by Vitor Marroni Fortuna
What was happening in Brazil during the Middle Ages? This is a strange question, as there was no Brazil during the Middle Ages. The country we know as Brazil today did not exist, and neither did the borders that define it. The territory which would eventually become Brazil was inhabited by hundreds of Indigenous peoples and societies, each with their own histories, forms of organisation, movements and conflicts. They were living their own histories, not a Brazilian version of the European Middle Ages.
But the question is interesting for another reason. It prompts us to ask: what happens when a period defined through European history is used to talk about places that were not part of that history? The Middle Ages may seem like a straightforward period of time – conventionally placed between the fifth and fifteenth centuries in European History – but the further it moves away from Europe, the less straightforward that category becomes. The societies and histories unfolding elsewhere did not simply wait for Constantinople to fall before moving from one historical period to another. This does not mean that nothing was happening in what is now Brazil during the centuries we call the Middle Ages. Quite the opposite. Indigenous societies were developing, moving, exchanging, fighting, and transforming their worlds. Their histories do not become medieval simply because they happened at the same time as what we call the Middle Ages.[1]
And yet, I, a scholar born and raised in Brazil, study the Middle Ages. More specifically, I study Medieval Scandinavia and its reception in the contemporary world. From Brazil, this can seem like a rather distant object of study because a) Scandinavia is on the other side of the Atlantic, b) Old Norse is hardly a language one is likely to encounter in a Brazilian school, and c) Medieval Scandinavian studies have a very limited institutional presence in Brazilian universities. But geographical distance is not quite the same thing as cultural distance. In Brazil, I can mention Vikings in a conversation and be fairly sure that people will have some idea of what I mean. They may never have read an Old Norse saga or encountered a Medieval Scandinavian source, but they have probably seen a television series, a film, a video game, a comic book, an advertisement, or a picture on social media. They already have an idea of what a Viking looks like, how a Viking behaves, what Vikings believed, and even what the Viking Age was supposed to have been like.[2]
The Vikings are everywhere, or at least a particular version of the Vikings is. This version is not necessarily the one we find in medieval sources, rather it is a modern cultural construction, shaped over time by the ways in which medieval Scandinavia has been imagined, remembered, and used. In Brazil, as elsewhere, the Viking appears in films, television series, video games, books, advertising, and social media, and these representations have made certain elements particularly recognisable: the warrior, the raider, the pagan, the seafarer, the drakkars, the axe, the runes, the gods. What interests me here is not simply whether these elements are historically accurate, rather it is the fact that I am not introducing a completely novel historical subject to my audience beyond academia. Instead I am entering a conversation in which the Viking is already familiar, even though the historical field behind that figure has very little institutional presence in Brazil. And this, for me, is where the challenge begins.
The challenge is not simply to produce rigorous research in a country where Old Norse studies are a minor field. It is also to decide what happens when that research leaves the university. How can a field that is largely invisible within Brazilian academia be made visible beyond it, without allowing the demands of visibility to reshape the research itself? This is the tension I want to explore here: the challenge of finding a balance between academic isolation and popular appeal.
In Brazil, I see this tension taking two particular forms. On one side, there are researchers whose work is well established within academia, since they participate in international conferences, publish their research in prestigious journals, engage with academic debates around the world, and contribute to the development of a field that, despite its relatively small size in Brazil, is intellectually active. Their work is rigorous, specialised and important, but the problem is that this work can also remain almost entirely within academic circles. This is not a problem with the specialised research itself, and not every academic project needs to become popular. But in a field as institutionally fragile as medieval studies in Brazil, this distance can have consequences. If most of the serious academic work remains within universities, conferences and specialised publications, it becomes difficult for these scholars to participate in the broader conversations through which Brazilians encounter the Middle Ages in the first place.
On the other side, there are researchers who have managed to establish a much stronger relationship with the public. They also end up publishing their work, but in less relevant local journals, or else as books from local publishers. And because they communicate through social media, create accessible content, and know how to speak to an audience that may have little or no academic background in medieval history, their work eventually reaches and is consumed by wider audiences. They can reach thousands of people who would probably never attend a conference on medieval studies or seek out an academic article about the Old Norse world. There is something genuinely valuable in this, and I do not think that reaching a wider audience should be treated as somehow less serious than speaking to other academics. If anything, I think that making historical research accessible can be an important part of what it means to be a scholar.
But there is a challenge here as well. These researchers know exactly what the public wants to consume, which is the image they already have of the Viking Age: the warrior, the raider, and so on. And because those scholars want to remain relevant, to be accessed and consumed, they end up reproducing precisely those clichéd elements which are most historically reductive. At worst, this kind of work reinforces reductionist stereotypes; at best it involves simply pointing out which ones are false, which are historically inaccurate and which are true, as if in a game of spot the difference. Research based on these approaches always turns out to be overly? simplistic.
The result can be a strange inversion. In one case, the rigorous research is present, but it struggles to leave the university. In the other case, the public engagement is there, but the pressure to remain visible and attractive can encourage the reproduction of the very images of the Middle Ages that historical research should be questioning. I do not think either of these situations is entirely satisfactory. And I certainly do not think the answer is simply to choose one side or the other. It may be more productive to ask instead whether there is another way of doing medieval studies in Brazil: one that takes academic rigour seriously without treating the public as an afterthought, and that takes public engagement seriously without allowing popularity to determine what counts as ‘good’ historical work.
This is where my own position becomes somewhat uncomfortable. I want my work to be read, discussed, and criticised by other scholars. But I also want to be able to talk about that work with people who have never encountered Old Norse or Reception studies, and who may know the Vikings primarily through popular culture. The challenge, then, is not simply how to make medieval history popular. It is how to make it public without making it dependent on the things that already make the medieval past popular.
I need to be careful about how I understand my role as a researcher. I do not want to enter the public conversation simply to tell people that what they know about the Vikings is wrong. That would be an easy position to take, but I am not sure it would go very far. If someone has encountered the Viking Age through television, games or social media, telling them that these representations are inaccurate does not necessarily tell them anything about why those representations exist in the first place.
What interests me more is the possibility of asking different questions. Why have these particular images of the Vikings become so familiar? Where did they come from? What happens when elements of a medieval past are taken out of their original context and given new meanings centuries later? And what does that tell us about the societies remembering? In this sense, I do not want to treat popular culture simply as an obstacle to historical knowledge. It is also an object of study in its own right. The fact that particular aspects of the Viking has been so enduring tells us something about the present, even if it tells us very little about what a medieval Scandinavian individual actually looked like or what they believed in. The modern use of the medieval past can be historically interesting precisely because it reveals the concerns, expectations, and desires of the people doing the imagining.
At the same time, I do not want to use this as an excuse to abandon historical rigour. There is a difference between studying a modern representation of the medieval past and holding that representation as an accurate description of medieval Scandinavia. For me, maintaining that distinction is essential. This is perhaps the balance I am looking for. I want to be able to take popular representations seriously without treating them as historical evidence in themselves. I want to communicate academic research without reducing it to a collection of easily digestible facts. And I want to make the Middle Ages accessible without assuming that accessibility requires simplification.
Writing this blog is, in a small way, an attempt to do exactly that. A blog is obviously not a substitute for a scholarly article, a monograph or a conference paper. It has a different purpose, a different audience, and prompts different kinds of conversation. But that difference is precisely what makes it useful. It creates a space in which I can take ideas that would normally remain within academic discussions and try to make them part of a wider conversation. I do not know whether this balance is actually possible. Perhaps there will always be a tension between the demands of academic research and the demands of public communication. Perhaps trying to satisfy both will sometimes mean satisfying neither completely. But I increasingly think that the tension itself is worth taking seriously.
The temptation is to settle into one of these two extremes. I could remain safely within the academic world, speaking primarily to people who already are familiar with the questions I am asking. Or I could adapt my research to whatever version of the Middle Ages is most immediately attractive to an audience. Neither seems sufficient to me. What I want to try instead is something less comfortable: to remain rigorous without becoming inaccessible, and to become accessible without becoming dependent on simplification. Perhaps that is an impossible balance. But if studying the Middle Ages from Brazil means constantly negotiating between distance and proximity, then perhaps learning how to negotiate that tension is part of the work itself.
Perhaps there is another reason why I think this work is worth doing from Brazil. The difficulties I have described are real. Medieval studies remain institutionally fragile, opportunities can be scarce, and building a research field around medieval Scandinavia requires resources, networks, and institutional support that are not always available. Yet studying the Medieval past from this position also makes something particularly visible: the past does not remain where it happened.
Medieval Scandinavia is geographically distant from Brazil, but the images, stories and ideas associated with it circulate remarkably well. They cross borders, languages, and centuries. They are reproduced in popular culture, transformed into commercial products, incorporated into contemporary identities, and, at times, mobilised for political purposes. This makes the study of medieval Scandinavia in Brazil more than an attempt to develop a field that happens to be geographically far from its object of study. It is also a way of understanding what happens when the medieval past enters a completely different cultural and political context.
This is particularly important when we consider how medieval images can be appropriated in the present. Contemporary political movements, such as the far right, have at times drawn on imagined versions of the medieval past to construct identities, traditions or narratives of belonging.[3] I do not think that an appropriate response is to declare these representations simply false and move on. They need to be understood: where do these images come from? Why are particular symbols and narratives so easily mobilised? What has been changed, removed or invented in the process? And what makes these versions of the past useful in the present? These are questions that require research.[4]
If we abandon the study of the medieval past because it is difficult, underfunded or institutionally marginal, we do not make the past disappear. The past is already being mobilised in the present, whether through popular culture, commercial interests, or political projects. Abandoning its critical study, therefore, does not mean stepping outside the conversation about what the past means. It simply leaves more space for others to decide what that past means. The answer, then, cannot be to retreat further into the university, nor can it be to give the public whatever version of the Middle Ages is most likely to attract their attention. It has to be something more difficult, like continuing to do rigorous research while also taking responsibility for how historical knowledge enters the world beyond the university.
This is what I mean when I talk about balance. I do not mean finding a perfect point somewhere between academia and popular culture and remaining there forever. I mean accepting that these tensions are part of the work and refusing to let either side entirely determine what historical research should look like. For me, being a good researcher means not only asking how to produce better knowledge about the past but also asking what happens to that knowledge once it leaves the university. It means recognising that the public already has relationships with the past and that those relationships deserve to be understood rather than simply dismissed. It means making research accessible without treating accessibility as an excuse for simplification and maintaining academic rigour without treating complexity as a reason to remain inaccessible. Perhaps this is an impossible task. But I am increasingly convinced that the challenge of the task is not a contradiction at all. It is the point.
Notes
[1] This question has been explored in discussions of medievalism beyond Europe. See Nadia Altschul and Kathleen Davis (eds.), Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020), especially the introduction, which considers the “medieval” as a spatiotemporal category shaped by European historical traditions.
[2] I use “Viking” here in the broad, contemporary sense in which the term is commonly used in popular culture.
[3] Recent examples illustrate how medieval symbols continues to be mobilised in contemporary political contexts. In Brazil, Paulo Kogos, a far-right political influencer and supporter of Jair Bolsonaro, appeared in 2021, dressed as a Templar Knight at a political rally in support of Bolsonaro. The symbol went along with his appeal to “restore order” and “reclaim freedom” in Brazil, presenting an idealised medieval image as part of a contemporary political message. See Fernando Miller, “‘Cavaleiro templário’ Paulo Kogos comparece na manifestação bolsonarista,” Diário do Centro do Mundo, 1 May 2021, https://www.diariodocentrodomundo.com.br/essencial/cavaleiro-templario-paulo-kogos-comparece-na-manifestacao-bolsonarista/. In the United States, following Charlie Kirk’s death in September 2025, Kash Patel and Alex Jones invoked Valhalla in commemorative messages, portraying Kirk as a warrior destined for a heroic afterlife. These invocations drew on an image of Valhalla as an afterlife for fallen warriors, linking Norse symbolism to contemporary ideals of masculinity, heroism, and political belonging. See Timothy Liam Waters and Basil Arnould Price, “Valhalla: A Phantasm,” postmedieval 17 (2026): 383–404, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-026-00419-z .
[4] This is not intended as a survey of Brazilian medievalism, nor as an attempt to map or recommend particular approaches to the study of medievalism in Brazil. I mention these examples simply to emphasise that valuable research on these questions is already being carried out here. Political neomedievalism in Brazil has been examined by Luiz Felipe Anchieta Guerra in “Neomedievalismo político no Brasil contemporâneo”, in Maria Eugênia Bertarelli, Renan Marques Birro and João Batista da Silva Porto Júnior (eds.), Medievalismos em olhares e construções narrativas, vol. 1 (Ananindeua, PA: Editora Itacaiúnas, 2021), pp. 47–64. While ongoing master’s research by Ana Flávia de Barros Leme examines the appropriation of the medieval past by neo-Nazi groups, particularly through the former Brazilian website Valhalla88, which was taken offline in 2007.
Vitor Marroni Fortuna holds a degree in History from the State University of Londrina and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in History at the same institution. He works at the Historical Museum of Londrina and is also pursuing a degree in Museology. His research explores the reception of Medieval Scandinavia in Brazil through a Viking-themed living museum.