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I don't think I've ever heard anyone IRL say they have viking ancestors. Yearning for Valhalla is more a specific type of extremely online poster / podcast bro / FBI director kind of behavior.
Would wearing a haircut from that dreadful viking TV show and a Thor hammer necklace count? I’ve seen quite a meme-worthy characters over the years
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Would wearing a haircut from that dreadful viking TV show and a Thor hammer necklace count? I’ve seen quite a meme-worthy characters over the years
There was that one Indian guy who hit the gym, bleached his skin and hair and now does a pretty credible Viking impression.
It is linguistically possible that "viking" was simply a self-referential ethnonym, with the first part meaning "home" or "village". 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.
In Icelandic, at least to my knowledge, we have never used Víkingur as an ethnonym (well maybe during a sports game, or among right-wing nationalists). It has always meant raiders. In 2007 there was even a new word dubbed Útrásarvíkingar meaning businessmen who made a bunch of money doing business abroad (buykings would a clever translation of the term).
EDIT: I just remembered that the -ingur suffix can also be used to indicate a temporary state e.g. ruglingur (confusion) and troðningur (trampling [n.]), and was used as such e.g. að fara í víking (to embark to a viking) so víkingur could also mean, a person that embarks to a bay.
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> rather than Scandinavian 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.
they do romanticize their ancient past as one of conquest and domination over others.
btw, even without the viking aspect, norse law was pretty strange in that it allowed murder for a fine. there is definitely a savage aspect to white tradition as there is to any modern culture, but there is a lot of whitewashing thats done to present anglo saxons as racially superior, highly civilized culture.
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The first part of the word viking, or vik simply means "bay" in nordic languages
The even firster part "vi" means "we" though.
In fact I don‘t remember a suffix which attaches to a pronoun. In modern Icelandic at least we like to introduce more pronouns or conjugate them rather then to suffix or prefix them.
If the word was broken as vi-kingur, I think the modern Icelandic would be við-kingur (or við-lingur), which is simply not a word in the language.
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Where did you hear it? I am sure at least one out of hundreds of millions of Americans claimed it. But you know, we have people who think the earth is flat, as well. But by that token one can take any dumb thing someone from a large group said and sort of say “why do all X say this one dumb thing”
At least from my experience I only heard people claim Scandinavian ancestry. Or even more specifically a country like Norway or Sweden for example. Places like Minnesota or Wisconsin have a lot of that.
The answer is - it's both. There's also parallels in archers in Europe from the longbow period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_longbow#Training You can tell who was a professional archer by looking at their skeleton, and so naturally families who had bodies with more readily adaptable skeletons typically became archers. This married the morphology of an archer to social status and family line.
It's safe to say that 100% of the Northmen who invaded England in 1066 shared that same "job description", however.
Poor Sven just liked maps but they kept making him come along on their “excursions”.