Thanks to chronicles and letters written by Christian holy men, perpetuated by modern books, cartoons and films, an enduring Viking stereotype is engrained in our collective cultural imagination: blond men in boats with beards and battle-axes, sailing slate-grey seas under northern skies. They may have come from the northernmost fringes of Europe – and in the case of Icelanders, from the middle of the North Atlantic – but Norse travellers reached every corner of the known world. Such ideas of racial and cultural purity would have been alien to the inhabitants of the medieval Nordic world. In US prisons, Odinism and white supremacy are bedfellows. The modern growth of Odinism and Ásatrú – the modern worship of Norse pagan gods such as Odin, Thor and Freyja – has been shadowed by an ideological subculture that emphasises racial heritage and ethnic separatism. Tolkien wrote to his son bemoaning ‘that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler’ for ‘ruining, misapplying, and making forever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light’. When Norway and Denmark were occupied, SS recruitment posters appeared, featuring Viking warriors and dragon-headed longships. The roots of this ideology lay in Nazi perceptions of Scandinavia’s past.
The programme was particularly active in Norway, where around 10-12,000 children were born to Norwegian mothers and German fathers. Particularly disturbing was the ‘Lebensborn’ programme initiated by the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, to secure the racial purity of the Third Reich. The Nazi ideology of Aryan supremacy rested on the premise of the Nordic race as superior to all others. Trump was not the first to misuse Scandinavian countries as a poster child for racism. One Norwegian woman tweeted: ‘We are not coming. Photos of beautiful African sunsets and wildlife were posted. The indignant response was on a global scale. In January 2018, President Trump expressed a preference for immigrants from affluent nations such as Norway, as opposed to those from what he termed ‘shithole countries’.
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