Random thought, but is the tendency to refer casually to Viking sexual mores as "homophobic" a little off the mark? Maybe contemporary gay culture represents a closer analogy to their masculinity?

After all, Vikings insults aren't anti-gay. They're anti-bottom. #MedievalTwitter

To put it another way, it doesn't disrupt a Scandinavian man's sexuality to claim to have fucked another man. Only to have been fucked.

Ofc, these insults are (probably) hyperbolic, but that doesn't meant that there wasn't an entire culture built around claiming to fuck dudes.

Would it be useful to think about this not as a kind of proto-homophobic culture, but as one more comparable to, say, modern gay white Euro-American male culture? Not that they are all gay, but that the prejudices are closer to those found in normative gay communities.

So, there's a strong tendency to bottom-shame, to prize "masculinity," and "straight-acting-ness," and to be femme-phobic and transphobic. Flyting insults depend on humiliating others by implying they aren't manly: NOT by implying they're "gay" but that they're "bottoms"

They also are replete with insults based on the idea that getting fucked by another man makes you metaphorically (or literally) into a woman, even leading to pregnancy.

This resembles, to some extent, the femme-phobia and transphobia of normative queer communities.

This isn't a fully fleshed argument, just musing aloud, but it does seem like some of the terminology that has been invented to describe normativity in modern gay communities is better suited to describe medieval Scandinavian society, at least in literature.

One thing that IS interesting is how much less evidence there seems to be for racism in those moments, at least, unlike in many modern white gay circles. Perhaps it's another reflection of the diversity of the Vikings, as seen in the recent DNA study? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/sep/16/dark-hair-was-common-among-vikings-genetic-study-confirms

Maybe we need to take more cues from queer theorists and communities for how to understand the Vikings.

Maybe Viking masculinity was much more like Grindr communities than modern white supremacist ones. Maybe that's why the word for "Viking" was "Víkingr."