Oof, that's a dangerous amount of Vikinger propaganda to take in all at once. You might want to watch "The Last Kingdom" to balance yourself out...

No, it's not. That's not what anyone's physical physique looked like in a premodern era that did not have access to cheap and abundant protein, modern gyms and professional trainers, a soupçon of performance-enhancing drugs, and a dangerous amount of deliberate dehydration and dieting in order to get those ab muscles to really "pop."

An actual professional soldier - although as I've stated, Vikingers were primarily pirates, slavers, and merchants - would have a certain amount of fat over their muscles, because it turns out that it protects your organs. If you want an example, albeit an exceptional one, of what that kind of build looks like, take a look at Hafthor Bjornson (the actor who played the Mountain):

Big and strong, absolutely - but not "shredded." He's got a healthy layer of fat on his abs (which helps to prevent him from suffering a rupture when he's lifting something extremely heavy) and the rest of his torso and limbs.

This is an excellent question!

I think Western pop culture has a weakness for historical warrior cultures in general - there was a big fad for samurai starting in the 70s thanks to Kurosawa films becoming crossover hits, there was a big moment for Spartans after Zack Snyder's film in 2006, there was another one for Romans between the HBO show in 2005 and the Starz Spartacus shows in the early 2010s - for complicated cultural reasons that keep historians like Bret Devereaux busy.

Vikingers had been around as a thing in pop culture off and on for decades - there was The Vikings in 1958 with Kirk Douglas and or the 13th Warrior with Antonio Banderas in 1999 - but it tended to be hit-or-miss one-offs rather than a general pop cultural trend until relatively recently. Sustained interest in Vikingers really does kind of trace back to the huge success of the History Channel show which ran from 2013-2020 - which is funny, because originally it was a pretty naked attempt to find something that would tap into the Game of Thrones audience, for all that Hirst hates the comparison- which prompted others to tap into the same audience with Assassin's Creed: Valhalla and The Last Kingdom and God of War, and so on. It's rare that one show hits big enough to cause a trend, but I do think you have to hand it to them in this case.

So why did Vikingers hit so big?

Part of it is that they come pre-packaged with visual iconography (the dragon-ships, the distinctive helmets and shields and axes, the rather inaccurate hairstyles, etc.) and mythology (Norse mythology has the virtue of being decently well-known enough that people recognize who the gods are, but not well-known enough that people complain if you make shit up that wasn't in the Eddas), so a lot of the "branding" has already been done for the creators.

I think another big part of it is that Vikingers kind of act as a cultural Rorschach test that allows people to see what they want - you can go all the way along the spectrum from right-wing Neo-Nazis seeing them as Aryan supermen destroying Western decadence through the will to power to left-wingers thinking that the Vikingers were progressive because they were relatively gender-egalitarian and didn't like Christians very much.

That's a tough question, because it really comes down to whether you view the Normans as being in historical continuity with their Vikinger ancestors (and for how long) - after all, the Normans were running around conquering southern Italy and Sicily and Malta and Cyprus and big chunks of North Africa and the Byzantine Empire and the Holy Land Levant for hundreds of years after Stamford Bridge.

Fuck off with your whataboutisms in defense of slavers. The owning is bad enough, but it's the slave trade where the real evil lies with the Vikingers.

Yes, Medieval Europeans (I find their religion irrelevant) did own slaves...thanks in no small part to the Vikingers, who sold them slaves on a trans-continental scale. Who do you think supplied the markets of Constantinople known as the "Valley of Lamentations"? Why was Dublin the biggest slave market in the world in 1000 CE?

Yes, but it's also the case that Amleth looks really cool and ripped and the fight scenes are really cool, and sometimes that can trump the intended message and contribute to propaganda. Pace to Martin Scorsese's intended messages about gangsters and Wall St. crooks being really bad people, but if you go to great lengths to make the crimes look really fucking cool and the comeuppance is drab and washed-out, it's not a very effective communication of said message.

I'm reminded of a time when a liberal tv news show (Donohue? Ted Koppel? 60 Minutes? Don't remember) did this segment criticizing Reagan's "Morning in America" commercial by reading statistics about unemployment and poverty over footage of the commercial. Reagan's communications director calls them up and says "thank you." Baffled, they say, "what do you mean thank you? We just savaged you." And he replies, "yeah, but you played the commercial over and over again, and it's the visuals that people are going to remember."