With the Packers hosting their neighbors to the immediate west tonight in a rivalry that has featured these excellent moments …

… two news items seem appropriate, the first particularly noteworthy for those of us of Nordic descent …

… from National Geographic:

The Vikings gave no quarter when they stormed the city of Nantes, in what is now western France, in June 843—not even to the monks barricaded in the city’s cathedral. “The heathens mowed down the entire multitude of priest, clerics, and laity,” according to one witness account. Among the slain, allegedly killed while celebrating the Mass, was a bishop who later was granted sainthood.

To modern readers the attack seems monstrous, even by the standards of medieval warfare. But the witness account contains more than a touch of hyperbole, writes Anders Winroth, a Yale history professor and author of the book The Age of the Vikings, a sweeping new survey. What’s more, he says, such exaggeration was often a feature of European writings about the Vikings.

When the account of the Nantes attack is scrutinized, “a more reasonable image emerges,” he writes. After stating that the Vikings had killed the “entire multitude,” for instance, the witness contradicts himself by noting that some of the clerics were taken into captivity. And there were enough people left—among the “many who survived the massacre”—to pay ransom to get prisoners back.

In short, aside from ignoring the taboo against treating monks and priests specially, the Vikings acted not much differently from other European warriors of the period, Winroth argues.

In 782, for instance, Charlemagne, now heralded as the original unifier of Europe, beheaded 4,500 Saxon captives on a single day. “The Vikings never got close to that level of efficiency,” Winroth says, drily.

Just how bad were the Vikings?

Winroth is among the scholars who believe the Vikings were no more bloodthirsty than other warriors of the period. But they suffered from bad public relations—in part because they attacked a society more literate than their own, and therefore most accounts of them come from their victims. Moreover, because the Vikings were pagan, they played into a Christian story line that cast them as a devilish, malign, outside force.

“There is this general idea of the Vikings as being exciting and other, as something that we can’t understand from our point of view—which is simply continuing the story line of the victims in their own time,” Winroth says. “One starts to think of them in storybook terms, which is deeply unfair.”

In reality, he proposes, “the Vikings were sort of free-market entrepreneurs.”

To be sure, scholars have for decades been stressing aspects of Viking life beyond the warlike, pointing to the craftsmanship of the Norse (to use the term that refers more generally to Scandinavians), their trade with the Arab world, their settlements in Greenland and Newfoundland, the ingenuity of their ships, and the fact that the majority of them stayed behind during raids.

But Winroth wants to put the final nail in the coffin of the notion that the Vikings were the “Nazis of the North,” as an article by British journalist Patrick Cockburn argued last April. Viking atrocities were “the equivalent of those carried out by SS divisions invading Poland 75 years ago,” Cockburn wrote. …

Rather than being primed for battle by an irrational love of mayhem, Vikings went raiding mainly for pragmatic reasons, Winroth contends—namely, to build personal fortunes and enhance the power of their chieftains. As evidence Winroth enumerates cases in which Viking leaders negotiated for payment, or tried to.

For example, before the Battle of Maldon in England, a Viking messenger landed and cried out to 3,000 or more assembled Saxon soldiers: “It is better for you that you pay off this spear-fight with tribute … Nor have we any need to kill each other.” The English chose to fight, and were defeated. Like anyone else, the Vikings would rather win by negotiation than risk a loss, Winroth says. …

The Norse were prodigious traders, selling furs, walrus tusks, and slaves to Arabs in the East. Winroth goes so far as to argue that Vikings provided much needed monetary stimulus to western Europe at a crucial time. Norse trade led to an influx of Arabic dirhams, or coins, which helped smooth the transition to an economy of exchange instead of barter.

Yet even among scholars who attempt to see things from the Vikings’ perspective, disagreements persist about the nature of Viking violence. Robert Ferguson, for example, doesn’t downplay its ferocity, but he characterizes it as symbolic and defensive, a form of “asymmetric warfare.”

In the year 806, for example, the slaughter of 68 monks on the Isle of Iona, off the coast of Scotland, sowed terror in Europe. Ferguson suggests that the move was designed to convince Charlemagne and others that it would be very costly to expand Christianity into Scandinavia by force. The Vikings “were fighting to defend their way of life,” Ferguson says.

Tonight’s game is, of course, a sellout, which means it will be on TV in the Packers’ home markets, Green Bay and Milwaukee. The NFL prohibits home-market telecasts if games aren’t sold out 48 hours before kickoff. There were two games blacked out in 2013 — almost including the Packers’ playoff game against San Francisco, though the deadline was barely met — and 15 in 2012.

About which, the Washington Post reports:

Federal regulators on Thursday sacked the longstanding sports “blackout” rule that prevents certain games from being shown on TV if attendance to the live event is poor.

In a bipartisan vote, the Federal Communications Commission unanimously agreed to strike down the much-criticized 40-year-old policy. Under the blackout rule, games that failed to sell enough tickets could not be shown on free, over-the-air television in the home team’s own local market.

The FCC said the rule mainly benefits team owners and sports leagues, such as the NFL, by driving ticket sales but it does not serve consumers.

”For 40 years, these teams have hidden behind a rule of the FCC,” said FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. “No more. Everyone needs to be aware who allows blackouts to exist, and it is not the Federal Communications Commission.”

The rule was initially put in place in 1975 amid concerns of flagging attendance at live sports games. At the time, almost 60 percent of NFL games were blacked out on broadcast TV because not enough fans were showing up at stadiums. Today, that figure stands at less than one percent, and professional football is so popular on TV that programming contracts contribute “a substantial majority of the NFL’s revenues,” said FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai.

The NFL has warned that ending the blackout rule would hurt consumers by encouraging leagues to move their programming exclusively to pay TV. But Pai pushed back against those claims Tuesday, saying teams can’t afford not to air their games on broadcast TV.

”By moving games to pay TV,” said Pai, “the NFL would be cutting off its nose to spite its face.”

The vote doesn’t mean that blackouts are going away immediately. The NFL still has blackout rules written into individual contracts with regional sports broadcasters. In general, these deals last until the beginning of the next decade. The FCC’s rule, which was struck down, essentially served as a stamp of approval for the NFL’s policy.

In new contracts, the NFL would have to renew those blackout provisions over the objections of the federal government. On Tuesday, the FCC’s message was clear: If the NFL chooses that path, it will be the only one bearing the brunt of consumer ire, particularly from low-income Americans and the disabled who can’t make it or have a harder time getting to the games.

The cable industry welcomed the 5-0 vote.

”We commend the commission’s unanimous decision to eliminate the antiquated sports blackout rule,” said the National Cable and Telecommunications Association. “As the video marketplace continues to evolve and offers consumers more competition and a growing variety of new services, we encourage the FCC to continue its examination of outdated rules that no longer make sense.” …

The NFL indicated Tuesday that it had no immediate plans to change how it broadcasts games.

“NFL teams have made significant efforts in recent years to minimize blackouts,” the NFL said in a statement. “The NFL is the only sports league that televises every one of its games on free, over-the-air television. The FCC’s decision will not change that commitment for the foreseeable future.”

The next to last sentence is not correct. The Packers host Atlanta Dec. 8, in a game that will be televised on ESPN. It will be on “free, over-the-air television” in Green Bay and Milwaukee, but not anywhere else in Wisconsin. If you don’t get ESPN on cable or satellite, and you can’t get channel 2 in Green Bay or channel 12 in Milwaukee, you won’t be watching.

The point here, which the Post finally got to, is that the FCC’s ruling has no weight given that the networks that carry the NFL have agreed to the blackout provision as part of their contracts.

What makes the blackout issue different now from the past is that the NFL has been taking a public relations beating (pun not intended) recently, thanks to the misbehavior of some of its players (which is not a new thing) and the NFL’s perceived mishandling of the issue. It’s impossible to say what the NFL’s public image will be in the early 2020s, when the NFL will be negotiating its next TV contracts after the current contracts expire after the 2021 season. That fact and the networks’ agreeing with the NFL to the blackout rules make the FCC’s decision less news than it may appear.