Raping and pillaging seems like an odd touchstone for cultural pride, but it was an implicit factor in much of the familial discourse I heard growing up regarding our heritage. Before I knew what they were famous for, the stories I heard in grade school about Vikings captivated my imagination. My dad's side of the family informally traces their lineage back, beyond the eleventh century Norman Invasion – a surname derived from “Norseman” – to their Viking ancestors. When referring to my dad's family, my mother would intone “the Normans” with an unsubtle shade of condescension that belied the conceit of our patriarchs illustrious heritage. Never mind that by now we are mostly English and Scots-Irish by blood – more English than Scots-Irish, more Scottish than Irish, more Irish than German, more German than French, and more French than Norwegian (I didn't find any of that out until I had to make a family tree for an assignment in college); never mind that no one in my family speaks Norwegian, or even knows anything about Norway and its culture, traditions, or customs; we are Norwegians, damn it, and proud to be so. I've often thought we should have a bumper sticker that somehow expressed the hyperbolic nature of this pride. Something like, “My Ancestors Raped and Pillaged Your Ancestors.”
Being a pale, skinny kid with an unkempt shock of bright-red hair named Eric, I took a special interest in the fanciful illustrations of the famous explorer “Erik the Red” that graced the pages of my 2nd grade history book. My mother apparently picked my name before I was born, not caring or thinking about Vikings – her heritage is mostly English and Scots-Irish – and before she knew that I would have red hair. Actually, no one else in my family, with the exception of a couple of much younger cousins, has red hair – a rather conspicuous phenomenon which no one in my family knew enough about genetics to be able to adequately account for. (When people would inquire from whom I inherited the red hair, my dark-haired father would often reply, “the UPS man”; if it weren't for knowing my mother as I do, some pretty obvious genetic similarities between my father and I, and the fact that the UPS man on our route doesn't even have red hair, I might have believed it.)
I always hated having red hair. It drew too much attention to me, and I mostly wanted to be left alone. The childish taunts of “carrot-top” and “firecrotch” – an epithet which utterly bewildered me when I was eight – were bothersome enough, but the most unwanted attention came from older women. Surrounded by acrid clouds of chemical perfumes that gave them a subtle but ominous light-refracting aura, wearing masks of garish make-up and long necklaces of brightly colored stones, speaking in unintelligable rants, to my childish imagination they ressembled aged carnies, or perhaps witchdoctors. They seemed to take sadistic pleasure in pinching my cheek while exclaiming, “My, what beautiful red hair you have!” To which I would quixotically reply, with inappropriate gravity and characteristic 4 year-old defiance, “I'm not a redhead, I'm a brownhead!” This was usually sufficient to make the wolves in old-lady clothing think I was perhaps a bit “touched,” possibly even dangerous, thereby throwing them off my scent for a while. But the damage was already done; how much of my essence did those geriatric predators steal over the years with their witchdoctor magic?; snatching away little bits of my soul with every pinch. Nevertheless, the hair has remained a coppery attention-magnet for much of my life. Of course, after thirteen grueling years of unwanted notice, when I discovered the beneficial attention of pubescent females my own age, the attractive properties of my hair color became a net asset practically overnight. Did I mention I am a direct descendant of Erik the Red? If nothing else, it made my name stick in their head...
Aside from the associative power of his name helping people to remember mine, imagining that I was related to this intrepid brute helped ameliorate some of the pains associated with being a smaller than average kid for most of my adolescence. Aligning myself with this powerful explorer who discovered Greenland, and whose son, Leif Erikson, was the first European to establish a colony in North America (take that Columbus!), helped this scrawny, redheaded runt endure the slings and arrows, and savage barbarism that was the playground of Coburg Elementary. Never mind that Erik the Red was not the first European to found a colony in Greenland; never mind that, even if he had been, there were already Inuits living there; and never mind that the only reason he left Iceland in the first place was due to his exile for several murders there. The wonderful thing about history is that few people are interested enough in the particulars to accept or remember the facts that contradict their cherished world view. You think your dad could beat up my dad? Well my ancestors raped and pillaged your ancestors. So there.
(Never mind that they didn't, and that it's not something to be proud of even if they did.)
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