“We’re steeped in Viking history, with all its fantastic stories, and if you have a story you can sell more,” said Patricia Retson, Highland Park’s brand heritage manager, after we had toured the distillery’s dankly atmospheric cellar and sleek tasting room. “But we’re also trying to make a real connection, and if it’s going to work, it has to be authentic.” To that end, the distillery’s Loki gets its mischievousness from an aroma that is all sweet apples, but turns to smoke and wood on the palate. Its Leif Erikssonis aged in 100 percent American oak barrels.

Yet in downtown Kirkwall, where the Romanesque cathedral, built of sandstone, houses the relics of St. Magnus Erlendsson, the Norse-descended Earl of Orkney who was martyred after an unsuccessful battle with a rival chieftain in the early 12th century, and where miniature Viking ships still cap the post office lintel, Donna Heddle had no doubt the connection went considerably deeper than mere marketing.

As the director of the Center for Nordic Studies, Dr. Heddle sees evidence of Norseness almost everywhere: in the Orkney dialect that puts its prepositions at the end of sentences; in a concept of social justice that emphasizes egalitarianism and spurns status or rank; in the fact, she said, that 66 percent of Orcadians’ DNA is Norwegian. And just as the Nordic presence helps explain the separate sense of identity that Scots feel from the English, so too does it explain the separate identity that Orcadians feel from mainland Scots. “Vikings are very sexy now,” she said. “But for us it’s more than that. You can see it in our knitting patterns and our sailing skills and in the can-do attitude. This is a living legacy.”

Living, but also dead. After Kirkwall, we drove across windswept hills and muddy farmlands, before arriving at Orphir and the archaeological remains of Earl’s Bu. According to the medieval Orkneyinga saga, the nearly 1,000-year-old site was home not only to a round church built by Magnus’s murderous cousin Hakon, but also to a grand drinking hall, or bu. Like most Viking drinking halls, it was the scene of quite a lot of violence (proximity to a church came in handy; the brawlers could slip next door to repent of their drunken behavior, and, consciences cleansed, get back to guzzling mead). Maybe it was the film in the modest visitor center that recounted how one drunken slight had unleashed a massacre at the hall, or perhaps we had watched too much of “Game of Thrones,” but as David and I walked about the lonely ruins of the stone church (a third of its curved walls still standing), I suddenly found myself charging him with an imaginary battle ax. After a brief but virtual bloody fight, we collapsed on the grass in giggles.

All that Viking history will do that to you. There are similar archaeological sites all over Orkney, so we had plenty of opportunities to perfect our re-enactment skills. At Maeshowe, a grass-covered mound that encases a Neolithic tomb marked up with 12th-century Norse Runes, the sheep that stood between us and the burial chamber fell to our raiding swords. At the Brough of Birsay, accessible only by foot during the few hours when the tides recede, we sweated in the chamber marked the Viking sauna. But there was no fantasy involved at the nearby Barony Mill, where Brian Johnston, the miller, grinds bere, a landrace barley, with a flavor more pronounced than wheat. “Many people think the Vikings brought it here,” Mr. Johnston said as he showed us around the 19th-century mill, which is powered by a water wheel. “And the only other place it grows is in Norway.”

There would be more culinary connections on the Shetland Islands. We landed early in the morning on the main island after an overnight ferry. Waiting for a cafe to open, we prowled the industrial-looking buildings and still-closed sweater shops in Lerwick, the capital and Shetland’s only real town. Once suitably caffeinated, we returned to Jurgen and headed south. Shetland is almost entirely treeless, with a terrain that veers mainly between the barren and the bleak, but is adorably dotted with the tiny ponies that take their name from the place. Rocky soil and near constant wind explain why the local diet is almost entirely lacking in fresh fruit and vegetables. But even that lack can only partly explain the peculiar dish known as reestit mutton.

“No, you wouldn’t expect to find this in a restaurant,” said Marian Armitage, the author of “Shetland Food and Cooking,” as she sawed off a few rocklike chunks of a fossilized slab of meat in her kitchen, where we had come to learn about the local cuisine. “Unless they were trying to do something quirky.” Through the windows of her enclosed porch, I could just make out the ruined walls of Jarlshof, another Norse settlement, in the distance. Ms. Armitage fried a bit of the mutton in a pan, and explained the process for making it: Raw meat was salted in brine, then hung from the rafters of the house, preferably over a peat fire, so that the smoke seasoned the meat. I put a bite in my mouth: Quirky was definitely one word for it. The mutton was fatty, salty and tasted, well, rotten. “Just what you want,” David said, “after a long day at sea.”

Still, I was thrilled to eat it. A couple of years earlier, I had tried something similar in the Faroe Islands, an archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean, about halfway between Norway and Iceland, where they make raest, which is raw mutton hung to air-dry in open huts for months, without the benefit of smoke or salt. Surely, I asked Armitage, raest and reestit were versions of the same dish, and evidence of a Nordic connection? “Ah no,” she said. “For that you’d be wanting vivda.” It turns out that Shetlanders once ate the exact same preparation — and called it by the Norse word for leg meat— until salt became more widespread in the islands.

After lunch, we turned around (“Snu rundt,” Jurgen said) and headed back north. We passed helpful signs that translated the islands’ Old Norse geographic names into English (“Tingwall, Field of the Parliament”) and stopped, incongruously enough, at a fjord-side food truck for pulled pork sandwiches. It required two more ferries, but we finally arrived in Unst, the northernmost of the Shetland Islands, and hence, the northernmost in Scotland.

Unst has a higher density of rural Viking sites than any place else in the world, including Scandinavia, with 60 longhouses on a 46-square-mile island. For our first stop, at Hamar, we skirted some curious sheep and a watchful bull to walk among the low, grass-carpeted walls of one (David was saved from another re-enacted vanquishing only because the preponderance of dung at our feet made things especially messy.) From what would have been the front door, I gazed down the length of the shimmering fjord, before I looked down to find the fragments of a broken beer bottle. The idea that local teenagers might use this ancient home as a hangout for drinking, flirting and communing with their Viking past pleased me.

But at the Skidbladner, a reconstructed Viking ship up the road, the volunteer who showed visitors around had a much more prosaic explanation for how past and present came together: economic necessity. Clad in a woolen dress fastened with brooches that approximated what a Viking woman would have worn once she was back on dry land, the volunteer divided her time between welcoming visitors to the site and doing a bit of nalebinding, a Nordic form of needlework that predates knitting. As she showed us around the Skidbladner, a full-size replica of a ship found in a Norwegian Viking burial mound in the 19th century, she told us about the Royal Air Force base that once formed the basis of Unst’s economy. “But they shut that down some years back, and that left a terrible hole,” she said. “Viking tourism is meant to fill it.”

We were back to the same question, with little of Scottish territory left. Luckily, just as we neared Shetland’s northern edge, we spied Valhalla. It looked more like a warehouse than the Norse god Odin’s grand hall for fallen warriors, but that may have been because on Unst at least, Valhalla is a craft brewery. The name wasn’t the founder Sonny Priest’s idea. “The Viking thing has been done to death, so I was dead against it,” he said, but more prescient minds on the regional council prevailed. These days, Mr. Priest sells his Old Scatness (named after a Shetland Viking settlement) and Simmer Din (from the Shetland phrase for summer’s long twilight) ales as far as Glasgow and Oslo.

He wasn’t sure what to make of his ancestors’ past. “When I was a kid, the ties to the Norse felt stronger,” he said as he stopped to stick his nose in a bag of hops. “There were all these words we used, and the whalers would take our men because they knew our seafaring skills went back to them. Now sometimes I think it’s just for the tourists. But everybody in Shetland is still proud of their Viking heritage.”

In the end, neither its Viking past nor its imagined Nordic future would be strong enough to sever Scotland from England. But at our final stop, David and I could see why it came close. After hiking through the heather at Saxa Vord, we arrived at the northernmost cliff on Shetland’s most northerly inhabited island. To the east, some 200 miles in the distance, was Norway; to the north, past the rocky outcrop of Muckle Flugga, was the Arctic. We watched the sun set, then got back in the car. “Reisen slutt,” Jurgen said. It was, as he said, journey’s end.