Modern Day Vikings Essay

As seen in Modern-day Vikings: A Practical Guide to Interacting with the Swedes, Modern Sweden keeps its Viking heritage alive by maintaining the same sense of solidarity within their community that the Vikings created. This started when the Swedes revolted against their Danish king, Christian II. After the king’s brutal rebuttal to the beginning of an uprising resulted in over eighty opposing noblemen murdered at a feast known as the “Stockholm Bloodbath,” the people of Sweden agreed to join together to help future king Gustav Vasa bring the Danish king down. This unity between the Swedes became a crucial foundation of Sweden that was later seen with the rise of unions in modern Sweden. With a huge increase in demand for factory workers during the industrial revolution came the demand for better working conditions which led to a unified working class banding together to push forward reforms to end the inequality between employer and employee. In both scenarios, Swedes needed to join forces against a common enemy for the greater good of their community. However, …show more content…
They “could own and inherit property and were free to divorce.” This unusual amount of freedom granted to women of that time contributed to how “Swedish women today pride themselves on self-sufficiency and independence and are not likely to accept a subservient role on the job or at home.” Swedish women today are closer to becoming equal to men in our lucrative patriarchy because of the freedoms and respect Viking women had in their society. This equality also forms the basis of Sweden’s sociopolitical system, The Swedish Model. Here the “Swedish social policy attempts to create a society without class, gender, or ethnic differences.” This distinct endeavor to achieve equality for all is characteristic of the Swedes. From the Viking Age to Modern Sweden, equality has been a constant theme in Swedish