Vikings are a part of everyday life. For a people who lived around a thousand years ago, their omnipresence is remarkable. They are a marketing device, a tourist attraction, and a subject on the national curriculum. They appear at museums, Viking festivals, and in comic strips, films, novels, and children's history books. They are a focus of academic controversy, with scholars waging an ongoing war over the proper interpretations of the Viking past, and they lend themselves readily to use in constructing various national and regional identities.Vikings are a vibrant part of modern popular culture. Although the Viking Age ended nearly a millennium ago, today Viking images are everywhere, functioning as marketing devices, role models, and sources of regional/national pride and identity. This book examines the causes of the Vikings' adoption as icons of popular culture and looks at the various ways in which Vikings are used.The book also turns to a chronological overview of political, literary, and archaeological developments that have influenced the evolution of Viking images.