“Sving til venstre.” Jurgen issued instructions in his pleasingly Nordic voice, firm but encouraging. From behind the wheel, David nodded his head, and turned the car to the left. We were only a mile outside Edinburgh, but thanks to David, my Norwegian-American boyfriend, and Jurgen, the Norwegian speaker on David’s GPS, I already felt deep into Viking territory.

Scotland is perhaps not the most obvious place to look for traces of Nordic culture. But in the months leading up to the nation’s vote on independence from England last September, there was talk of it everywhere. Although it had been six centuries since any part of Scotland was in Norse hands, many nationalists were suggesting that Viking heritage formed part of the separate identity that lay behind an independence bid, which, although it failed at the polls, has grown stronger since the referendum.

And it wasn’t all historic either: The Scottish Nationalist Party assured voters that Scotland’s similarities to its Scandinavian neighbors — its small size, its environmental awareness and its Norwegian-style oil reserves — would guarantee prosperity. And perhaps even justify membership in the Nordic Council, an intergovernmental body that fosters political, economic and cultural cooperation among the five Nordic nations and three autonomous regions.

As a recent transplant to Denmark, I was still trying to figure out Scandinavian identity myself, so this claim intrigued me. What did it take, besides a penchant for bicycles, brooding television series and salted licorice, to become Nordic? To find out, David and I would start in the capital, then drive as far into Scotland’s formerly Viking lands as we could.

We began at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. The first Viking invasions into the British Isles were recorded in the late eighth century; monks’ chronicles make frequent, terrified references to northerly marauders who raped and pillaged their way through the Highlands. But at the museum, the image of those rampaging Norsemen was changing: Not only were they not all raiding, bloodthirsty warriors, but they also weren’t even all men. Tools, jewelry and a reconstructed burial site on display all testified to the gentler side of Viking life, and proved that the Norse (male and female) set down roots in Scotland, engaging in agriculture, trade and family life. “Relations with local people,” read the optimistic text on one case, “weren’t always hostile.”

On that day last August, they were rather the opposite. Near a barbershop full of men whose lumberjack beards marked them as either Scandinavian or Brooklynite, we found Timberyard. With its rough wooden floors and jars of fermenting vegetables on display, the restaurant would have fit as easily onto a lonely, windswept expanse of the Stockholm peninsula as it did in the Scottish capital. The food, too, was identifiably Nordic, from the chewy sourdough served with house-made butter and lovage salt that started the meal, to the foraged woodruff tea that ended it. In between came delicate dishes strewn with local herbs and flowers: nearly raw scallops shaved thin and adorned with wild garlic petals; mackerel grilled so that the char cut through the fish’s oiliness, served with yogurt and juicy nasturtium leaves.

“It’s hard not to be influenced by it,” Ben Radford, the chef, said of the northerly elements in what he calls his “modern Scottish” cuisine. “Culturally, we’re very similar. And we’re working with the same ingredients, letting them shine through, so that each flavor is apparent, crisp and clean.”

In Glasgow, two recent graduates take the affinity even further. Through their consulting firm Lateral North, Graham Hogg and Alex Hobday help towns in the upper reaches of Scotland develop their Nordic potential as transportation and green energy hubs. “We have the same climate, the same landscape, even the same dark sense of humor, so we can take the Nordic countries as a model for economic development,” Mr. Hogg said. “We’re trying to get people to think of Scotland not as the end of Europe, but as the gateway to the North.”

It was time to head toward that gate. There are a number of Viking-related spots in the Western Highlands. But Mr. Hogg had said we would find the most striking examples of Scandinavian-style Scotland in Orkney and Shetland, so we fired up the GPS and headed north. “Rett frem,” Jurgen said, directing us straight ahead with what I interpreted as approval.

Several hours later, Norway appeared on the horizon. In truth, it wasn’t really Norway, just a series of Nordic-style houses — pointy, clean-lined and painted in bright, saturated colors that stood out against the churning North Sea — that wouldn’t have been out of place in Bergen. We had reached John O’Groats, the purportedly northernmost (there is some contention) point of mainland Scotland. It consists of little more than a few souvenir shops and a parking lot big enough for all those tour buses to turn around in.

But Natural Retreats, a hotel development company, has made the place much more appealing by taking a Gothic-style inn and adding several Nordic-style wooden houses onto the side. Each building is called a toft, a Norse-derived word for farmhouse or homestead. The tofts are painted different colors and contain apartments, which comprise the accommodations. The rooms are spare and tasteful, with the streaming light and clean lines that are the hallmarks of Scandinavian design. “It’s quite straightforward,” said Adam Gough, Natural Retreats’ head of technical services, when asked about Nordic style. “There is a lot of history and strong links with Scandinavia.”

But neither Scandi chic, nor the newer, kinder version of the Vikings had made it to the nearby town of Wick, which gets its name from the Old Norse word for bay. Asked why the hotel where she worked was called the Norseman, the receptionist admitted that she wasn’t sure. “Because they came here raping and rampaging through the hills?” she asked. “You know, doing Viking things.”

It wasn’t hard to see why she persisted in that image. Wick, which Robert Louis Stevenson once referred to as “the meanest of mean towns,” has little in the way of tourist attractions except for a ruined castle that was probably built in the 12th century, presumably by the Norse earl, Harald Maddadson. One of the oldest and best preserved in Scotland, the castle’s tower still reaches four stories up, and its defensive ditches and perilous cliffs keep it cut off from the mainland. It is a stirring place, desolate and imposing, and not at all hard to imagine as the kind of stronghold from which one might have set out marauding.

Did people in this part of Scotland feel Viking? As we stood on the ferry to the Orkney Islands, watching mainland Britain disappear, we pondered the question. “What I can’t tell,” David said, “is whether they actually identify with their Nordic past, or if it’s just a marketing ploy.” We had our first answer of a sort after landing at St. Margaret’s Hope, a pretty, stone-clad town that was a welcoming entry to Orkney’s main island. Rebooting Jurgen after his stay in the ship’s hold, we drove to Highland Park distillery in the market town of Kirkwall, the Orcadian capital. The northernmost whiskey distillery in Britain (there would be many claims to the northernmost on this trip), Highland Park makes a line of high-end Scotch whiskies named after Vikings real and imagined: Eibar, Thor, Loki.