Vikings: Life and Legend, British Museum

One of the British Museum’s most popular exhibits is The Lewis Chessmen – a perfectly-formed chess set found in the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides in the 19th century. It stirs the imagination and recasts chess as a Norse epic. The wonderful set, already much-visited, is now part of the British Museum’s new BP-sponsored show, Vikings: life and legend. The first major exhibition about Viking culture at the museum for over 30 years, it opens the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery – and is child-friendly to boot: the Museum has even scheduled a tots event coordinated by the parenting website Mumsnet.

Longboats, helmets, beards, sagas and heroic rituals fire the imaginations of children as well as adults – as the Museum genteelly puts it, ‘cultural contact was often violent’. The Vikings were great looters and yes, they pillaged. But something of their romance and derring-do has leaked indelibly into ‘swords and sorcerers’ fantasy literature, from Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones.

The show is a blockbusting view of the Viking world from the late 8th century to the early 11th century, and as you’d imagine the British Museum has hauled in the archeaological cream. There’s the Vale of York Hoard, found by a metal detector in 2007 in Yorkshire and now seen at the BM for the first time, axeheads, silver and gold, the Cuerdale Hoard found in Lancashire in 1840, scary skeletons from a grave of massacred Vikings near Weymouth in Dorset and work from a hoard from Gnezdovo in Russia, never previously seen here.

This is interesting, as it showed that these Scandinavian maritime plunderers went east as well as west – indeed, so ambitious were they that Vikings got as far as the Caspian Sea  and the Mediterranean, and here you’ll even see relics from Uzbekistan. But the killer, never-been-seen exhibit is the remains of a 37m warship, from Roskilde fjord in Denmark, the crucible of Viking culture. The National Museum of Denmark and the National Museums in Berlin have both helped to bring it here.

Exhibitions like this usually have an argument. So what is the British Museum, bastion of learning, doing to change our minds about the Vikings? Well, it argues that the Vikings represent one of three major early belief systems - Islam, Christianity (both still with us) and the worship of Thor. It tells us that the Vikings were collectors, patrons of the arts, and cultivated (if aggressive) peoples who were well-travelled and multilingual – and that they loved power and plunder. It’s amazing that think that they emanated from Scandinavia, now a bastion of social democracy and downright reasonableness.

The show emphasises the strength of the British Museum under the directorship of Neil MacGregor, who can’t be far from retirement. As the writer of The History of the World in 100 Objects – which included the Lewis Chessmen – he has been a real leader. This show will be another feather in his cap.