Tonight, Norway’s men’s football team will face Brazil in New York as two of the last 16 teams at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, after weeks of Norwegian fans invading American squares and stadiums with their viking rowing. Regardless of how tonight’s game unfolds, Norway’s return after 28 years has brought its cultural heritage to the international stage, for better or worse. As much as I enjoy a football match, my day to day professional concerns are with heritage in Norway. The presence of stave church ornamentation at tonight’s game is only a very minor detail, but extends the use of a specific cultural heritage site as a phenomenon that I have spent the last several years researching. What does this mean for our cultural history and how we understand it today?
In April, the Norwegian Football Federation and Nike launched the new world cup kits, featuring motifs within based on none other than ornamentation from the Urnes Stave Church. Not only that, they had their official team photo taken by David Yarrow dressed as vikings posing in front of a fjord. Norway was taking all of its cultural clichés, ready to hold its own against Scottish tartan and bagpipes, Mexican Aztec, Ghanian and Moroccan embroidery patterns.
Around a year before the release of this football shirt, I defended my PhD thesis on the many copies and imitations of the Urnes Portal. My doctoral research had already collected around 300 reproductions. The football shirt is by no means unique in adopting this ornament, a motif already circulated on coins, passports and stamps, but it is amongst the most extreme in terms of the scale and circulation. My research found that over 200 years of reproduction, especially in the last few decades the Urnes Stave Church has been becoming increasingly more connected with a popular Viking culture.
It has been wonderful to see so many fans embracing the viking aesthetic, as head coach Ståle Solbakken has noted everybody in Norway from age 2 to 100 has been rowing and getting behind their national team. But there is some divide over whether this is an appropriate image to adopt. Viking culture has long been adopted by metal music in various forms, and through these links it is no accident that this aesthetic can be connected with extreme right ideologies. The Urnes portal has been used on album covers by bands Amon Amarth and Black Sabbath, and is a regular source of inspiration for tattoos. Amon Amarth frontman Johan Hegg even claims they invented the rowing. I can agree with politician and Red Party parliamentary representative Mímir Kristjánsson, when he says that he is “sick of people connecting the Viking Age and the Norse culture with Nazism and right-wing extremism. … They don’t own Thor, Odin, runic writing or Valhalla. We have to take that back from them and then I think the national team is leading by a very good example”. Regardless of the result of tonight’s game, that appears to have happened this summer. Star forward Erling Braut Haaland said after that last game that his team had “changed Norway forever”. It might not be quite what he was thinking, but as far as exhibiting national cultural heritage they have brought joyfully refreshed version of viking Norway to one of the world’s most colourful parties. Back home, the whole country is rowing and embracing it for all its kitchness.
All that said, what is a viking art motif doing on a medieval Christian church anyway? Urnes Stave Church, it might be said, is misplaced under this banner of viking culture. When the portal was carved in 1070 AD, Scandinavia was undergoing a fascinating transition, embracing a new religion with a society that appears to have been more multicultural and multilingual than compartmentalising perspectives on history have taught us. The motif is both Christian and Norse, a lion in battle with serpents, good conquering evil, speaking to those fluent in co-existing visual codes. Urnes is not just a viking art style, but an extension of the Christian celtic traditions and patterns from illuminated manuscripts fused with Nordic wood carving craft. It is far more interesting and complex than being one or the other, belonging to no-one in particular and yet to us all. I believe it was made to be universal, and now whilst the monument continues to be reproduced it is fascinating to watch its meaning continue to evolve and grow. The PhD thesis concludes that maintaining a monument extends to that meaning, and its balanced growth must be managed. For those of us concerned with communicating heritage, it is important that research-based facts must also enter into that circulation, like dutiful arborists tending to the stable growth of a tree. As for Urnes at the world cup, it has been exciting to see a new branch of that tree growing as Norway progress deeper into the competition.
For more, see my PhD thesis “Portal Propagations: Reproduction, Reception and Rediscovery in the Life of the Urnes Portal”.
