The Black Toenails of the Vikings

Myth:  The Vikings, a group composed of various Scandinavian ethnicities, is the general title bestowed upon a peoples prevalent during the late Dark Ages to the early Middle Ages.  The Vikings are often characterized as a brutal and warring people, composed of merchants, pirates, marauders and explorers, conquering and settling many areas of Europe and the North Atlantic.  Using their infamous longships, the Vikings traveled as far east as Constantinople and parts of Russia – not to mention the possibility of being the first Europeans to discover the Americas more than four centuries before Columbus’ famed voyage.

Fact:  The Vikings were a misunderstood tribe, not comprised of burly, bearded men as popular lore suggests, but rather a rag tag gathering of scrawny, brooding, acne-prone teenagers.  They were, in the crudest sense, the first Goth kids the world would see.  Coming from all walks of life, contradicting the earlier notion that most were of Norse stock, these depressed teenagers, often from broken homes, went north to be with their own.  A manuscript found in present day Portugal details the emigration of one noble family’s troubled youngest son to present day Sweden:  “Our youngest, Franco de Brofila, has decided, after the divorce of our parents, to head to the gloomiest region of our continent.  He has, shockingly, changed his name to Frank the Bloody Crow and taken a liking to Scandinavia’s native tongues.  Today he leaves with several others carrying nothing but his poetry.”  Scandinavia became a haven for once wealthy heirs submitting to their hormones.  But what of the brutal pillaging that has entertained imaginations over the centuries?  This can be answered simply.  After a century of emigration to the morose environment of the Norse world, many of the adolescents became jaded as the population grew exponentially.  In short, it simply wasn’t cool to live in Scandinavia anymore – posers had tainted the area.  After about a century, the Viking children began to fracture into sects, each vying to find the darkest place on earth, a place so dark that the poetry and off-key, simple guitar chords would simply flow from one’s fingernails.  So, they departed.  Many of the inhabitants the Vikings came across felt sorry for these disillusioned youngsters and told stories of their brawn and cunning so as to boost their broken egos.  Many even adopted some of these lost youth.  Leif Ericson’s (Leif Ericson translates into “Lover of Manson” in English) adoptive mother was so compassionate that she managed put her adopted son in the history books as a possible original discoverer of North America.  Her recently discovered diary says otherwise:  “He was a meek little thing, weighing only about 5 logs [about 90 pounds] and ate only Fritos most of the day.  But he had a sweet side, and I accepted him as my own.”