Courtesy American Swedish Insтιтute

Minnesota has the largest Scandinavian American population in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau. But if not for the American Swedish Insтιтute, in south Minneapolis, the Twin Cities’ handle on Nordic culture might stop at lutefisk, “uff da,” and standoffishness. Think of the maypole-circling Midsommar, the crayfish-scarfing Kräftskiva (August 23), or last spring’s egg-shaped sauna—ASI demonstrations many degrees farther north.

This spring through fall, ASI now re-introduces Minnesotans to the Vikings, in one of the biggest exhibits yet at the Scandinavian culture and history museum. The ancient Nordic seafarers did more than plunder, defile, and binge-drink their way to NFL poster-boy status, as new research shows.

The Vikings Begin, on display until October 27, rolls out about 40 artifacts dating some 1,400 years back. Excavated from Swedish burial grounds, they span weapons, jewelry, helmets, and other riches, predating the Norse warriors’ biggest raids by a few centuries. Overseas for the first time, they now fill ASI’s Osher Gallery and Turnblad Mansion. Minneapolis makes the third and final stop on a two-year U.S. tour, following stints in Connecticut and Seattle.

ASI dims the lights, circulates epic music, projects videos of smudy-eyed actors (with research suggesting that Vikings did wear eyeliner).

And the effect is disorienting. Minnesotans have the football team, yes, but popular culture has long treated the Vikings as public-domain history. We’ve dressed them in the (debunked) horned helmets of Richard Wagner’s 19th-century operas; reduced them to the Sunday-comic barbarism of Hägar the Horrible; and adapted what we know of their spirituality for the Marvel Comics universe—while clumsily bundling them with the byword “rape and pillage.”

Despite or because of that ubiquity, the exhibit, on loan from Gustavianum, the Uppsala University Museum in Sweden, makes the Vikings feel real for the first time.

“The main misconception, very much enhanced by the TV series and other depictions, is that brutality and cruelness were their basic characteristics,” says Gustavianum director Mikael Ahlund. (The History Channel’s Netflix-bingeable Vikings prides itself on nailing details but also hypes medieval violence.) “This has prevented many people from seeing and understanding the sophistication of their society.”

Researchers have overlooked that sophistication, too, according to the three archaeologists who recently ᴀssessed the artifacts on display. The Vikings left no written history, no religious texts, no records of trade. We have burial-site finds, plus Old Norse runes, plus the biased accounts of Anglo-Saxons—wherein churchmen describe hellish raids on unprotected monasteries.

If academics have tried to fill in the gaps since about the ’70s, they left key work unfinished: Gustavianum’s ᴀssets, around since the ’20s, have escaped modern analysis until now.

“We have a new chance to [re-examine the exhibit’s materials], with DNA and other analytical methods,” says Gustavianum conservator and exhibit manager Emma Hock. “So it’s quite an exciting time for the University, as well.”

Who were—or, weren’t—the Vikes? Here’s what we found out.

Boat installation

Male, Maritime, and Violent

Price breaks down the Viking stereotype into three parts: “male, maritime, and violent.”

And the Gustavianum team’s adjustments to that stereotype deal in subtleties, at least at first. Visitors enter ASI’s Osher Gallery, surrounded by wall-size images of stormy seas. In the center, a boat installation replicates the type pre-Vikings used in burial, where the artifacts on display would have turned up.

In addition to weapons and tools, the warrior might have gone under with horses, dogs, sheep, goats, pigs—enough to surround him, or, significantly, her, with a menagerie of skeletons, as seen in pH๏τographs in the Turnblad Mansion.