ABSTRACT
The monumental past that surrounds us today in the form of memorial sites and monuments testifies that the urge to remember heroes and events of the past is significant in how people define their society. A thoughtprovoking question is how institutional heritage management acts when a monumental past is ‘outdated’, in other words when memorial sites and monuments have become memories themselves and do not have the same societal appeal any more. A distinct feature of cultural heritage in the present landscape, highlighting this topic, is the national memorial sites paying tribute to heroic Vikings, constructed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today these memorials represent a national project which is defunct or superseded. The sites have become iconic as representations of ‘old’ nationalism projects which are disputed and criticised today for being outdated as cultural symbols. That is because they exclude a culturally diverse population and thereby promote a divisive national heritage, associated with dissension, one which is problematic and difficult, a past one would want to forget. Yet they stand as testimonies to a past that heritage management has to deal with.
