Identity paradigms in the perception of the Viking diaspora

Within the research studies on the early Middle Ages, increasing attention has been paid to social and ethnic issues, during the last decades. New groups and local societies ensued from the collapse of the Roman Empire were experiencing new forms of organization and identity, once merged in the imperial ideology of regna, religio et gentes. Around the North Sea basin, among Scandinavia, the British Isles and Northern France, mixed networks known as ‘Vikings/vikings’ gave rise to long-lasting and shifting stereotypes of ethnic representation, particularly successful in the reworkings of the Victorian Romanticism. This was largely due to its emotional impact on the contemporary European communities, and to the related critical questions about cultural identity. The powerful imagery recalled by the various labels in the medieval iconography and literary sources reveals how deeply misunderstood viking super-ethnical, non-religious and loosely nation-based nature generally was.