The Vikings brutalised our ancestors. So why do the English still love them?

Michael Wood on what the World Cup revealed about national identity

An illustrated tree growing from a ring of sea, its branches hung with three golden crowns, with a robed king standing on the left shore and a Viking-style warrior with a shield standing on the right shore, facing each other across the water.

Published: September 4, 2026 at 4:00 PM

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The excitement of the World Cup is over – with all the ‘might have beens’. For England, one of the highlights of the tournament was the close-fought battle with the Norwegians, before ultimate defeat at the hands of Argentina.

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As an early medieval historian, one intervention had me smiling: a message on social media purporting to be from a Norwegian ambassador (though quite likely a spoof):

Our world cup journey ends here, but respect remains. Vikings and Saxons share a long history and in many ways we are family. As I promised, if Norway fell tonight, I would proudly stand behind England for the rest of the tournament. Bring the World Cup home for the sons of Vikings and Saxons! On behalf of Norwegians, good luck cousins!

Cousins? Well, it is a long connection, especially in northern parts of Britain. In a Norse saga describing the events of 1066, when a fleeing Norwegian asks the way from a Yorkshire peasant, he replies: “You’re from Norway, I can tell by the way you speak.” They spoke a dialect of the same language.

In parts of the north, that lasted a very long time, as the pages of the Lakeland Dialect Society show. In 1940 in Narvik, Norway, the Westmorland and Cumberland Field Artillery could make themselves understood in the local shops. In the Wirral, the Norwegian Viking settlement in 902 has left distinctive family names, which are matched by distinctive DNA.

Britain, of course, has long been the goal of migrants coming westwards. Post-Roman settlements from modern north-west Europe transformed the identity of Britain, especially from Jutland, Denmark and Saxony (England, after all, got its name from Angeln in Schleswig), but also from southern Sweden and Norway.

There were intensive migration periods: one in the late Roman world and the so-called Dark Ages, and one in the ninth century, the Age of the Vikings. This had a profound effect on the nature of the English state that emerged in the 10th century. Æthelstan and Edgar ruled an Anglo-Scandinavian kingdom. “We Anglo-Saxons,” Lantfred of Winchester wrote, are a kingdom of “many different peoples, distinct in appearance, speech and custom.” In the 960s, parts of King Edgar’s law codes were “common to all the nation, whether English, Danes or Britons”. But others were regional: “For my Danish subjects, I leave it to them to establish the best secular laws as they see fit.” It was understood that no one law would work everywhere. So Englishness itself, you could say, was more about allegiance to the king, and the law made in his name, than to race or language.

This Anglo-Scandinavian state was ruled by Danish kings in the 11th century: Cnut, Harald and Harthacnut. Cnut ruled a North Sea empire, and for a time the crowns of England, Denmark and Norway were united. But all that changed in 1066 with the Norman conquest. Then a Norman-French aristocracy subdued the country with absolute ruthlessness in a massive rupture with the deep continuities of Anglo-Saxon England. The stark divisions of power, class and language were very long lasting. Some would say they are still with us.

So, the social media poster may have been having a bit of fun in the World Cup. But they justly drew attention to the long connections of England and Scandinavia. Back in the mists of time, the Norwegian kingdom was founded by Harald Finehair in the ninth century. Norwegian tradition says that Harald sent his son Hakon to Æthelstan’s court to learn the arts of kingship. Hence, the boy was known in all the later literature as “Æthelstan’s foster son”. That story has been doubted, but a now lost life of Æthelstan, written in the late 10th century, tells of an embassy of Harald to Æthelstan in York naming Norway’s first ambassadors to England: Helgrim and Osfrid. If we can rely on it, this is the earliest evidence of Harald’s existence, and perhaps, too, of the jesting relationship of the kings portrayed by later saga writers.

So another World Cup of disappointment for England. Friendship with Argentina, for historical reasons, still seems a long way off. But, by the same token, we’ll always have our Viking cousins in Norway!

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This article was first published in the September 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

Authors

Michael Wood

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester

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