The Small Change of Archaeology

By ROBERT HUGHES

In New York, a much heralded show of Viking artifacts

A "ruthless, wrathful, foreign, purely pagan people": so one medieval Irish text described the Vikings. "They are the dirtiest of God's creatures," sniffed Arab Historian Ibn Fadlan, who had seen and smelled a Viking encampment on the banks of the Volga in the 10th century, "and they do not wash themselves after sex." Thus, as Hilaire Belloc sardonically put it in our own century:

Behold, my child, the Nordic Man And be as like him as you can. His legs are long; his mind is slow; His hair is lank and made of tow.

It is certainly true, as the British Museum's director David Wilson remarks in the catalogue preface to "The Vikings," the big show of Norse artifacts and relics that opened last week at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, that the Vikings have had a bad press. That is what happens when you fall foul of Irish reviewers. No people in Western history, perhaps, had more of a reputation for mayhem and brutishness. Their longships ranged from Greenland to Byzantium and Kiev; they reached America 500 years before Columbus; and virtually everywhere they went, their greed and implacable cruelty stank in the nostrils of their victims.

The Metropolitan's show, imported after a successful five-month run at the British Museum, offers us a different sort of Viking: the monster chez lui, a more conscientious and stolid fellow, the rude ancestor of the modern Volvo executive. He does not even have a horned helmet --a Wagnerian embellishment on the plain iron cap he actually wore in battle. He plows his acres; he makes crude wooden boxes with crude iron tools. His wife has a comb and looks like Bjorn Borg in drag. Living in a permanent crisis economy, he believes in bullion as a hedge against disaster. He cannot keep his gold in a sock (archaeology has not so far produced a Viking sock, though the Met has some withered shoes in a glass case), but he melts plundered silver down into ingots. Sometimes he buries them, wanders off across the Skagerrak to kill a few more Irish scribes, and forgets where the cache was. He is, in short, not unlike you or me.

The Vikings had a more developed culture than people think; not literate exactly, but capable of housing and decorating itself, and equipped with a rudimentary sense of law. Their supreme artifacts were their longships, beakprowed and clinker-built, with a shallow draft so that they could be rowed straight up on the beach for surprise attack, like landing craft, and usually powered by 30 or more oars. Alas, the Viking ships found in such Norwegian burial sites as Gok-stad and Oseberg, and now preserved in Oslo, are too fragile to cross the Atlantic. But as a sort of extension of the Metropolitan exhibition, a two-thirds scale model of one is being displayed at the South Street Seaport Museum in Lower Manhattan.

As spectacle, most of the Met's show is disappointing; and because the real subject of exhibitions like this is culture as spectacle, "The Vikings" does not offer much. The argument it mounts really belongs to a book, not an exhibition, and it is far better done by the catalogue, which is a model of serious, popular historical reconstruction. In the museum, the objects, drawn from national collections in Scandinavia, England, Ireland and elsewhere, seem overcome by the pomp of their display: case after beautifully lighted case, spread wide out to allow for crowd passage, each enshrining its sparse array of broken pins and chipped beads. In this way the socially interesting small change of archaeology is implicitly promoted to "treasure": The Search for/ The Tomb of/ The Magic of/ The Curse of Someone or Other.

There are some interesting precious objects: a massive torque of twisted gold, brooches and harness mounts ornamented with serpentine, imbricated motifs; some large and striking ornamental pins. Clearly, the best Viking goldsmiths could stand comparison with their Byzantine or Inca counterparts. But such works are in the minority, and despite the extreme rarity of Viking artifacts and their obvious significance as historical fragments, one is left wondering why the Met devoted so much space to this show. --By Robert Hughes

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