Viking Heritage and History in Europe

Sara Ellis Nilsson is Researcher of Nordic Medieval History and Director of Studies in History at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include cultural heritage, social and cultural history, material culture, hagiography/liturgy, and digital humanities. She is currently the project lead for the Swedish Research Council funded, 'digitization and accessibility of cultural heritage collections' (DigARV) project, Mapping Lived Religion: Medieval Cults of Saints in Sweden and Finland, and one of the co-leads of the NOS-HS funded Nordic Spatial Humanities initiative. Her research and publications have previously focused on, for instance, the digitization of cultural heritage, medieval lived religion, identity and the construction of sanctity, medieval travel, and the formation of textual networks and communities, as well as how objects and their reconstructions are used by different actors in the creation of narratives about the past, with especial focus on the Viking Age.Stefan Nyzell is Associate Professor of History at the Department of Society, Culture and Identity, Malmö University, Sweden. His research interests include medievalism, cultural heritage, public history, police history, and contentious politics. He is currently researching historical re-enactment as a form of history from below, or grassroots public history, in which the past is not only consumed by the participants but also produced and mediated within the domain of public history. His research and publications have previously focused on violent social conflict in modern society.

• 1. The Mythopoetic Viking in European Cultural Heritage; Section I: Viking Tourism, Living-history, and Re-enactment as European Cultural Heritage; 2. Cross-Cultural Contact, the Tourist Gaze and Viking Heritage Spaces; 3. Viking Hiking and other Time Travel; 4. Vikings in Historical Pageants and Public Events; 5. Viking Re-enactment; Section II: Perspectives on Vikings in European Popular Culture; 6. Towards Inclusive Interpretations; 7. Alcohol Consumption, Masculinity, and the Modern Viking; 8. Viking and Old Norse Memoryscapes in Comics; 9. Vikings and Gaming: Cultural Representations of the North in Video Games;Section III: Vikings in European Museums, Heritage, and Politics; 10. Reconstructing Viking Ships in European Cultural Heritage Institutions; 11. Uncanny Encounters with Iceland’s Vikings at the Saga Museum; 12. Runes and Racism; 13. Political Uses of the Viking Age: The Sweden Democrats and the Danish People’s Party; Conclusion; 14. Towards Public Viking Research