By D.W. Roach
MarauderBooks.com
Preface: On Perspective and Experience
Before continuing, context matters.
I am a United States citizen and a United States Marine. I have spent over twenty years working in the physical protection industry, serving multiple Fortune 500 companies and alongside law enforcement professionals. My career has been rooted in threat assessment, deterrence, logistics, and the practical realities of force, power, and consequence.
This article is not written from academic distance or ideological abstraction. It is written from lived exposure to how security actually functions when norms fail, when deterrence matters, and when idealism collides with material reality.
That experience does not make me infallible—but it does make me allergic to comfortable lies, especially the kind that only survive in environments where consequences are theoretical.
What follows is not an endorsement of brutality, nor a rejection of modern ethics. It is a rejection of historical dishonesty: the habit of projecting contemporary moral comfort backward onto cultures that survived precisely because they did not share it.
With that understanding, we can proceed honestly.
Let’s address an uncomfortable truth plainly.
Many people who follow Viking and medieval history today are not actually engaging with those cultures. They are projecting modern European liberal morality backward in time, then congratulating themselves for agreeing with it.
Axes in the profile picture. Odin quotes in the bio. Longships on the banner.
And yet the worldview underneath it all is entirely modern, entirely moralized, and entirely disconnected from the realities Vikings lived—and thrived—in.
Before going further, let me be clear: I understand why this happens.
Why the Modern Moral Lens Is Natural — and Still Wrong
We live in a world shaped by post-war European liberalism, human rights frameworks, and a deep collective desire to believe that power can be restrained by norms alone. Most people alive today have never had to defend land, food, or family through violence. Their moral instincts are shaped by safety.
That isn’t stupidity. It’s comfort.
It is completely natural for modern people to interpret history through the values they were raised with. It is human to want the past to affirm the present. But what is natural is not always useful. And in this case, it is deeply impractical. Applying modern moral frameworks to Viking culture does not make Vikings more ethical—it makes them unintelligible.
Vikings Were Not Moral Philosophers
Vikings did not debate the ethics of conquest. They did not operate within abstract systems of universal rights or moral permanence. They lived in a world governed by scarcity, violence, and competition.
In that world:
- Land belonged to those who could take it and keep it
- Power created legitimacy
- Weakness invalidated claims
- Neutrality was a luxury few could afford
- Opportunity was meant to be seized, not analyzed
This was not barbarism. It was realism.
You cannot meaningfully admire Viking culture while condemning conquest itself as immoral. That is not historical appreciation—it is selective fantasy.
Greenland: Reality, Not Romance
Greenland exposes the contradiction cleanly.
The Norse took it without treaty. They named it to attract settlers. They exploited it for trade and prestige. When they could no longer sustain or defend it, they lost it.
No apologies. No moral reckoning. No belief that land remained theirs in perpetuity simply because they once held it.
That is not cruelty—it is how history actually works.
To insist that modern powers must treat Greenland as morally frozen territory while celebrating the people who originally seized it by force is not principled. It is incoherent.
Power Still Matters — Pretending Otherwise Is Dangerous
Another hard truth: many Viking-adjacent communities today are completely detached from real-world threat environments.
They speak as though geopolitics is a graduate seminar rather than a contest of:
- Naval dominance
- Logistics
- Resource access
- Strategic geography
- Deterrence and force projection
Vikings understood these realities instinctively. Their entire way of life was shaped by sea lanes, chokepoints, and forward positions.
Greenland’s location in the Arctic and North Atlantic would be immediately obvious to any Viking war leader as strategically decisive. Control of it would be admired, not morally condemned.
Ignoring this does not make you enlightened. It makes you unprepared.
Vikings Sold Their Swords — and Never Apologized
There is also a persistent myth that Vikings were ideologically loyal to abstract homelands or moral causes. They weren’t.
Vikings:
- Served foreign kings
- Joined stronger empires
- Fought for wealth, land, and status
- Became rulers when conquest succeeded
The Varangian Guard did not moralize Byzantine politics. Norse mercenaries did not agonize over whether their employer’s cause aligned with their personal ethics. They followed strength, opportunity, and reward. That wasn’t betrayal. It was how professionals survived.
Aesthetic Paganism Is Not Historical Paganism
What many people defend today is not Viking culture, but a modern, sanitized version of it—pagan aesthetics filtered through liberal guilt.
It offers:
- Symbols without substance
- Identity without risk
- Myth without material reality
- Power worship without power acceptance
Real Viking culture was hierarchical, violent, opportunistic, and brutally pragmatic. You are free to reject that—but then be honest enough to admit you are rejecting Vikings themselves.
History Is Not Meant to Be Safe
Vikings did not believe history existed to be preserved. They believed it existed to be shaped.
Empires rose. Empires fell.
Borders shifted. Peoples moved.
To them, history was not a moral archive. It was a record of who had the strength to impose order—and who did not. Modern moral discomfort with that reality is understandable.
But comfort has never been a strategy.
Final Thought
It is natural to view the past through modern moral lenses. It is human to want history to validate the present.
But Vikings did not live in a moralized world. They lived in a dangerous one. You cannot invoke their symbols while rejecting their understanding of power. You cannot celebrate their expansion while condemning conquest itself. And you cannot claim historical grounding while insisting history behave politely.
Vikings did not apologize for reality. They adapted to it. They mastered it.
If that unsettles you, the problem is not history—it’s the expectation that history should make you comfortable.
— D.W. Roach
MarauderBooks.com
D.W. Roach "Marauder" 