No, not that kind of romance. There are no hearts to be found here, unless you count the kind that have been brutally carved out of the chest cavity in the midst of unstoppable berserker rage. That’s right, we’re talking about the national romanticism kind of romance that was popular back in the late 1800s and the early 1900s.
One Norwegian guy, Gerhard Munthe, was pretty into Norse history back in those days and he glorified the epic naval Battle of Hjørungavåg in this mighty tapestry, now housed at Norway’s National Museum of Decorative Arts. Thousands of Norwegians and Jomsvikings were slaughtered and the sea off the coast of Sunnmøre turned red with their blood. It doesn’t get much more romantic than that.