is that at the time, I knew very little about the Vikings. And yet the bravery, the raw nerve, the wanderlust—all of that was imbued in the ship itself. Standing beneath its curved, haughty prow was as thrilling as an unexpected kiss.
I had this yearning for a life defined by bravery and intrepid risk-taking.
But that was not me.
Throughout my life, I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression, two diseases that tend to make you pretty risk averse. In addition I have experienced intense post-traumatic stress and survivor’s guilt, which has only served to compound my risk-aversion in the past nine years. As a result, I’ve struggled a lot to identify and go after the things I really want.
The phenomenon of glamour, when I discovered how it worked, felt so exciting because it presented me with a road map to the truth of what I valued. And a lot of the time, I was too afraid to let myself know what I valued.
I felt alienated back then. But the hilarious thing is: I would be even more alienated if I could somehow go back in time and live among my Viking forebears. I would be too delicate, too prone to sinus infections, too philosophical. Perhaps I would be allowed to tend to the children, or make cheese, or weave cloth, but I would never be included on those intrepid voyages towards the western stars.
So why was I seized by a longing to return to that time? Why did I fantasize about clambering onto that ship?
This is the truth:
I want to be brave. I want my life to have a grand purpose. I want a journey with a fabled destination, and I want the camaraderie that comes from belonging to the crew of a ship.
I want to be a writer, a painter, a teller of stories, a singer of ballads. I want to be the voice in other peoples’ heads that says quietly, remember. Remember the woods and the oceans and the mountains from which you came. Remember when you were young and everything was overwhelming in its beauty and magic, but then your innocence was lost, and it was never the same after that, but sometimes you smell violets and you remember.
I want to be the golden eyes of a wolf on the margins of the forest, burning in the dark like struck matches, alerting you to the ancient truths you spend most of your time suppressing. I want to make you aware of where your body ends and where mine begins; I want to smell the adrenaline in your blood; I want to startle you.
When I was looking at the prow of that ship all those years ago, I had denied that about myself. I told myself that my gift of writing was shameful, because it can’t easily be monetized. (I did not know about Substack!) I was depressed and lost, having just failed at trying to be a teacher. A career path I chose, by the way, because I thought it would make my parents proud of me, not because I actually wanted to do it.
I kept telling myself to just be content with where I was—living with my mom, not doing anything with my life, sleeping for 14 hours a day. Stop striving, stop hoping, stop dreaming. Just give up. It would have been easier to follow the siren call of nihilism and allow my life to mean nothing. I’ve gone there before. The effort it takes to crawl back from that country takes years off your life. But I was still on fire with longing all the time—it had just been pushed underground.
The Oseberg ship forced me to stop living like I didn’t care what happened to me. It allowed that hoping, dreaming, brave part of me to surface. I was closer to her than I’d ever been. I could see the whites of her eyes. They stood out all the more starkly from her sunburned skin.
That was why I was crying.
This is what happens when glamour comes at us sideways. Your Fantasy Self could be hiding in many different places.
While researching for this essay I found out that it took four years for a Nordic woman to weave one sail for a Viking ship. Scholars now agree that the introduction of the sail was what enabled the Vikings to travel over such great distances. There would be no Viking Age, no L’Anse aux Meadows, no excursions to Sicily, without the skilled labor of women. Their deftness, their dedication, their skill, is what carried these warriors lightly over the waves.
And the women could have said no.
Nordic women were still second class citizens in Viking society. At the same time, they had a lot of control over their households in relative terms. It wasn’t necessary for them to weave these sails; it took the wool of over 200 sheep to make just one. That wool could have been allocated for new clothes for the family, or as products to sell. So these voyages must have been something the women cared about and felt invested in.
Perhaps I am just meant to stay at home on the farm and lose myself in hours of repetitive action. Perhaps courage is most visible in the quiet determination to finish something important to us, regardless of the other demands we feel we must answer.
Or perhaps not.
I Am Only Brave In My Bikini: The Ocean As A Staging Ground For My Latent Courage
The great thing about glamour is when you realize you already have the kernel of the thing that you long for. See, I become like a Viking in the ocean. I grew up surfing with my father. Except that I don’t like surfing itself all that much anymore.
My dad has an intuitive understanding of the water. He passed it down to me. I have it too. The ocean is my dad’s true home. All his bitterness and disappointment get washed away, leaving only the part of him that is whole and tender and free and brave. When I think of “my dad,” this is the man who appears in my mind’s eye. You know, he never smiles all the way unless he’s in the water, and that smile is my favorite thing in the whole world.
His love of surfing has taken him all over the world, from Tahiti to Samoa to New Zealand to Brazil. He’s surfed the North Shore, he’s surfed with world champions, he surfed El Porto in the seventies. My dad has lived like a Viking. He has crested those towering black waves.
And in a sense, this is the strongest bond I have with him, this love for the sea. But I’ve never had his natural finesse on a surfboard.
Your surfboard can be your friend and guide, but it can also turn against you. If you lose control of it and it flies above you in the air, the fin can slice through your eye, the board can knock you out. That has almost happened to me.
And when you take off on a wave, there is a fundamental--momentary, but total--yielding of control to the wave. You must wait for it to catch you. Even if you are paddling like hell, you are really waiting for it to pick you up and carry you along in its arms. I do not like that sensation. It fills me with blind terror. I do not like having to wait for the sets to come in, suspended in an eerie stillness beyond the breakers, my body tensed in preparation for the appearance of a rogue wave.
But when I swim, without my surfboard, I feel better. I can duck under the waves that try to crush me, or launch myself over them. There is no longer a buoyant piece of fiberglass preventing me from slipping under or from moving how I wish to move. I take risks; I swim toward the crest of a wave, hoping to float over it before it breaks. Sometimes I feel the velvet treachery of a sting-ray beneath my feet--its body, not its barb--or the fluttery fins of a sand shark. Sometimes, I even allow myself to twirl around in the water like a mermaid twisting her tail.
I am home in the sea, and home for me is a lonely place. Home is a place where danger lurks, where change is constant, where nothing is certain. And it is so beautiful.
But I will keep going there, and I will keep evading those foaming white fists, and I will keep breathing strategically, even as my heart twists itself into worried knots and does its best to convince me that the risk isn’t worth it.
Because I know that fears, when we face them, must always be faced alone.