Enough with Right Wing Misuse of Pagan Signs

Ancient North European traditions have sadly been misused and misappropriated by white nazis and other extremists over the years, even though any historian will tell you that racism and bigotry as we know it, would have meant nothing in the context of their world. Still, the far right still exploit ancient symbols such as Celtic spirals and Viking runes to try and build their offensive ideologies. But genuine researchers into the deep history of ancient Europe continue to show up this stupid expropriation. On Thursday afternoon the Smithsonian Channel along with the Swedish TV channel network found that a significant number of warrior graves in Viking era Sweden belonged to women, who led warriors and trained their male counterparts in battle. The sexist assumption of the right wing, that men need to fight and women obey them, meant nothing to the Viking societies that prospered in the early Medieval period. Women could and did pursue careers at the top of the hierarchy, and were rewarded by having a warrior grave send off into the afterlife. Not only that, but our traditional image of Vikings as macho raiders who killed and raped everyone they came across is not true either: the Vikings were equally traders and farmers, settling new lands and trading with peoples they came across. The Viking tribes discovered Newfoundland and thus the edge of the Americas around four hundred years before Christopher Columbus's famous voyages. They settled Iceland and their trading network moved along the silk roads as far as the borders of Ancient China. What an achievement! And all without the right wing's racist and bigoted projections.