Since 1961 Minnesota has fielded a football team with a Viking name, a horn on its helmet and a rallying cry that began as a drinking toast. The story does not start in the ninth century. It starts in the summer of 1960, with a publicity man from Los Angeles, a bowling company and a state where around 1900 about one resident in eight had been born in Norway or Sweden. This article separates what club records and newspapers show from what families remember and from what is plain myth. Two points up front: the origin of the name is less tidy than the usual short version claims, and the horn has nothing to do with the Viking Age.
You will often read that the Vikings took their name in 1961. That is only the year of their first game. The National Football League, the NFL, awarded Minnesota a team at its owners' meeting in Miami on 28 January 1960, to begin play the following year. On 5 August 1960 the owners named Bert Rose as the first general manager. On 27 September 1960 the club announced its name at a "Welcome Professional Football" luncheon. That is the sequence in the club's own timeline.
The first game came almost a year later. On 5 August 1961 the Vikings lost a preseason game to the Dallas Cowboys in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, 38–13. On 17 September 1961 they won their first regular-season game, 37–13 against the Chicago Bears, at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington. That ground, originally built for baseball, stayed the team's home until 1981.
There had been a detour. In August 1959 the Minneapolis businessmen Bill Boyer, H. P. Skoglund and Max Winter secured a franchise in the newly founded rival American Football League. When the NFL beckoned, they gave it up, and the place went to what became the Oakland team. The club's timeline lists five founding owners: Max Winter, E. William Boyer, H. P. Skoglund, Ole Haugsrud and Bernard H. Ridder Jr.
Bert E. Rose Jr. (1919–2001) came from Seattle, studied journalism at the University of Washington and later ran sports publicity there. In 1955 he became public relations director of the Los Angeles Rams. He was no specialist in Scandinavia. He was a professional in public impact. The Vikings' 1962 press guide credits him with the idea; that he recommended the name to the board comes, according to Wikipedia, from Mark Craig (2016). The reasoning was given at the announcement by club president William Boyer, as Rob Beer of the Forum of Fargo-Moorhead retells it: a team name should represent an aggressive person or animal with the will to win and if possible evoke the region, and "Vikings" did both. The club's current timeline says much the same, speaking of an aggressive person with the will to win and of Nordic tradition in the northern Midwest.
That reasoning deserves a second look. It contains no historical claim about the Viking Age. It names a temperament and an ancestry. The Viking of 1960 was a promotional figure, promising toughness to a new team and belonging to an entire state. Whether you thought of raids, seafaring or your own grandparents was left up to you.
The dates differ slightly. Wikipedia, drawing on a 2016 fan book by Mark Craig, gives 17 September 1960 as the day the board adopted the name; the club and the Star Tribune give 27 September as the day it was announced. Both can be right if the decision came before the announcement. I found no confirmation of 17 September independent of Wikipedia, and I could not consult Craig's book or the board papers. Only 27 September is backed by contemporary reporting.
The short version, "Rose invented the name", has a problem. A company called Minnesota Vikings Inc. already existed before Rose took office. According to the Star Tribune it was formed on 14 June 1960, and its four owners included Harry Gustafson and Max Winter. It was a bowling team, set to play in the planned National Bowling League. Winter was therefore on both sides of the table. In autumn 1960 the football team wanted the name, and the paper says the bowlers need not have given it up. They did anyway and started out as the Twin Cities Skippers when the league began in 1961. The league lasted a single season.
Wikipedia adds that Winter later credited Gustafson with giving him the name and that Gustafson had filed for protection of it. The entry gives no specific reference for this, so I cannot confirm it. There is a third trail too. The Minneapolis Tribune reported on 6 August 1960, the day after Rose's appointment, that the team would be "Minnesota" rather than "Minneapolis–St. Paul", and, according to Wikipedia, listed nicknames under discussion: Chippewas, Miners, Vikings, Voyageurs. Paul Lukas of Uni Watch found the article in the archive and writes that the details appear to check out. Yet he too gives the list of names only via Wikipedia, and I have not read the newspaper text itself. If the list is right, the name was in the air before Rose had been in the job a week. Other suggestions of those weeks, according to Rob Beer, were Eskimos, Lakers, Twins, Wolves and Medics.
The list itself is revealing. Chippewa is an older name for the Ojibwe, who live in Minnesota. Miners points to the workers of the iron ranges, Voyageurs to the French-speaking fur traders. Each of those names referred to a group that really lived and worked in Minnesota. Only the Viking stands for people with no proven presence there, which is why the choice was justified through descendants: the medieval Norse did not come to Minnesota, the Scandinavians of the nineteenth century did.
That the name came from Rose himself cannot be clearly established. What is documented is that club tradition has named him since 1962 and that he is said to have made the recommendation to the board. It is plausible that he picked up an existing idea and pushed it through. That, however, is an inference, not a finding from the sources. A further, undocumented version credits Ole Haugsrud with the name and the colours.
Among the owners, Haugsrud had the longest history in football. Born in Superior, Wisconsin, he had owned the Duluth Eskimos in the 1920s, a travelling NFL side of 1926 and 1927. When he handed the team back to the league he secured, according to Wikipedia and Sportslogos, a prior claim on any future NFL team in Minnesota. He passed on it for the Minneapolis Red Jackets of 1929 and took it up in 1960, receiving ten per cent. Minnesota had thus seen NFL football decades before the Vikings, who were not the first attempt, only the first lasting one.
His high school in Superior was Central, and its teams were called the Vikings and wore purple and white, as the town's current high school confirms; some accounts say gold. From this grew the story that Haugsrud handed the new club its name and colours. Lukas followed it up. Several people had heard it, all second-hand, and one book gives it only with "reportedly". Rose's son Stephen disagrees and calls Haugsrud a silent owner. No document supports the story, according to this research. Lukas himself considers it an oft-repeated tall tale, and team historian Fred Zamberletti went with Rose. That does not strictly disprove it, but it remains mere fan tradition.
There is a simple reason why a Viking name caught on in Minnesota at all. In October 1850 the Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer visited what was then Minnesota Territory, not yet a state, and wrote that same month a sentence about the land that now appears on the "Swedes in Minnesota" marker at Scandia.
"What a glorious new Scandinavia might not Minnesota become!"Fredrika Bremer, letter from Minnesota, October 1850, in The Homes of the New World, tr. Mary Howitt, vol. 2, 1853, p. 56; the Swedish wording on the "Swedes in Minnesota" marker at Scandia (1995) reads "Hvilket herrligt Nytt Skandinavien kunde ej Minnesota bli!"
Bremer spun this out, half travel report, half rapture. In the same passage the Edda is already at play: she speaks of a "New Vineland" on the islands of the Mississippi, of frost giants, of Balder, Loki and the Midgard Serpent. The word "Viking" does not occur on these pages, as a check with the retrieval tool showed. The link between Norse mythology and Minnesota is thus more than a century older than the football team, and it began as a literary flourish.
The immigration itself was more sober. The Scandia marker gives 1850 for the first Swedes in the territory, with settlement around the Chisago Lakes from 1851. Norwegians came to the southeast in the early 1850s (the Star Tribune says 1852, Wikipedia a colony in Goodhue County in 1851). The pressures were a growing population, too little land and work at home, and the famine of the 1860s. On the American side stood the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted settlers 160 acres if they lived on the land for five years. That land had a prior history: treaties had taken it from Native peoples, and after the US-Dakota War of 1862 the government expelled the Dakota from the state. In 1867 Minnesota set up its own immigration board, with the Swedish-born Hans Mattson as its first secretary, and sent out pamphlets and agents.
The figures I could find give the scale. Around 1860 roughly a third of the population was foreign-born. The 1900 census counted 115,476 Swedish-born and 104,895 Norwegian-born residents of Minnesota, together about 12.6 per cent of some 1.75 million people (as compiled by Stacker; I have not seen the original table, and the Star Tribune also gives about 13 per cent). By 1920 nearly a quarter of the foreign-born came from Sweden, and in 1940 about 193,000 people still named Norwegian and about 165,000 Swedish as their mother tongue. I could not consult the monographs by Gjerde ("Norwegians in Minnesota") and Ljungmark ("Swedes in Minnesota"). Danes and Finns are not included in these figures.
By the time the NFL arrived in 1960, the main waves of immigration lay decades in the past. The name therefore reached not immigrants but their children and grandchildren. That explains why it worked as a badge of origin without anyone needing a word of Norwegian. Marketing did the rest: Rose's son Scott recalled that using the state name rather than "Minneapolis–St. Paul" gave season-ticket sales a huge lift, because it sidestepped the rivalry of the Twin Cities and reached buyers in neighbouring states. Rose himself explained the state name more soberly to Rotarians in Rochester in November 1960: the double name was too long, St. Paul might get dropped, and "Minnesota" would secure statewide backing.
The immigrants themselves were farmers, lumber workers and domestic servants. Why did Vikings of all people become their ancestors in the public image? Part of the answer is an older American quarrel. In 1874 the Wisconsin scholar Rasmus B. Anderson published "America Not Discovered by Columbus". To set Leif Erikson against Columbus was also to say: we are not latecomers to this country, we were here first. In a University of Washington master's thesis (2025), Erik Moe treats the 1925 festival as a stage on which Norwegian Americans presented themselves as full, white Americans, with the Leif story as one of its main themes; I know only the abstract.
Minnesota was a stage for this. From 6 to 9 June 1925 the Norse-American Centennial on the State Fair grounds in St. Paul marked a hundred years since the sloop Restauration crossed from Stavanger to New York. The Post Office issued a stamp with a Viking ship, the commemorative medal showed one as well, and the programme included a pageant with 1,500 performers. President Calvin Coolidge spoke on 8 June and, according to secondary accounts, acknowledged Leif's voyage some 500 years before Columbus; I have not read the speech itself. The historical basis for that is now secured archaeologically for Newfoundland, as the article on Vinland shows. For Minnesota it is not. By 1960 the Viking was long established as a badge of Scandinavian-American identity, and whoever used it had nothing to invent.
In 1898 the Swedish immigrant Olof Öhman said he had found an inscribed stone near Kensington in western Minnesota, whose runic text claims a Norse expedition in 1362. How the inscription is built, who examined it and why its language and rune forms fit the nineteenth century is covered in detail in the article The Kensington Runestone; the prevailing expert view regards it as a modern forgery. Even if it were genuine it would be late medieval: by 1362 the Viking Age lay about three centuries in the past.
Is there a direct line from the stone to the team name? I found no evidence for one. Neither the club timeline nor the accounts of Rose, Winter or Haugsrud give the stone as a reason. Anyone who calls it the source of the name is presenting a guess as fact. Its role was a different one. It kept alive in Minnesota the idea that Norsemen had crossed this land before Columbus. Hjalmar Holand campaigned for it for over fifty years, it went on show at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in 1948, and Alexandria businessmen bought it for the local tourist trade.
The chronology also rules out a popular shortcut. Alexandria's famous Viking statue, "Big Ole", came after the Vikings, not before them. The Gordon Display Company of Minneapolis built the fibreglass figure, about 28 feet tall, for the Minnesota pavilion at the New York World's Fair, where it stood beside the runestone in 1965. Its shield at first read "Birthplace of America?", with a question mark. After its return to Alexandria, celebrated on 21 December 1965, the question mark vanished when the figure was repainted. A question became an assertion without any new evidence being added. The figure shows how far stone and Viking image were addressing the same audience in the 1960s. It does not explain the team name.
The Vikings have two signature images: the Norseman in profile, blond, with a thick moustache, a braid and a horned helmet, and the white horn on each side of the purple football helmet. The horn was slightly revised in 2006, the Norseman most recently in 2013. We deliberately show neither here. Both are protected marks, and a description is enough.
Paul Lukas researched where they came from for ESPN in 2017. The Los Angeles cartoonist Karl Hubenthal, known to Rose and coach Norm Van Brocklin through the Rams organisation, left papers saying he designed the helmet, uniforms and Norseman in 1961. His daughter gave sketches and papers to the club in 2015/16; a helmet drawing from his files is dated March 1961. According to Hubenthal's note, Rose also specified purple and gold, the colours of his alma mater, the University of Washington.
A second claim stands beside this. The 2016 death notice of the outfitter John Merritt Aldritt names him as designer of the helmet logo, at Van Brocklin's request and with the sole condition that it be a horn. His sons describe an envelope marked "Viking Horn" holding a template and decals. A commemorative brick at the stadium has named him since 2015 as designer of the original logo; the club accepted this after seeing documents, while not questioning the Hubenthal account either. Both families recall three designs. The dispute is open. Lukas suggests that Aldritt may have drawn the horn and Hubenthal developed the finished helmet with its gold ring from it; this can no longer be proved, since the principals are dead.
An older parallel is firm. In 1948 Fred Gehrke, then a Rams player, painted ram's horns on his team's helmets, according to the Pro Football Hall of Fame the first modern helmet emblems in pro football. Rose worked for those Rams from 1955. It would be natural for their horn to have rubbed off on the Vikings'. This is not documented, and it remains my own observation, not a statement from any source.
There is no archaeological evidence for horns on Viking helmets. The best-preserved Viking Age helmet from Scandinavia, the Gjermundbu helmet, has a cap and an eye guard but no horns. The genuine horned helmets from Veksø in Denmark are Bronze Age, some two thousand years older than any Viking. The image placed on a helmet in Minnesota in 1961 goes back to the nineteenth century and, according to Roberta Frank's research, above all to Carl Emil Doepler's costumes for Wagner's "Ring" at Bayreuth in 1876. The article Did Vikings wear horned helmets? traces that route in detail.
One feature matters for the Vikings. The horn on the football helmet is not an ornament anyone actually wore but a painted sign. Even so, it has turned things around: for many people, "Viking" now calls up exactly this silhouette. Fans took the final step with "Helga hats", purple caps with white horns and blonde braids. For years the mascot Ragnar also patrolled the sideline, played from 1994 to 2015 by Joseph Juranitch. The name recalls the legendary Ragnar Lothbrok, though I found no club statement of the reason. Viktor has been around since 2007. All this is entertainment. It only goes wrong when someone reasons from the logo back to the ninth century.
Behind "Skol" lies the Scandinavian skål, Old Norse skál, first a bowl or drinking vessel, later the word called out in a toast. Skol is the English spelling, following the sound. The word's history and the stubborn tale of drinking from enemy skulls are covered in Skål: meaning, origin and the skull-cup myth, so they need no repeating. Gregg White, who teaches Swedish at the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, told the broadcaster WCCO there is no evidence that Vikings used the word as a battle cry. The idea of a war cry is modern.
The word appears early around the Vikings. The club dates it to the start in 1961. The song "Skol, Vikings" is by James "Red" McLeod of Edina, Minnesota, who also wrote or arranged University of Minnesota fight songs, which points more to college football than to Scandinavia. I could confirm its date only as "around the founding". The old recording still plays when the team scores.
The communal chant with raised arms, which many take for ancient heritage, is far younger. The Vikings introduced this Skol Chant only in 2016, on moving into U.S. Bank Stadium. The model was Iceland's football fans at the 2016 European Championship, and by the club's account it asked Iceland about borrowing the idea. Yet the thing is not old in Iceland either. Supporters of the club Stjarnan are thought to have picked up the rhythm in 2014 from fans of Scotland's Motherwell FC at a European tie. Its ultimate origin is unresolved: other accounts place it at Motherwell for decades or even earlier at France's RC Lens. The "Viking war chant" is thus a modern European football custom, which then acquired an old drinking word in Minneapolis.
The same goes for the Gjallarhorn, sounded before home games since 2007. In the traditions about Heimdall this horn announces the end of the world of the gods. The instruments in the stadium were, according to Wikipedia, made by Todd Johnson, general manager of a music store. The name is old, the custom belongs to this century.
Why are the Minnesota Vikings called that? The club cited an aggressive figure with the will to win and the Nordic tradition of the northern Midwest, home to many descendants of Scandinavian immigrants.
Who suggested the name? Club tradition names general manager Bert Rose. There are also pointers to Harry Gustafson and Max Winter, whose bowling company already bore the name, and an undocumented story about Ole Haugsrud.
Does the team have anything to do with the Kensington Runestone? I know of no direct connection. The stone belongs to the same regional imagination, but the sources do not give it as a reason, and scholars largely regard it as modern.
What does Skol mean? It is the English spelling of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish skål, originally a bowl, today the toast "cheers".
Who designed the horn? That is disputed. The families of Karl Hubenthal and John Aldritt both claim it, and the club has let both accounts stand.
The Kensington Runestone · Did Vikings wear horned helmets? · Skål: meaning and origin · Vinland · Leif Erikson · The Gjermundbu helmet · What does "Viking" mean? · The drinking horn
The Kensington Runestone – Vikings in Minnesota or a Nineteenth-Century Forgery? · The horned-helmet myth · Skål! Meaning, Origin and the Myth of the Viking Skull Cup · Typically Viking? · Viking films and series.
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