I don't want to be too specific, and exhibit a person or a club, so I have chosen to modify the facts slightly, to keep the involved parties uninvolved.
I was recently asked to make a banner for a Nordic show event for a certain kind of pet. In this case we will say it was a dog show. One of my suggestions was a dog wearing a viking uniform, as it is a Nordic show and I imagined that Vikings was one of the common denominators.
The club was thrilled, and they used the banner to invite members from multiple Scandinavian countries. I got several positive replies and comments from multiple members saying that they thought the image was really cute!
Some time later, the Swedish delegation protested, saying that they could not publish the invitation banner to their members, because viking helmets with horns were a symbol of right wing extremists and that they represented Nazis.
Initially I thought that this was a joke, but i don't want to judge before knowing if this indeed is the case in Sweden. Do people look at horned viking helmets and think "Nazi" instead of "Viking"?
And yes - this is made with AI. Love it or hate it, it makes for very affordable illustrations for clubs and groups that have no money and make no money
The story I always heard was that the horned helmet was an anachronism from opera, specifically the operas of Richard Wagner, who expressed anti-Semitic views and whose works were co-opted by the Nazis after his death, maybe that’s where they formed the idea?
wow! That would be a really long stretch, if this is true! and should have pulled in a lot more symbols than just the horned viking helmets?
Yeah, though in respect to this image I don’t see any other symbols that would qualify (Thor’s Hammer, runes come to mind)