Why Vikings?

A furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine.

“From the fury of the Northmen deliver us, O Lord.”

When Wicked and I first discussed my visit on Twitter, I asked her if she’d like me to write about anything in particular, and she said, “Why Vikings.”  My rather flip response was something on the order of “Why not? (Or is that answer too short?)”

But really, why?

The uber-alpha warrior hero is as old as the modern romance novel itself, introduced in Kathleen Woodiwiss’s second book, The Wolf and the Dove (1974). Wulfgar, the base-born Norman knight who takes command of Darkenwald and its heiress, Lady Aislynn, is all things alpha: lusty, arrogant, handsome (though scarred), sexy, domineering, honorable, heavy-handed but just, never unnecessarily cruel. He is also a Viking.

Wait, you say. Didn’t you just call him a Norman knight?

Well, yes, but the Normans were Vikings (look at the Latin prayer against the Vikings, aka Norsemen/Northmen, above). Specifically, they were the descendants of the army of Gongu-Hrolf, aka Rollo the Ganger (Walker), who had harried the Franks into giving him lands along the coast of France and the right to collect tolls from every ship that passed up the Seine in return for NOT ransacking Paris. Afterward, the Vikings were happy to settle down, bring in some women—their own or others’, it didn’t matter—and start farming. (Some researchers believe that population pressures and lack of farmland back home were what sent the Norsemen off a-viking in the first place.)

Since a group of Vikings had done basically the same thing in England a few decades earlier, splitting the country pretty much down the middle, the Norman invasion of England in 1096 was more of a feud between cousins than a conquering by a foreigners—although I’m sure it didn’t feel that way to the English.

Oops, got off on one of my history rants. Back to the question, Why Vikings?

Go back and read that description of alpha Wulfgar, and then that bit about the Vikings settling down.

Romance, at its most basic, is about the feminine taming the masculine, the maid bringing the warrior to his knees. And while raiding Vikings were undoubtedly brutal, monstrous barbarians, capable of flaying a man alive for an evening’s entertainment, they were, underneath that, supremely tamable. Unlike the nomadic Huns who never quite settled down, Northmen had a pattern of subjugating a population, carrying off the treasure and some slaves, and then moving in for the long term. Additionally, Viking women had rights undreamed of in the rest of Europe, and the sagas contain many stories of men brought into line as good husbands by women they loved (at which point, in line with modern romance novels, the couple is considered boring and the story ends…without even a nice baby epilogue)

And then there’s how they looked: tall, golden, hunks of virile manhood. If you think that’s just an idealized image, recall that Ibn Fadlan (921AD) met the Rus, Vikings who had moved into the lands now called Russia in their honor, and said of them:

“I have seen the Rus as they came on their merchant journeys and encamped by the Volga. I have never seen more perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms, blonde and ruddy…

To back up Ibn Fadlan’s account, we also have The Annals of Fulda (884AD), which tell us:

Quales numquam antea in gente Francorum visi fuissent, in pulchritudine videlicet ac proceritate corporum.

[In that battle such men are said to have been killed among the Northmen as had never been seen before among the Frankish people, namely in their beauty and the size of their bodies]. (Coupland, Simon. “The Vikings on the Continent in Myth and History.” History 88:290 (April 2003) pp. 188-189)

So we have gorgeous physical specimens, strong enough to conquer pretty much anyone they run across, who start out flippin’ scary but are willing to change and settle down to become decent husbands and good fathers.

In other words, we have romance heroes.

And that’s why Vikings.

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Lisa Hendrix is the author of the Immortal Brotherhood series, about a crew of Viking warriors cursed to live for eternity as were-beasts, each taking the form of his fylgja, or spirit companion. Her current book, Immortal Champion, the third in the series, follows the trials of Gunnar the Bull as he seeks the one woman who can help him be free of the curse. Find out more about Gunnar and his fellow warriors at Lisa’s website, http://lisahendrix.com, and follow her on Twitter and Facebook for news, chat, and contests.