Rebuilding the Rainbow Bridge: A study of the historical development of Nordicism and its evolving relationship with Modernity

Nordicism is more than a historical term that should be assigned to a marginal group of northern European and American racist thinkers of the early twentieth century. It is a living, evolving and highly ambivalent cultural myth rooted in the idealization of the 'noble savage' during the late-Enlightenment and Romantic periods. This later developed into a powerful racial fantasy, through fusion with the emerging field of racial science and eugenics. ‘Rebuilding the Rainbow Bridge’ attempts to shed fresh light on the nature and evolution of Nordicism and its relationship with modernity by examining it as a societal phenomenon which, in its variant forms, came into being as a source of psychological rootedness and grounded reality with which to counter the disembedding, disenchanting impact of an ever-changing and accelerating state of modernity. Its conceptual framework draws on Roger Griffin’s model of modernism as a reaction to the corrosive phenomenological impact of modernization, and Zygmunt Bauman’s parallel theory of the existential and socio-political dilemmas posed by reality’s increasing liquefaction under the impact of ‘modernity’. By using these perspectives to re-examine Nordicism, through the Norse metaphor of the Rainbow Bridge as a countervailing force to this erosion of established values and traditions, the thesis reveals its nature as a set of complex but coherent mythic strategies for establishing a sheltering ‘home’, a refuge from ‘the storm of progress’, throwing into relief the deep structural linkages between the ‘light’ and ‘dark’ currents of Nordicist myth. It also highlights the persistence of these traditions in various modern forms, whether as Viking 'kitsch' or the malignant offshoots of White Supremacism.

Grantor dc:publisher

Oxford Brookes University

Year dc:date

2018

Author dc:creator

• Forssling, Gregers Einer

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved

Language dc:language

en

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.24384/3jc9-k068

OAI identifier oai:identifier

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