How Norway fans’ Viking Row and Vikingblod song took over FIFA World Cup

For about an hour on Sunday night, Times Square became a Norwegian fjord. Thousands of Norway football fans in bright red jerseys had invaded midtown Manhattan. They congregated on the Red Steps, waited for a cue on the drums from Ole Froystad, a man in a Viking hat, and then in unison let out a guttural chant of ‘ro’ (pronounced ruuh) while mimicking a rower’s motion. Someone blasted a Norwegian song called Vikingblod, and fans joined along.

After Boston, the Viking Row and Vikingblod had come to New York.

Norway is playing in its first World Cup in 28 years. At their first stop in Boston, a clip of fans doing the Viking Row on an escalator at South Station went viral. Since then the celebration has been unmissable. Fans have done it on the streets of Boston and in cafes, where Scotland fans joined in. The Norwegian Prime Minister, on a short visit to the US, did it at an event. In New York, before the Times Square gathering, the sounds of ruuh echoed on the Hudson River when a group of Norwegian fans got on a ferry, sat on the hull and started rowing. Then they did it on the floor of a metro train.

Legend has it they’re still rowing 😅 pic.twitter.com/tQ44fHHcio

— Gillette Stadium (@GilletteStadium) June 17, 2026

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Back home in Norway, the celebration and the song have caught the country’s imagination. Vikingblod rose to number one on Spotify in Norway last week. Members of the Storting, Norway’s parliament, paused a session to do the Viking Row. Oslo Airport ran a campaign around it. Nurses went viral for doing it on stretchers in hospitals. Then there was this: a non-profit organisation helping people with spinal cord injuries lined up participants in wheelchairs, one behind the other, and got them rowing together. The clip went around the world. It was the Viking Row doing something a stadium chant is not supposed to be able to do.

Norway fans are doing a “Viking Row” up the escalator at Boston’s South Station before heading to the World Cup

Adding this to the list of things I’ve never seen before and probably never will again pic.twitter.com/j8NvltOvfk

— Jeremy Siegel (@jersiegel) June 16, 2026

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“It’s become part of the Norwegian football team’s identity,” Froystad told The Indian Express. “We had no idea a chant could bring people together like this. When we see fans from other teams sitting and rowing with us, it shows amazing unity. It’s nice to see fun and peace between countries. That’s the best thing that could have ever happened.”

Froystad, who goes by Mr Row Row, is one of the faces of Oljeberget, the biggest supporters club for the Norway national team, which has brought an estimated 10,000 fans to the US. He is also the man giving the cue to row.

Froystad was watching Rosenborg BK when the chant of ‘Ro-Sen-Borg’ caught his attention. He liked the sound of the ruuh. In 2025, trying to come up with a stadium chant for the national team, he remembered it.

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The Viking Row made its debut in a Norway-Switzerland friendly, then featured in a game against Sweden where it gained some traction online. The World Cup made it viral.

Norway fans row during the World Cup Group I soccer match between Iraq and Norway in Foxborough near Boston. (AP Photo)

One of Froystad’s neighbours in Oslo, Jonas Thommasen, a musician who had been trying for years to write an anthem for the national team, had the same idea. The two spent hours discussing the celebration and the song, continuing the conversations on a vacation to Tenerife. Eventually Thommasen came up with Vikingblod, a rock song built around Norway’s Viking heritage, with multiple references to Norse explorer Leif Erikson, who landed on continental America about 500 years before Christopher Columbus.

Imagine you are heading to Times Square NYC to see “Les Miserables” and you stumble into this … #Norway play #Senegal tomorrow at MetLife Stadium pic.twitter.com/JpG9VRRehT

— Maximiliano Bretos (@MaxBretosSports) June 22, 2026

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Some of the lyrics: ‘Mother Earth is ours; Because we beat Columbus by four hundred years; First we took Europe and now we take USA; We are Norway, we know we are not the biggest; But Odin knows we were here first; We will come across the pond and row there.’

“I started writing the song after Norway beat Italy,” Thommasen told The Indian Express. “People throughout the world don’t really know about the Norwegian Viking who discovered America. The idea was that the Norwegian Vikings are coming back to take back the continent they discovered before Columbus. Since we are going across the Atlantic as the Vikings did with their ships, the rowing felt like a fit.”

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Norway has two official World Cup songs: Vikingblod and Sammen for Norge, released by broadcaster NRK. There is also Alt for Norge, the anthem from Norway’s last World Cup in 1994, which is making a return. Thommasen describes Vikingblod as the rock song of the three.

“Vikingblod is catchy, it can be sung in the stadium, and it feels very unifying,” he said. “It’s like everybody in a boat together. You have to row with timing. You need power, stability, and cooperation. I felt it was a good symbol for what we are trying to achieve.”

The whole idea, Froystad said, was to put a country of five million people on the map. After Times Square, the Hudson River and the Boston escalator, they have managed that already.