“I am so sick of those questions,” said Stenar Sonevang, the spokesman of the pagan group, the Nordic Asa Community. The chant, explained Mr. Sonevang, “has got nothing to do with the Nazis, I promise you.”
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Jasper Juinen for The New York Times
Amid a boom in Viking-related TV shows and films — and a corresponding surge in Viking-inspired tourism and advertising campaigns — there is increasing political tension and social unease over the use of various runes, gods and rituals from the Viking era.
Viking symbols are often used in mainstream branding initiatives for everything from barber shops to chocolate bars to Norway’s downhill ski team. One longstanding pagan group, Forn Sed, has encouraged the use of Viking symbols like a wooden Thor’s hammer as an icon for gay pride.
But some use of the symbols reflects an extremist side of the Viking cultural renaissance taking hold across the Nordic region and beyond.
Avowed neo-Nazi groups like the small but violent Nordic Resistance Movement say they draw inspiration from the Viking era and have adopted elements of the region’s Viking past. The group’s symbol is a Viking rune on a green background.
Vikings “symbolize everything about Northern Europeans,” said Haakon Forwald, a spokesman for the Norwegian chapter of the group. “We are adventurous, we take risks and settle where no man would dare to settle.”
This association has put on edge everyone from tour operators who sell Viking-themed tours to the archaeologists, runologists and historians who study the Viking era, concerned that the adoption of Viking symbols by fringe groups could toxify the meaning of a brand, a museum exhibition or an act of worship.
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Jasper Juinen for The New York Times
Strong pushback has come from many corners of the Nordic countries, whether from sports fans or grass-roots organizations like “Vikings Against Racism.”
That Viking symbols can be deployed in such a broad range of uses, and appeal to such a broad political spectrum, is a sign of how little is actually known about worship practices or local customs during the Viking age, said Fredrik Gregorius, an expert on religious studies and a senior lecturer at Linkoping University. This allows for an almost endless variety of interpretations of Viking culture, Dr. Gregorius said.
Per Lundberg, a spokesman for Forn Sed, pointed out that symbols are always open to interpretation, as he showed a wooden Thor’s hammer that was fashioned in a more phallic shape than other iterations.
“Symbols are empty in themselves,” he said. “We put meaning on to them.”
Mr. Lundberg expressed concern that paganism, or heathenry, which his group had worked hard to instill with a more positive connotation, was regaining a negative association through being tied to the sort of ethnic nationalism practiced by competing groups like the Nordic Asa Community. Mr. Lundberg said membership in his group required a stated commitment against racial discrimination.
After the ceremony by the Viking burial mound concluded — with offerings beneath a fir tree of carrots, eggs, flowers, grapes and the final sloshes of leftover beer and mead — Mr. Sonevang, the Nordic Asa Community spokesman, described his organization’s goal as promoting Nordic heritage and tradition.
“The more the world is in chaos, the more people are looking back to where they come from,” Mr. Sonevang said. “That is where they feel safe. That is why they turn to Asatru,” he added, using a word to describe the Norse religion.
Mr. Sonevang, who changed his first name to Stenar after deciding that Stefan sounded too Christian and therefore inappropriate for a pagan, formerly held positions in his local chapter of the Sweden Democrats. The staunchly anti-immigrant party is expected, according to polls, to consolidate its place in Sweden’s political mainstream in an election in September. He noted that his pagan group did not take a political stance on most matters and did not require members to back any political position.
Formed in 2014, and granted its status as an official religious organization in 2016, the group claims to have over 800 members and is currently raising funds for a pagan temple, which Mr. Sonevang said would be the first in Sweden in over 1,000 years.
One point where some of the more liberal or apolitical groups embracing Norse mythology may find some surprising common ground with the nationalist or neo-Nazi adherents is in a love of nature in general, and of locally grown food in particular.
Helene Loow, a senior lecturer at the Uppsala University, and one Sweden’s leading experts on fascism, said Nordic extremists connected clean food to the purity of the land, body and race.
“I have hardly met anyone from these movements, neither the old ones nor the young ones, who are not serving me organic food, and lecturing me about the dangers of fast food, the dangers of McDonald’s,” Ms. Loow said.
As a consequence, a neo-Nazi group like the Nordic Resistance Movement is occasionally represented at local farmers’ markets. “When people meet them in real life, they are not their media image. People get surprised. They are nice, they are talkative, they offer you a lot of good food,” she said.
“It’s the same trick,” she added, “that extremists play everywhere: Build on local trust.”
Source : Nytimes
