The NFL will tell you that the Minnesota Vikings and New Orleans Saints first clashed on Oct. 13, 1968, a Saints win right before the Vikings would go on to engineer one of the greatest non-championship team runs in NFL history from 1969 to 1976.
But really, the Vikings and Saints returned to England to do battle in the same country where they first fought. The first Viking raid of a monastery in recorded British history occurred in 739 AD, after which a monk and royal advisor known as Alcuin wrote “The pagans have desecrated God’s sanctuary, shed the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope and trampled the bodies of the saints like dung on the street.”
Vikings and Saints history stretches long before the NFL
It’s hard to say that the Vikings from Minnesota trampled the Saints, but they did eke out a tough-fought win in order to bookmark the Vikings’ visits to England over the centuries with victories. The Vikings from Eagan didn’t carry the same level of urgency or dominance as those from Norway, but they were able to engineer a final drive to push Minnesota to a 28-25 win over New Orleans, levying a series of field goals to chip away at the Saints.
The history of the Vikings in the British Isles runs long, though the only ones with any horns on their helmets were of the Minnesotan variety. Like any good Vikings raid, vision on the field was obscured by battle smoke — though the modern-day gunpowder was used more for fireworks than for burning down a thatch-roofed cottage.
It seems to be no historical accident that the Vikings played the Saints at Tottenham, nor is it by chance that the Norse Vikings landed at Lindisfarne, rather than any of the other monasteries dotting the British coastline. As priest David Adam wrote in his book, “The Holy Island of Lindisfarne,” the monastery “certainly seems to have more saints per square metre than you can find almost anywhere else.”
The populace of Saints near White Hart Lane was nearly as numerous, and the cacophony of the crowd on either side was deafening enough to confuse a Benedictine monk into thinking there was a great battle, though the “home team” Saints only seemed to draw the biggest roars during team introductions, losing out ever so slightly to Vikings fans during the game.
Head coach of the Vikings, Kevin O’Connell, noticed. “[I] cannot say enough about what the environment, atmosphere was like here today, in addition to what three, four days have felt like here for our team, and the support, just a genuine, real love of American football that I feel.”
The Vikings recorded wins at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Wembley, and Twickenham, the only team to do so. The Vikings also recorded victories at Lindisfarne in 793, York in 865, and Englefield in 870. No one has the record of conquest over England more than the Vikings do.
To conclude the most recent chapter of victories against the Saints seems appropriate.
In a sense, the Vikings and Saints were doomed to do battle. There’s certainly been no love lost between the two franchises, as each can claim the other as the progenitor to one of the most embarrassing recent playoff losses in memory, with the 2009 NFC Championship Game — remembered more for the allegations in the Bountygate scandal than the Super Bowl that followed — rivaling the Minneapolis Miracle when it comes to mutual fan rancor.
Sunday’s battle was just the latest in this long-tenured history
They were able to build on that rivalry in Sunday’s flag-filled affair. While this particular game won’t be as well-remembered as their overtime playoff game during the 2019 season or the Minneapolis Miracle, it also won’t be the footnote that their Week 8 matchup was in 2018.
Down to the wire, the Saints required that kicker Wil Lutz break — and then break again — a team record for field-goal yardage. Not up to the task, Lutz bounced his final attempt, a 61-yarder as time expired, off of the left upright and the crossbar before the ball spilled out instead of in.
In the same way, the peaceful Vikings settlements throughout Northumbria are less exciting of an historical development than the raids during the Viking Age but just as important to the rich history of interactions between the Vikings and Saints. We’ll remember Lindisfarne as well as we remember Sean Payton mocking the skol chant in 2017 just before witnessing Stefon Diggs’ time-defying effort to win the Divisional Round.
That kind of hubris is what Alcuin would have described as a portent for the Miracle to come afterward. As he processed the raid on Holy Island, Alcuin wrote “What assurance is there for the churches of Britain, if St Cuthbert, with so great a number of saints, defends not its own? Either this is the beginning of greater tribulation, or else the sins of the inhabitants have called it upon them. Truly it has not happened by chance, but is a sign that it was well merited by someone. But now, you who are left, stand manfully, fight bravely, defend the camp of God.”
Certainly, Saints coach Dennis Allen thinks there wasn’t a meek surrender. “We’ll … make the evaluation of what we need to do better. I thought our defensive guys battled their tails off today. I thought we put them in a couple of tough situations. And I thought they battled.”
The clashes between the Vikings and Saints throughout the United Kingdom would come to define both cultures. One of the most important events in early Western history, the Battle of Hastings in 1066, featured Anglo-Saxons defending their country from Norman belligerents from the north of France — a colony of former Vikings established a century prior.
It is impossible to overstate the impact of the Norman conquest. Not only did it have a tremendous impact on the English language — a reason that so many English words have Latin roots despite being a Germanic language — but on governance, food, and the structure of society.
Of course, one of the very first acts of William the Conqueror was to establish a monastery, Battle Abbey. His daughter, Adela of Normandy, was consecrated as a Saint by the Roman Catholic Church. Just as the Vikings and Saints were locked in battle, so too were they amalgamated, one into the other.
Several NFL players have played for both the Vikings and Saints
And as the Vikings helped to create Saints, the Saints created Vikings — the first 1,000-yard receiver in Vikings history was John Gilliam, a four-time Pro Bowler in the early days of Minnesota’s dynasty. The exchange of Vikings and Saints — Adrian Peterson, Teddy Bridgewater, Darren Sharper, Wade Wilson, Latavius Murray, Tom Johnson — is ever-present. Even lineages cross over, perhaps the greatest tight end in Vikings history, Steve Jordan, is the father of one of the greatest Saints pass rushers of all time, Cameron Jordan.
The historical throughline of all these clashes tells us that these divisions can be arbitrary. After all, Northumberland was ruled by a monarchy of Anglo-Saxons, themselves originally from Denmark — where, a few hundred years later, we would see Vikings.
Heroes and heroic performances
This cross-pollination doesn’t mean that these arbitrary lines don’t matter. It’s hard to imagine a history of the modern Minnesota Vikings without some understanding of their play against the Saints; heroic performances from Case Keenum, Stefon Diggs, Kyle Rudolph, Adam Thielen, Everson Griffen, and so on dot any retellings of their many matchups since 2009.
The Saints themselves have those heroes: Drew Brees, Alvin Kamara, Scott Fujita, Jonathan Vilma, Cameron Jordan, and more.
So too, with the Vikings and Saints of old, are the heroes of one story, the villains of the other. Without ever being implicated, Brees became one of the faces of Bountygate along with linebackers Vilma and Fujita, originally suspended by the league for their alleged participation in the program.
More troublingly, these heroes have had an impact off the field. Leading the team in tackles against the Vikings in 2009 was Sharper, who that year earned first-team All-Pro recognition after reeling in nine interceptions. The previous four years, he had played for the Vikings, earning two Pro Bowls while suited up in purple.
But that’s not what he’ll be remembered for. Convicted of sexual assault of nine victims with a judge noting there may be several more, the stark realities of humanity intervene in the mythmaking process. Off-field allegations dog players like Favre, Cook, Kamara, Peterson, and more.
And on top of allegations of real, tangible harm we can point to, what are we to do with decisions like Cousins’ vaccine refusal, Brees’ business association with Advocare, Vikings owner Zygi Wilf’s civil fraud, or the ongoing case of the Saints’ alleged public relations assistance to help shield the Catholic church in their own abuse crisis?
How are we to visit sites like Lindisfarne and see the wreckage wrought by both Vikings and Saints on places of worship and come away thinking that there are clear heroes and villains?
Considered one of the holiest sites in all of England, Lindisfarne not only held the remains of St. Cuthbert and St. Aidan – two people who might be the most responsible for the Christianization of dark age England – but extraordinary wealth and treasure. While the Lindisfarne Gospel, one of the most detailed and impactful religious manuscripts produced of the era, represents both the efficacy and excess of the church.
Monasteries existed as a means of projecting power and collecting wealth and were founded and managed by a combination of royal and Christian administration, allowing kings to extend their influence, collect rent, and eventually, create fortresses.
The dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century was a means of consolidating the power that the monasteries had acquired and paved the way for the king to exert control in the same way that monasteries had, leading to more modern systems of land enclosure and private speculation.
The Vikings’ raid on the Saints of Lindisfarne was only possible because of the enormous accumulation of wealth inside, both the product of land ownership and tithing pilgrims. Brutal acts of violence from the Vikings overshadowed the subtler violence of starvation, disease, and exposure that came from the hoarding of wealth common to monastic institutions.
And the Vikings themselves had their heroes. From Harald Bluetooth to Erik the Red, the greatest Vikings heroes are marred by their own histories, whether it’s Bluetooth’s violent unification of the Viking kingdoms or Erik’s exile from Denmark for manslaughter — and his arrival in Iceland eventually led to another clash between historical Vikings and the English in the aptly named Cod Wars.
The ancient historical raids on English monasteries preceded settlement on the island, and today a substantial portion of English genetic history comes from those Vikings. The ancient separation between Vikings and the English that ran starkly then runs thin today.
The Vikings (from Minnesota) returned to England to conquer. Instead of raiding villages and leaving behind a wake of death and destruction, they raid practice squads and leave behind the broken bodies of the players they run through. We don’t see visits to cathedrals of religion but cathedrals of status — stadiums whose values exceed the billions, inconceivable to the monks of the eighth century.
Both voyages to the British Isles were to seek out treasure on relatively untapped grounds — first to seek out unplundered loot and the second time to capture market share.
As Vikings receiver Adam Thielen said after the game, “I think there’s a great opportunity to expand this game. Hopefully, we can continue to bring it to other countries and continue to bring it to this country. I feel like every time I come over here, it’s usually like four, five years apart that we kind of come over here, and I feel like the game has grown so much.”
And his quarterback agreed. “As I said to somebody on the field after the game, it’s a great product. If you’re a fan, we gave you something to watch. We kept it close and entertaining,” said Cousins after the game.
The motive for the expansion in the eighth century was the same as it was in the 21st: profit. The ascetic life of monks, many of whom themselves were not wealthy but afforded the privileges of landed gentry, concealed vast stores of wealth in the same way that modern-day Saints, like any NFL team, embrace the spartan grind.
The Vikings’ raids on monasteries were not wholly malicious either, an expanding population in Norway and Denmark limited their own access to resources and spurred the Viking Age, leading to settlements in Greenland, Iceland, Ireland, and Northumberland.
A good portion of the power of the Saints in England came from royal decree, profits on land, and the generosity of pilgrims. NFL teams also find the same source of status — government monopoly protection, unique land rights, the extant wealth of the ownership class, and fan engagement.
Those pilgrims and these fans have unique reasons for their own participation, whether it’s to find an escape from their everyday lives, the chance to be part of something greater, or meaning in a world that’s seemingly left them behind.
All of these are valid reasons to participate in their own investment and mythmaking, and people should feel empowered to find meaning in whatever gives them direction. But it’s also important to remember the background of all that worship. And nothing puts it into context better than the 1,200-year history of Vikings in the United Kingdom.