Thor's Day

By Andrew Vaillencourt

Vikings? Really?

Yes, really.

Famous for barbarism, pillaging, and poor manners, the word "Viking" is synonymous with bad behavior. Their world was dangerous and mean, filled to the brim with treachery and unsavory characters. Their politics were rife with bribery and backstabbing, their daily lives an endless struggle against a society and an economy hell-bent on crushing the spirit. It was age lost to the darkness of greed and fear.

Wait. No. That's our world. My mistake.

The Viking age was one of the greatest periods of exploration and economic growth the world has ever seen. Social mobility was high, the rights of the people were sacred, and anyone with a good idea and a surplus of bravery could aspire to the loftiest offices of the land.

Both law and custom for the Vikings catered to the growth of the community through the empowerment of the citizenry, and for four centuries this system humiliated the monarchies of Europe. What can the Vikings tell us about our own lives, and how can they help us live up to the potential of the modern world?

With a generous helping of snark and a fair bit of foul language, this book will try very hard to answer those questions with a question of its own:

What would Thor do?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Vaillencourt
• Release date: Nov 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393042495

Andrew Vaillencourt

Andrew Vaillencourt would like you to believe he is a writer.  But that is probably not the best place to start. He is a former MMA competitor, bouncer, gym teacher, exotic dancer wrangler, and engineer. He wrote his first novel, ‘Ordnance,’ on a dare from his father and has no intention of stopping now. Drawing on far too many bad influences including comic books, action movies, pulp sci-fi and his own upbringing as one of twelve children, Andrew is committed to filling the heads of readers with hard-boiled action and vivid worlds in which to set it. His work pulls characters and voices born from his time throwing drunks out of a KC biker bar, fighting in the Midwest amateur MMA circuit,  or teaching kindergarteners how to do a proper push-up. He currently lives in Connecticut with his lovely wife, three decent children, and a very lazy ball python named Max.

Book preview

The Mightiest Day of the Week

___________________________

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

(The more things change, the more they stay the same)

_____________________

Humanity has come a long way haven’t we? We’ve gone to space, we’ve plumbed the depths of the ocean, we know what color underwear our favorite celebrities have on at any given time. It seems like human progress is barreling along like an unstoppable juggernaut of knowledge and social progress. And it is. We are smarter, faster, stronger, and nicer than we have ever been. It is a very good time to be alive.

But have we, as humans, changed all that much? At a family barbecue, whilst imbibing enthusiastically, a discussion between myself and several of my eleven siblings meandered down a path that ended up becoming an obsession for me for several years after. We were discussing the influence of ancient cultures on modern society and got to pointing out all the ways things had not really changed. Western politics are no more or less corrupt than ancient Greece or Rome. The economic landscape is no more or less unequal and unfair across the globe than during the Renaissance. We still worship idols and religion is still causing a lot of conflict. The players are different, but the game remains the same.

Yet we succeed. We grow, We adapt. Despite our flaws progress marches on. Why? The answer is culture. The various cultures of the world developed frameworks and customs to limit the damage caused by human nature. It’s a fascinating phenomenon, wherein the societies that succeed develop rate-limiting steps for all the nasty behavior we selfish organisms get up to in the never-ending rat-race of competitive survival. Sometimes it’s rule of  law, sometimes it’s rigid custom, often times it's both. In one notable case, the system that ended up working did not seek to limit the behavior of the individual, but instead encouraged it.

Which brings us to the Vikings. Never has a more violent and morally ambiguous group of people enjoyed such incredible success across multiple centuries. All that the Greeks did with science, the Romans did with politics, and the Byzantines did with trade, the Vikings accomplished with pure unfiltered grit. Theirs was a culture that revered the doer, the fighter, the ambitious leader. They were unique, and they were freaking awesome.

I began to write and compile weekly vignettes, once every Thursday, demonstrating how Viking philosophy and culture could be employed on the modern-day battlefields of work and home life. I put them out to the world via the internet, and soon, my little adventure swelled to thousands of followers.

I wondered if the Vikings were onto something, and I was not alone.

What is Thor's Day?

Thor's Day, on its face, is Thursday. It's the fifth day of the week. It is named for the mighty Thor, strongest and fiercest of the ancient Norse gods and currently a pop culture icon.

Obviously, we don't care about that. The day could be called 'Putzday' for all the thought we give it in our daily lives. But Thor captures the imagination in ways few other things can. Long before Marvel Comics made the name famous by misappropriating the character for some of the greatest stories ever told, Thor represented the quintessential, stereotypical, and prototypical Viking in the minds of most folks who heard the name spoken.

In the mythology, Thor is brutish and mean. He's none too bright and more often than not the butt of pranks conjured up by his equally famous half-brother, Loki. Many of us picture Vikings and Viking culture the same way. Brutish, mean, not so smart. The word 'barbarian' gets tossed around quite a bit, and rightfully so in certain contexts.

But context is a funny thing.

Over the course of this book I'm going to hit you with some of the most amazing and thought-provoking facets and folklore from the Viking age. Most historians consider this to be the years between 793AD through 1066AD, and in this time period no other European culture had as much impact on the planet and its future as the collection of Scandinavians we have come to call Vikings. Each vignette will include historical context and cultural insights that will help you understand just how important and critical the contributions of the Vikings were to the world we live in right now. Here's a taste:

The Vikings were the greatest explorers of their era and several eras afterward. Their military campaigns were overwhelmingly successful. On most social issues Viking law and custom stood head and shoulders above their contemporaries. They had equal rights and complex property law as well as a democratic method for administration and conflict resolution at a time when the rest of the world believed that the King knew everything and that God wanted poor people to serve forever. They mastered shipbuilding and open-ocean exploration at a time when everybody else was afraid to leave the sight of shore.

The Vikings were a rough bunch, but also exceptional. Our perception of this ancient culture is skewed by so many contradictions and pop culture alterations that many of the most interesting bits about them have been glossed over and forgotten. Four of the seven days of the week are named for old Norse gods, fully half of the English language uses the same Germanic roots. The boot print of the Vikings lays securely across the throat of our western world and with good reason. After combing through endless sagas and reference books I can say this with confidence: The legacy of the Vikings is filled with positive, progressive, and timeless wisdom. Much of which we can still use, and thus this book is born. Of course, most of it is buried beneath a history resplendent with bloody murder, reckless imperialism, moral ambiguity, and axe-first diplomacy. It is not hard to see why public perception of Vikings looks the way it does.

Well, that ends now, dear reader. Collected here are fifty-seven glimpses into the heart and soul of medieval Scandinavian culture and history. One for each Thor's Day of the year with a couple bonus rounds. Liberally spliced with snark, insults, and cynicism, I will try to shoehorn the practices of history's most famous barbarian horde into your daily life in a way that almost makes sense. Our world is a kinder and more enlightened place than it was during the Viking age, but I think we may have lost something in getting here. I want it back.

Let these vignettes guide and shape how you navigate the modern world. Because come on, is the modern world any less mean, cutthroat, and dangerous than medieval Europe? This book was born when I began to see how well many Viking practices and concepts worked for me on the battlefield of business and society. If you can get past the violence and danger, there is much good advice to be had from this period and this group of remarkable people. So, with tongue planted firmly in cheek, I proceeded to assemble the following. Ironically, when the challenges of putting this book together began to become apparent, I considered not doing it at all. But then good old Longfellow sprang to mind:

MEEKNESS IS WEAKNESS,

Strength is triumphant,

Over the whole earth,

Still is it Thor's-day!

-Henry W. Longfellow (The saga of king Olaf)

SO WHERE AM I GOING with this?

I'm going to the meat and potatoes of Viking culture. It's about being bold and being strong. The Vikings revered the victors, the winners, the doers-of-great-things of their society. There was no room in the sagas or the society for the meek. Cruelly, this was not the sort of thing you could opt out of, either. As nice as it would have been to simply stay out of the way, it was often not enough keep your head down and avoid problems. The problems, the wars, the thieves and murderers were coming your way whether you played nice or not. So you had to harden up and deal with it or get crushed by the unrelenting pressure of one of the most violent societies, within the most violent period of human history.

Men, women, or children; it made no difference. You choices were kick butt, or get your butt kicked. It was really rather awful, and it bred some awful people. Most of Ireland and Northern England can attest to the type of individual bred by these conditions, and the Vikings have a well-earned and very grim reputation throughout history. But realistically they were no more brutal or savage than any other medieval society, just less apologetic, and without the cover of religion or bureaucracy to color the perception of their atrocities. Consider the fact that they shared a time period with the fall of Rome, the Inquisition, Visigoth rule in Iberia, Genghis Khan, the fall of the Byzantine Empire and most of the Crusades. In that context, the Vikings weren't any worse than their contemporaries. If you think that the Vikings stole more loot and killed more people than the Papacy or the middle Eastern Caliphates of the same time period, then your history teacher was awful.

The Vikings, at least, were self-aware. The Vikings accepted that life was going to be hard, and that only hard people would triumph over it. There was no point in feigning meekness, or in groveling to hierarchies that promised protection at the cost of personal wealth and advancement. It was a hard world, and no Viking worth his beard looked for comfort in the institutions of this one or the promises of the next. It was simultaneously depressing and liberating. The real difference between Viking society and their contemporaries was not brutality, but liberty. Because it valued the strength of the individual, it was the most socio-economically mobile culture of its time.

Now, those of us in a first-world, high-tech, digital economy enjoy more of that mobility than even the strongest Viking. Our economic and cultural progress as a society grants every individual the potential for amazing wealth and power. Ironically, it still requires strength and boldness. Obviously, the techniques are different (unless we are still allowed to defenestrate people with axes and steal their stuff. Did I miss a memo?). But meekness, more often than not, is still a deal-breaker.

So life is hard, sometimes. Maybe you were born poor. Maybe you never got to finish your college degree. Maybe you came from an abusive household, or have a disability. Maybe the universe just hates you and you can't catch a break. Oh, Boo-hoo. Think about a penniless, orphaned, 14-year-old Viking boy, pulling an oar on the North Sea in a wooden boat the size of a school bus. Think about this kid, with his dead Dad's second-hand axe strapped to his back jumping off the boat and running to shore where only war and death are there to greet him. Then realize that this kid grew up to be Harald Hardrada, and that one day his name would be whispered with reverence and fear across three continents. His wealth and legacy would build both an empire and a monarchy, and his legend would be told for a thousand years.

Ask yourself if you could be that kid, and then ask: What would Thor do?

A Note on Morality

Isuppose before we continue something must be said to prepare you for what you will find in these pages. In a nutshell, Vikings were mean. They did not care about your feelings. Hell, they did not care about their own feelings. They just weren't into feelings, okay? It was a hard time in a hard part of the world. It bred hard people.

Knowing this, I do not believe it will surprise most readers to find out that the medieval Scandinavians did not embrace traditional western morality. Over the course of this book you may find that in many very important ways, Viking law and custom was extremely progressive and highly moral, even by modern standards. That's the fun part. The not-so-fun part is that if I am going to be honest with you guys, much of that same culture was incredibly, horrifically, staggeringly, violent and callous.

It would be fun to ignore all that and paint this group as a forward-thinking, brave, and community focused population that has been demonized by Western chroniclers to the extent that no one would even recognize them. I could do it, too. There's enough great stuff going on to almost totally gloss over the less-than-pleasant bits. But that would be a shame, too. The Vikings were what they were, and while twisting that for some sort of rhetorical trick might entertain me, it's not really what I want to do with this book. The lens of hindsight is a funny thing, and I am happy to employ it when gazing back on this fascinating culture. What I won't do is sugar-coat what we see.

The short version goes like this: Viking concepts of 'good' and 'evil' are notoriously ambivalent (and almost entirely absent) until Christian historians and their pesky 'written language' got involved and started twisting