Vinland flag

The Vinland flag is a Nordic Cross flag designed by American Gothic metal band Type O Negative. The flag was used to symbolize a variety of front man Peter Steele's interests and political ideals (paganism, socialism, and nature connectedness),[1] including his own Scandinavian heritage.[2] Viking explorers visiting North America around the year 1000 called one of the areas they came to "Vinland". The flag appears on various compact-disc covers produced by the group, sometimes with the slogan "made in the People's Technocratic Republic of Vinland", and adorns various pieces of Type O Negative merchandise.

Flag of Vinland

Flag company Patriotic Flags made the first Vinland Flags offered for sale in 2004.[3] Subsequently various far-right groups in North America adopted the symbol as an ethnic flag, including numerous vendors, some Germanic neopagan groups, and extremist groups who commodiously identify the name of the 11th-century Norse colony at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, called Vinland in the Norse sagas, with the predominantly Anglo-American inhabited areas of the modern nations of Canada and the United States. (More narrowly it has been displayed at the Finnskogen festival, celebrating the Forest Finns, despite its Norwegian provenance.)[4] In the early 2000s the white supremacy skinhead group Vinlanders Social Club appropriated the flag, and it was bruited by the Anti-Defamation League and Stormfront that it could be defaced with the symbols of fellow extremist groups,[5] The original Vinland flag in and of itself was designed with no racist connotations.[6]