“Vengeance of the Vikings” was a strange Northern that appeared in St. John’s Weird Horrors #7 (April 1953). (The cover of this comic by William Ekgren strikes me as unusual for the 1950s. It looks more like Mike Hinge’s doodle-art work for Fantastic in the 1970s. That “Weird” is also very familiar. I suppose by 1953 Weird Tales was so down-in-the-dumps they couldn’t be bothered to chase this.) The story was written by an unknown author with art by Lou Cameron.
Now the theme of frozen Vikings was nothing new in 1953. Pulps like Doc Savage had used it. Comics like Avon’s Witchcraft had “The Frozen Horror” and St. John’s Strange Terrors with “Sword of the Vikings” (recycling stories?) Stories of frozen mammoths discovered in Siberia morphed into frozen cavemen and then Vikings and finally dinosaurs. “Vengeance of the Vikings” does this too though in fewer pages than most.
Capt. Ed Bennett is making a special trip to Northern Greenland. The men up north need the supplies badly. Even when a storm threatens, the valiant flyers press on.
Ice forces the plane to land. Ed, Bill and Jack take refuge in a cave.
Inside they make an amazing discovery– Vikings frozen in the ice. The classic mistake is made. A campfire is lit and it causes the ice to melt…
The Viking crash out of the ice and speak to the flyers in English. (Well, Old English with plenty of thees and thous.) The men are taken prisoner. To make this even stranger, they have been frozen for thousands of years! (I would think it was about 800 years.)
The flyers escape their captors, throwing chunks of ice at them. The cave is sealed forever when one of the men accidentally drops a torch into the spilled gasoline. The airplane explodes sealing off the cave mouth. Later, when the men are rescued, they talk in the hospital. They begin to doubt the whole experience as a mass hallucination when Ed pulls out the necklace of Lief Erickson.
Baffling Mysteries #8 (May 1952) lives up to its name. Plenty of mystery. Who wrote the story? Why is it almost exactly the same as St. John’s Weird Horrors #7 (April 1953)? Why did Baffling Mysteries #24 have a Ken Rice cover from this story? There are no Vikings in #24. Sorry but I have no answers. Here’s the entire text story.
The biggest departure from the previous story is the inclusion of a love interest, the Anglo-Saxon gal, Laurie. The idea that a modern English-speaker could understand Anglo-Saxon is ridiculous. Even Old English is virtually a different language and it is closer. Anything before 1066 isn’t going to include the Norman French that is half of modern English. Comic book writers aren’t linguists so we can’t expect too much.
“Return of the Ice Vampire” (Hand of Fate #22, March 1954) features many of the same ideas: frozen bodies revived, a connection to Vikings as well as a vampire. The author is not known.
Conclusion
Both unknown authors” falls back on a cliche, the evidence that it wasn’t just a dream. Robert E. Howard used it with Conan back in 1934. It wasn’t new even then. Of course, all other evidence of the reconstituted Vikings is lost. Will the men tell others about their experience, or wisely keep it to themselves? All of these frozen Viking stories probably stem from the discovery of Viking graves in Greenland in the 1950s. The frozen corpiscle is a Pulp cliche dating back at least to the first issue of Weird Tales in 1923. Ian Cameron would revive the whole Viking thing in 1961 for The Lost Ones, better known as Island at the Top of the World.
This comic is available for free at DCM.