This chapter shows how, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Norse gods and the Scandinavian Viking were reimagined and refashioned in poetry, visual art, and music drama in accordance with Burke’s ideas of the sublime. Coinciding temporally with Burke’s Enquiry, the revival of interest in Old Norse and medieval Scandinavian poetry furnished poets and artists with a new mythology as an alternative to classical Greek and Roman mythology. This chapter argues that the aesthetics of the sublime, as a challenge to neoclassical standards, encouraged an expansion of the poetical canon, allowing for the inclusion of ancient Scandinavian poetry, which the previous generation had scorned as rough and barbaric, and furthermore provided a new verbal and visual idiom in which this poetry could be recreated for a contemporary audience.

The Scandinavian seaborne raiders known as the Vikings are famous for their violence. Initially operating in small bands, by the second half of the ninth century they put together large armies comparable in size and weaponry to those of the kingdoms of Europe, some of which were brought to their knees. The purpose of the Vikings’ violence was to acquire wealth, which fed into the political economy of northern Europe, notably in the form of gift-giving. Viking warriors were motivated by a warrior ideology of violence that praised bravery, toughness, and loyalty. Any fallen warrior who had excelled in these qualities expected to go to Valhöll, the great hall of the god Odin, where they would constantly be feasting. The unexpected raids by previously barely known peoples from northern Europe was shocking to their victims, who tended to exaggerate the fighting prowess of the Vikings and to ascribe a particular propensity for violence to them. The idea that the Vikings were more violent than others took root in European culture and spread also to Scandinavia itself, leading to unfounded myths such as berserks and the ritual of the bloodeagle. The violence of the Vikings was, however, not dissimilar from the violence of other early-medieval Europeans.