I work in the US with white dudes who literally think their heritage is "Viking" and make it a big part of their identity - I appreciate your point but I also understand why someone might pick that title.
People believe in all kinds of fanciful nonsense to try to feel "special". In the US in particular, people will draw on some distant real or imagined ancestry to try to establish some kind of feeling of ethnic identity. Part of the reason may be the feeling of vacuousness of American identity from an ethnic point of view, as well as the dissolving religious identity which historically functioned as a substitute for ethnic identity in the US. (Various ideologies and subcultures are also expressions of this.) People will not only claim to belong to ethnicity X, 5+ generations after their ancestors immigrated and 3+ of which didn't speak the language and didn't maintain any contact with the country of origin; they will also claim they're "1/16th" of some ethnicity, as if "genes" or "blood" were like chemical elements. Naturally, these "identities" are rooted in stereotypes rather any kind of living culture.
I'm so glad someone brought this up. It irks me when I hear Americans detail every minor fraction of their genetic makeup: 1/4 Italian, 1/8 German, 1/16... etc. But they don't speak any of these languages, they've never even visited these countries. It's such a matter of pride for a lot of Americans, but it's just a costume.
A quote I found here on HN, that I really liked:
"Americans will say they are Italian because their great grandma ate spaghetti once, but God forbid someone is American because he was born there" -
mvieira38 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43930642)
I highly recommend reading Ethnic Options by Mary C. Waters. It's a fascinating work of sociology that defines this exact phenomenon and explains its origins.
This is accurate if their family ancestry is from the Nordic countries, Britain or Ireland, which is a substantial chunk of Northern Europe (although in the latter cases the heritage looked more like male Viking invaders taking non-Norse wives from among the people they conquered for hundreds of years in the Danelaw or similar).
More broadly, the Norse were among the last people in Europe to be converted to Christianity, and their particular pagan traditions lasted long enough to be recorded and preserved in some form by medieval Christian writers, in a way that was not true of other Germanic peoples who were Christianized much earlier. So there's a sense in which our modern understanding of the pre-Christian Norse worldview is a stand-in for what must've been a more widespread set of European pagan traditions that were wiped out by Christianity. An incomplete and limited stand-in, of course, as any serious scholar of that world will tell you; but it makes sense that modern white people who have an interest in what their own ancient, pagan history might've been like - or for that matter people who have a sincere problem with Western Christianity and are seeking some kind of alternative spirituality - might look to the Norse world with interest, even if their share of genetic heritage from that world is minimal.
lo_zamoyski|8 days ago
It's a kind of cosplay-lite for the masses.
samaltmanfried|8 days ago
A quote I found here on HN, that I really liked: "Americans will say they are Italian because their great grandma ate spaghetti once, but God forbid someone is American because he was born there" - mvieira38 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43930642)
throw4847285|8 days ago
JuniperMesos|6 days ago
More broadly, the Norse were among the last people in Europe to be converted to Christianity, and their particular pagan traditions lasted long enough to be recorded and preserved in some form by medieval Christian writers, in a way that was not true of other Germanic peoples who were Christianized much earlier. So there's a sense in which our modern understanding of the pre-Christian Norse worldview is a stand-in for what must've been a more widespread set of European pagan traditions that were wiped out by Christianity. An incomplete and limited stand-in, of course, as any serious scholar of that world will tell you; but it makes sense that modern white people who have an interest in what their own ancient, pagan history might've been like - or for that matter people who have a sincere problem with Western Christianity and are seeking some kind of alternative spirituality - might look to the Norse world with interest, even if their share of genetic heritage from that world is minimal.
coldtrait|7 days ago