Visibly Viking

It is, however, not only a matter of inner qualities, such as personality and genetic traces of potential future diseases. The mainstream social genetic imaginary is further connected to an outer and visible representation, to which I will turn next. As is the case with most mainstream culture, the social genetic imaginary is both followed by and productive of very convincing ‘visual effects’. Gilroy notes that imperial production of races and raciology required ‘a synthesis of logos with icon’ (Gilroy 2004a: 35) and that is what The New York Times article and the website introduce with the figure of the Vikings. The New York Times article couples the genetic discourse with a portrait of the Viking-donors and future babies using imagery and visual imaginary reminiscent of past racial and human classifications. In the following I will explore this iconographic imagery and visual imaginary further and trace its genealogy to fascist imagery.

In The New York Times article this third strand, of the physicality and aesthetic of the blond and tall offspring of Danish college boys, is obvious in the Viking metonymy hinted at in the headline as well as in the metaphor used throughout the piece.

Additionally, the accounts of the sperm donors in the sperm bank catalogue describes the college boys as physically active in four kinds of sports and measuring 1.90 centimetres. On top of which the success of the sperm bank is said to be partly due to

‘a high success rate in producing offspring’ (Alvarez 2004). Thus, according to the

picture sketched in the article, the virile¹²⁷ Danish college boys of the twenty-first century, physically active and attractive, are populating the world just like during the Viking Age, only less violently, and as the heading reads, without boats.

The Viking imaginary is furthered on the website for Cryos International and by documentaries examining Viking lives and raids such as the BBC television production, The Blood of the Vikings (2001). I want to elaborate on the Viking iconography using this documentary, because it makes explicit what the article only alludes to in terms of virility, masculinity and wildness of the Cryos Viking baby and the historical Viking. The imagery used in The Blood of the Vikings introduces the Viking as a man with long blond hair and a fierce look. As the Online Etymological Dictionary states, a Viking is a ‘Scandinavian pirate’¹²⁸, a war-loving wildman out to spread his seed. Nevertheless, in the documentary he is an admired wildman, admired for his longships, craftsmanship and technical knowledge, as well as for his fierce fighting instinct. In The Blood of the Vikings, the Vikings are only portrayed in war battles, and the narrator Julian Richards meticulously describes their fatal wounds, deaths and killings. There is a kind of fascination with the violence the Vikings produced and the vision they had of their own worth in combination with their talent for the technical side of war. Though the Vikings are portrayed as plunderers and killers, rape is awkwardly absent from the narrative of the documentary and these acts remain uncondemned. A fascination remains, which can be paralleled with what Susan Sontag (1980) identifies as the love for and the aesthetics of the Noble Savage in fascist imaginary. She writes:

Fascist aesthetics include but go far beyond the rather special celebration of the primitive… [T]hey flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behaviour, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two

127 Again the ambiguity of this topic presents itself in that the Danish male population is in fact among the least fertile in the world. Several studies and conferences have discussed why 40–50% of Danish men’s sperm count is below 40 million per millilitre. This is below ‘normal’ adequacy for pregnancy to occur and much lower than other nations’ with male populations very much like the Danish, Finnish men, for instance. The problem has been discussed at several conferences and in the news as well. See, for instance, http://www.dagensmedicin.dk/nyheder/2006/02/09/darlig-sad-er-et-samfundspr/.

(accessed 1. Nov. 2008)

128 http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=Viking&searchmode=none. (Accessed 1. Nov.

2008)

seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. (Sontag 1980:

91).

The parallel (and it is only a parallel) lies in the celebration of ‘the primitive’ through a ‘preoccupation’ with masculine physical violence and political power paired with the civilised and practical talents for developing war technology. Sontag’s Noble Savage is submissive and servile by virtue of being ‘untouched’ by civilisation: a traditional imperial notion of anachronistic representation of the ‘uncivilised other’.

This is contrary to the case of the Vikings, in which the displacement in time is factual and so they can be seen as naturally submissive to civilisation while still admirable for their ‘uncivilised’ ways. The Vikings are, so to speak, excused for their violence.

Sontag goes on to argue for the fascist constraint of female importance: ‘a society in which women are merely breeders and helpers, excluded from all ceremonial functions and represent a threat to the integrity and strength of men’ (Sontag 1980:

90). This circumscription has already been discussed above, but it re-enters the stage in The Blood of the Vikings, though to a lesser degree, when the narrator Richards takes the task upon himself – with the help of scientists – to track Viking DNA in contemporary male Britons’ veins. The scientific experiment once again ties together genetics and masculine identity. Neither The Blood of the Vikings nor personal interests in Viking history or family genealogy dating back to the Viking Age are connoted as fascist. Rather the denotations of physical masculinity and fascination with violence and the connotations of this particular picture of muscular, ‘white’ men draw a parallel to the denotations and connotations of the fascist iconography of the perfectly shaped and healthy male body and its capacity for violence as well as honour.

An additional parallel in representational imagery and visual imaginary connected to the Vikings can be traced from the fascist ideals to the colonial categorisations of the Family of Man. Besides the lurid ‘science’ of racial hygiene, the colonial and the fascist ideas of race and raciology have visual representations in common. The commercialisation of whiteness to sell purity through soap commercials and other imperial products during the height of colonial regimes (McClintock 1995, Gilroy 2004a) is comparable to the fascist admiration of ‘white’ skin, strong health and