The Norwegian “Viking row” celebration has been the ubiquitous sensation of the 2026 World Cup. Norway fans have rowed in Times Square, rowed on escalators and rowed at NFL stadiums around the U.S. in unison with their national soccer team, led by the quintessential Viking himself, superstar striker Erling Haaland.

The demonstration is inclusive and iconic. And according to news reports in Scandinavia—it’s also Swedish.

A recent report in Aftenposten, the largest newspaper in Oslo, Norway, noted that crowds rowing Viking-style have been a popular feature at concerts for the Swedish metal band Amon Amarth since at least 2009. Indeed, the band’s official TikTok has a 2023 video of an arena full of fans in Glasgow performing the distinctive seated “row!”

“Long before rowing found its way to the football stands,” the Aftenposten report wrote on June 25, “it was already a fixture in the metal scene. And it is especially famous through … the Swedes.”

Morten Ramm, a Norwegian comedian, posted an Instagram video of Amon Amarth fans rowing at another metal concert. “The least you could do now is give [the band] a listen to help boost his royalties,” Ramm wrote in the caption.

The Norwegian national team and its official supporter club, Oljeberget, did not respond to requests for comment. Norway’s victory on Tuesday over Ivory Coast is sending the national team to the round of 16, where it will face Brazil at MetLife Stadium, renamed New York New Jersey Stadium for the tournament, on Sunday.

Indeed, the Vikings were not distinct to present-day Norway but were a group of seafaring pirates from across Scandinavia who raided and colonized swaths of Europe from the 9^th to the 11^th century, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Today, the legacy of the Vikings yields mixed feelings across the region.

“The clearest signs that something is really wrong in Norway have come from their national football team,” wrote Alex Schulman, a Swedish author and media personality, in an opinion column for the Swedish paper Dagens Nyheter, titled, “Thank God I’m not Norwegian and have to play Viking.”

Schulman wrote that if he had to watch members of the Swedish soccer team “perform similar Viking antics, I would have died of shame. But the Norwegians seem to be overjoyed… an insane chant is now heard from the stands, which involves everyone suddenly playing galley slaves and shouting ROW! ROW! ROW!”

A column by commentator Anders Q Björkman in Svenska Dagbladet prodded Swedes to “take over” the chant because “history actually suggests that rowing was something ‘our’ Vikings did more than Vikings from what is now Norway.”

But at least one present-day Swedish Viking supports the Norwegian row. Johan Hegg, lead singer of Amon Amarth, posted on the band’s official Instagram last week that his grandfather came from Norway, and as a result, “it makes me a little bit extra proud that the Norwegians have brought this tradition of rowing to the World Cup. We love it.”