Hans Hauge

Nordic Sameness and Difference

The North
Seen from the outside the North seems to be a unity with a common and
shared homogeneous culture. Seen from the inside – that is to say from a
national point of view – the North is heterogeneous, divided into distinctive
cultures, nation states, languages, regions and stateless nations. Sameness and
difference depend on the viewpoint. One may of course take the outside view
inside the North and attempt to see the North as one. Or see the differences
from the outside, and see the North as many.
In a sinister way the North is also always haunted and differs from itself.
It is and was at the same time the best and the worst, both pure and contami-
nated. At the beginning of the Romantic era Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér (1782–
1846), in his epic poem, Svea (1811), dreamt of Sweden as the third realm,
which was to emerge after 18101 as a classless new society where all were
brothers marching towards “the state’s new temple”, and the painter Carl Lars-
son saw the Swedes as the noblest people on earth (jordens ädlaste folk), 1908.
Such dreams were realized in the universal welfare state with equality as the
ideal. This was the best legacy of the Nordic countries, if one is a Social Demo-
crat, but the North is also spectral and haunted by a ghost that cannot be
exorcised: the Nordic race. The “Viking” is an ambivalent symbol of this; so
are the ancient Icelandic ideals. Without the ideal North there would have
been neither Wagner nor Nazi mythology.
1907 saw the publication in three volumes of the founder of ‘German’
Christianity Arthur Bonus’s Isländerbuch. With his intervention he wanted to
counteract French culture and further the spontaneity of life. It was part of a
so-called “lebensreformerisch-nordisch orientierten Berliner Vorstadtkultur.”2
Towards the end of the nineteenth century the Nordic race became the ideal
race. The tall and blond man was the aesthetic model. The blond Swedish
woman is still the ideal of beauty. Everyone wanted to be a Northerner. A spate
of English and Scottish nineteenth novels beginning with Walter Scott was
modelled on the Sagas. The English wished to be Northerners and not Romans.

1 With King Karl XIV Johan.

2 Klaus von See, Barbar Germane Arier: Die Suche nach der Identität der Deutschen (Heidel-
berg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1994), 215. Arthur Bonus also authored Geschichte des
Skalden Egil Skallagrimssohn (1922).

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26 Hans Hauge

This idealization of the North never ends: it started with Samuel Laing (1788–
1868), Paul du Chaillu established the Viking Age as the pre-history of the
English-Speaking peoples (1889), and J.R.R. Tolkien carried on the tradition in
The Lord of the Rings. Today Scots imagine themselves as Scandinavians.
The North, Nordic mythology, and the “Vikings” inspired not only Nordic
nation-builders but also the National Socialists. The North became, especially
after the spread of Darwinism, the vagina nationis and the Nordic race became
the ideal white race up until the Second World War and the Nordic universal
welfare state became the ideal one after the War. The new Norwegian constitu-
tion of 1814, the so-called Eidsvold Constitution, contained a paragraph 2
which said that Jews would never be admitted to the country nor allowed to
live there.
Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, is often associated with Nordic design
and welfare state but he was also a member of the Swedish fascist party, Ny-
svenska Rörelsen,3 even after 1945. So was filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. One of
the best Norwegian authors, Knut Hamsun, was a National Socialist. This
national socialist reverse side of the North is being continually reconstructed
and kept alive especially in contemporary Swedish crime novels.
More often than not literary histories and philology have taken the inside
and national view emphasizing the distinctiveness of the different national
literatures and languages. There are no hybrid literary histories. Literature is
always national: either Danish or Norwegian and so on. We organize literature
like stamp collectors: country by country – our own first. The reason for this
is easy to grasp. The Nordic countries are all homogeneous ethnic nation
states. Since in the late nineteenth century a Nordic union failed, the small-
nation solution was adopted, and we have since then dialectically and unorigi-
nally emphasized unity in diversity. The Nordic countries split up like the
decolonized Latin American ones and did not unite like the United States. The
‘civil war’ in the Danish realm (1848–1851)4 had the opposite result than the
American Civil War because our south (the Duchies) and our north (Denmark)
were not united. The Icelanders, by the way, sided with people in Holstein.
The ‘civil war’ in the Danish realm had the same effect in Denmark as the
American one had in Europe at large: it gave a new and lasting impetus to
the formation of nation states. Even the Prussian-Danish war of 1864 was the
beginning of the formation of a German nation state; first together with Austria

3 New Swedish Movement.

4 It is a relatively new thing to refer to that war as a civil war. It signals that one does not
belong to nation state centred history. In older school books it was a war between David-like
Denmark against Goliath-like Germany (and not Prussia).

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 Nordic Sameness and Difference 27

but after the 1866-war without. The result was a great German realm albeit
smaller than planned.
Until the mid-eighteenth century the North consisted of two competing
and warring multiethnic empires: the Swedish and the Danish-Norwegian one.
Eventually these two wore each other out. After the last Great Nordic War,
which ended in 1720, there was relative peace between them. Denmark-Norway
began to see itself as an Atlantic and archipelagic realm and re-colonized
Greenland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Sweden looked eastwards and
southwards.
In 1792, however, the writer and politician Ove Høegh Guldberg still
referred to “the two Nordic nations” and there was for him only one language
in the Nordic realms which was divided into two dialects: Danish and Swedish.
Norwegian did not exist for ham. From a strictly linguistic point of view this
is correct, yet one language slowly became at least three languages much in
the same way as Serbian and Croatian today are two different languages. One
always becomes three in the North. First one North, then two, and finally three.
Scandinavia is Trinitarian.
In the nineteenth century the two realms became three nations. In 1809
Sweden lost Finland (Östlandet/The Eastern land), Pomerania and other coun-
ties in “Germany”. This created the Swedish nation state and was the back-
ground for Tegnér’s above-mentioned Svea. Denmark lost Norway to Sweden
in 1814 and after 1864 the German-speaking duchies. Hence Sweden and Den-
mark are (like today’s Austria) technically speaking “rump nations”. They were
states, who became nations; whereas the other Nordic countries were nations,
who became states, or who would like to become states. First Norway in 1905,
then Finland in 1917 and finally Iceland in 1944. There are independence move-
ments in both Greenland and the Faeroe Islands but to my knowledge not
amongst First Nation peoples – the Sámi and the Kvens.
In the romantic-nationalist era three Trinitarian metaphors became popu-
lar. With them they could intuit the sameness within diversity: The first one
was the tree with three branches and a common root and the second one the
fairy tale metaphor of the three brothers. The third, I have briefly mentioned,
was chiliastic and saw the North as the Third (and final) Realm. Tegnér had
that vision; and the Danish poet, pastor and educationalist N. F. S. Grundtvig,
too.
There are other less metaphoric ways of thematizing the sameness and
difference of the North: A theological, a political, a “racial”, a legal,5 an artis-

5 See Jacob W. F Sundberg, fr.Eddan t. Ekelöf: Repetitorium om rättskällor i Norden (Stockholm:

Juristförlaget, 1990), “Sec.2 En eller flera rättsordningar?”, 19. “It is more reasonable to talk
about Nordic right than Swedish and Norwegian”.

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28 Hans Hauge

tic, a design-and-architectural, and a linguistico-literary one. In terms of reli-

gion, theology, hymns, churches, and liturgy the Nordic countries are strikingly
similar. Politically they all – by accident – became almost ideal nation states;
today they are all, as mentioned, examples of the universal, Nordic welfare
state. They have all had strong labour parties. The literatures, however, are
different and contribute to maintaining differences. The same is the case with
languages.

Religious Sameness
Going back in time Christianity integrated the various regions and ethnic
groups. The canonization of Olaf in 1031 marked the reconciliation between
the Nordic and the Christian traditions. Olaf replaced Thor, and the law
became the laws of St Olaf. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s (Norwegian) national
anthem reads: “Olav på det land har malet/korset med sit blod” (Olav painted
the cross on the country with his blood).
Before this happened, however, it was the fight against Christianity, which
contributed to constructing what we today call a distinctive identity. The south-
ern wall, Dannevirke, was built (650 and onwards) during one of the first clash
of civilizations. The Northerners began to defend themselves against Charle-
magne’s imperial expansionist policies, which had crushed the Saxons. Many
years later – after 1814 – N. F. S. Grundtvig urged the Danes to build a spiritual
Dannevirke to defend us against the Germans, and left-wing intellectuals in
their fight against the EEC repeated this gesture in 1972. So potent has been
the symbolic power of Dannevirke. Now it is a tourist spot.
Today secularism and de-churching characterize the Nordic nations and
separate them from many other European countries. Thus there are three sta-
ges in Nordic history of religion: anti-Christian (the early Viking empire), Chris-
tian (Protestant), and anti-Christian or multi-religious (now).
There are references to God in most of the Nordic nineteenth-century
national songs, poems, hymns, verses and anthems about the individual
nations and the North as such, most significantly in Iceland’s national anthem,
Matthias Jochumsson’s “Vort hjemlands Gud”, in which there is no reference
to any Nordic or “saga” past.
The Nordic was the Christian. Protestantism became the Nordic identity;
the Lutheran Reformation was successful in the Nordic countries and the tran-
sition from Catholicism to Protestantism was relatively smooth. No Nordic
nation remained Catholic. Catholicism, it is true, lingered on in Norway. There
was nothing in the North like the fights against Catholics in England or as the

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 Nordic Sameness and Difference 29

division of “Germany” into a Catholic and Protestant part. Catholics were never
the Other inside the North.
Protestant culture accounts for the uniqueness and richness of Nordic
hymn writers from Norwegian Petter Dass, Swedish Isreal Kolmodin, Danish
Hans Adolf Brorson, Thomas Kingo, N. F. S. Grundtvig, Swedish C. D. Wirsén
to today’s Norwegian Svein Ellingsen and Danish Simon Grotrian. C. D. Wirsén
once said he had three fatherlands: Thule, Zion and Athens. Sometimes it is
claimed that Icelandic literature was in the doldrums between 1400 and the
crop of new writers at the time around independence. That is not true. Hallgrí-
mur Pétursson’s baroque Passion Hymns (Halvtredsindstyve Passionsalmer)
have meant much more in Iceland than the sagas ever did and they are still
in use.
All Nordic flags carry the Christian cross in them.6 This is something dis-
tinctive also in a European context. The other example is the Union Jack with
the three crosses.7
On the eve of the Second World War, Finnish philosopher of aesthetics,
Hans Ruin, pointed out that the Nordic was a unique combination of Christian-
ity and Hellenism. The Nordic countries had, according to him, accomplished
something, which what he called “destructive nationalist prejudices” had not
been able to understand: “namely that the great community does not exclude
diversity (mångfold)”. This sounds very much like what everyone says today.
He goes on: “Nordic co-operation follows the laws for a piece of music. It
develops like a Nordic symphony … in this Nordic symphony it is now the
Finnish part which is being played.”8 Other contemporaries regarded Finland
as a Christian bulwark, protecting civilisation from Communism. Finland was
the East Wall. This reintegrated Finland into the North.
In all Nordic countries there have been state churches, indeed so much so
that one could refer to them as church-states. In Sweden, until the separation
of church and state, all was born into the Swedish Church. The Scandinavian
Lutheran-Evangelical churches are still the world’s most progressive ones with
women ministries, lesbian women bishops,9 non-married vicars and so on. The
recent separation of church and state is a Swedish Sonderweg and it illustrates
how differences are growing.

6 The new Greenlandic flag is red and white like the Danish but replaces the cross with
the rising sun. The Sámi flag is also without a cross, although without Christian mission –
Laestadianism – there would not have been Sami nations in the North.
7 There are also Switzerland, Malta and Georgia.
8 Hans Ruin, Ett land stiger fram (Helsingfors: Schildt, 1941), 32.
9 In Stockholm.

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30 Hans Hauge

There is less and less Nordic unity. Norway, Iceland, the Faeroe Islands and
Greenland are not members of the EU. Sweden and Finland are not members of
NATO. Today the Nordic states are the most atheist ones in the world. The
Nordic countries were the last to be Christianized and the first to become secu-
larized.

Political Sameness
The Protestant state was easily transformed into a nation state and later into
a welfare state. The Nordic ones are exemplary nation states because there is
almost complete congruence between the political and the cultural spheres.
Nation and state nearly coincide: One language, one religion, and one culture.
All Nordic countries realized the ethno-nationalist version of nationalism at a
time where there were only very few such examples in Europe at large. Today
almost all European states are ethno-nationalist ones.
Scandinavianism (1820–40) and Nordism (1860 and onwards) were the two
political attempts to unite the three states: Norway, Sweden and Denmark.10
The first one wanted to create a new, strong united state and the latter one
worked for more co-operation between the individual sovereign Nordic coun-
tries. Many nineteenth-century poets and thinkers fought for a united North:
Most notably poet Carl Ploug, dramatist and pastor C. Hostrup, Norwegian
writers B. Bjørnson, Henrik Ibsen and the Swedish writer E. von Qvanten. The
movements were also youth- and student movements.
In several public speeches the national-liberal spokesman, jurist and jour-
nalist Orla Lehmann – who hailed from the German-cultural part of the
realm – maintained that Northerners should feel a national unity and imagine
Scandinavia as their fatherland. There was only one people divided into three
tribes and one country divided into three realms, he said. Scandinavianism
was similar to other contemporary attempts to unite states – beginning with
the US, Italy, Canada, Germany. Nordism was the result of the lost war in 1864.
It had as its ideal the freedom of peoples. Carl Ploug, the Danish poet, imag-
ined that science, art and culture (he used that word) could unite what was
politically divided.
The Scandinavian countries are constitutional, limited monarchies. The
two post-colonial states Finland and Iceland are republics. Monarchies are

10 See Lars Hovbakke Sørensen, Slagsbrødre eller broderfolk (Copenhagen: Aschehoug, 2004),
130 ff.

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 Nordic Sameness and Difference 31

good for art, literature and fantasy. The Danish folk high School is a unique
civil society institution. In fact the Nordic countries have both strong states
and vital civil societies. There are such folk high schools in all the Nordic
countries – including Greenland. The idea for them came from N. F. S.
Grundtvig. They were to be schools without exams, devoted to the living word
and they were meant to disseminate Nordic mythology to peasants. Grundtvig’s
Nordens Mythologi eller Sindbilledsprog (The Mythology of the North or Sym-
bolic Language) from 1832 is the founding text for these schools. Grundtvig
did not distinguish between finding and creating myths. His view of Nordic
mythology is rather unique. The myths were never seen as “heathen”, so he
did not accept the rationalist or pietistic eighteenth-century view of a sudden
transition from a barbarian and heathen to a civilised and Christian era. Nordic
mythology was simply an expression of the human even the genuinely human.
His motto and the motto for the high school movement became: Human first,
Christian next. Nordic mythology was the Scandinavian Old Testament: “Høje
Odin! Hvide Krist!/Slettet ud er Eders Tvist” (High Odin, white Christ, the battle
between you is over). Both Asa-faith and Christianity are revelations of the
divine, the young Romantic Grundtvig maintained. The Nordic was also for
him the opposite of the cosmopolitan and it represented the freedom of peo-
ples from strong centralizing states. At a later stage he entertained a sort of
chiliastic dream of realizing God’s plan for the North as the elect people. Den-
mark was the new Palestine.11
The Folk High School songbook, Højskolesangbogen, is still in use and is
a distinctively Danish phenomenon, but it is also very Scandinavian and Nor-
dic. It contains quite a number of songs in Norwegian and Swedish. And the
songs are in use. Thus there is a living Nordic poetic tradition, which is being
kept alive by congregations and folk high schools, but not by universities and
media. These latter maintain differences. But a new trend is extensive Nordic
cooperation between private companies like Nordea bank and Arla dairies.
And finally: the new Nordic “kitchen” is now extremely popular with the res-
taurant Noma being nominated as the best in Europe.
The Lutheran state made the social democratic hegemony possible. Danish
historian Uffe Østergaard has called social democracy secularised Lutheran-
ism. Few societies confirm and illustrate Max Weber’s theses about religion
and the spirit of capitalism as well as the wealthy Nordic countries. After the
Second World War the so-called Nordic universal welfare state became the new-
est model of the ideal state for many other countries. It was a continuation of

11 The standard work on Nordic chilialism is Paulus Svendsen’s Gullalderdrøm og Utviklingstro

(Copenhagen: Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1940).

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32 Hans Hauge

the Protestant state and the nation state. The national welfare state form is
resilient but it is being transformed these years where Sweden and Norway
officially begin to describe themselves as heterogeneous multicultural states.
This may be mere state ideology but it may also reflect historical and demo-
graphic reality and it will radically change the image and demography of the
North. Many observers agree that the Nordic welfare state model is at its end
and will come to resemble the European model.

Linguistic and Literary Difference

There is no common Nordic language when seen from the inside. But it is one
when seen from the outside. There once was such a language – to some extent.
The development of the Nordic languages was also illustrated with the tree
and the root. The tree metaphor, however, is ideological and excludes Finnish,
Sámi and Greenlandic. The differences between the languages are created and
maintained and are the result of political decisions. Languages don’t grow
organically. In reality the languages are dialects, but with nationalism they
came to be construed as national languages. Without nationalism they would
be speaking Danish in Iceland and the Faeroes today. And Finnish is a Nordic
language, so easily translatable into Swedish.12
Increasingly, the individual languages are becoming more and more differ-
ent and mutually unintelligible. The Icelanders gave up Danish as a first sec-
ond language and adopted American as the language with which they prefer
to communicate with other Nordics. They have separated themselves the most.
In Greenland authorities now demand that Greenlandic be spoken in parlia-
ment. The preferred second language in Finland is now also English or Globish.
Young Scandinavians have begun to speak to each other in English, too. If
there is one Nordic language, it is English.
There never was a Nordic literature in the same way that there is or was
an English literature. English was a supranational category, which subsumed
Irish, Welsh, Scottish and English literatures.13
For obvious reasons there could not have been a Danish nor a Norwegian
national literature before 1814 or a Finnish before 1809. There was a common
literature, if there was literature at all. But even if Norwegian literature did not
begin until 1814 or 1905 – after the break-up of the union with Sweden –
literary histories project literature back in time. A short history is made long. A

12 See Max Engman, “Är Finland ett nordiskt land?”, Den jyske historiker, no. 69–70, (1994).
13 Although this is changing and the literatures are getting nationalized.

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 Nordic Sameness and Difference 33

young national literature is made old. That is the reason why we appropriated
Icelandic sagas. They filled up a gap in Danish and Swedish literature, since
there was no Old Danish or Old Swedish literature, only Norwegian (Ice-
landic) – Old Norse or Old Icelandic. All such references back to Old Icelandic
are signs of a counter-modern attitude and an escape from modernity – today
and then. Art and music were never nationalized in the same way as language
and literature. The Cobra-painter, Asger Jorn, however, who worked together
with the archaeologist P.V. Glob, believed in a distinctive Nordic aesthetic,
which resembles John Ruskin’s idea of the Gothic. Such a Nordic aesthetic was
counter-modern, too. The Gothic as such was often used to differentiate the
Northerners from the Germans and the Germanic. Danish writer Johannes V.
Jensen, self-proclaimed imperialist and Nobel-prize winner, had a vision of a
“Gothic” renaissance around the turn of the century (1900). Even today literary
histories entertain the fiction that there was a national literature before the
relatively recent invention of the nation.
Literature from before 1814 was nationalised in the course of the nine-
teenth century. Just like the law. Nordic literature(s) began to begin as Old
Norse or with the sagas. If one read Danish or Nordic at a university, one began
one’s studies with learning Old Norse and with reading sagas. This was given
up after 1968. Today only a few specialists master Old Norse. So the beginning
is slowly being erased and forgotten. Today one studies such things for aes-
thetic reasons. Why else would there be Old Norse studies at UCLA? There is
no longer any need for a common and foundational national and Nordic origin.
Nordic literature has no beginning.
A case in point is the eighteenth-century essayist and playwright Ludvig
Holberg. Today he is Danish in Danish literature and Norwegian in Norwegian.
He was neither of course. He wrote before the advent of nationalism and wrote
his most important works in Latin. The comedies, which he wrote in Danish,
were not considered serious art by contemporary art-critics but rather like vul-
gar entertainment. One writer can, as his example shows, belong to two differ-
ent national literatures, but not until after it had come to be considered a
quality to write in a national language. To repeat: language had not as yet
become nationalized in Scandinavia, when Holberg lived.
Similarly with Sigrid Undset and Aksel Sandemose. They were both born
in Denmark, but moved to Norway. Henrik Ibsen wrote in Danish. He lived
much of his life in exile, yet he is claimed as a Norwegian writer. Per Petterson
is an interesting contemporary case. His father was Swedish and the mother
Danish. He writes in Norwegian and lives there. He could have been a paradig-
matic Nordic writer, but he is Norwegian. The nation state creates such prob-
lems, if they are, indeed, problems. Michael Ondaatje is Canadian in Canada
but Srilankan in Sri Lanka, where he was born.

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34 Hans Hauge

The so-called Modern Breakthrough has sometimes been seen as an intra-

Nordic movement with Georg Brandes as the leader and Ibsen, Bjørnson and
Strindberg as followers. Certain literary historians opine that the Modern came
from the North and influenced Germany, France and England. On the other
hand Swedish literary historian, Göran Hägg, calls it a Danish literary histori-
cal propaganda term.

The Three Metaphors

Trinitarian metaphors were used to erase binary oppositions. Three is less vio-
lent than two. Two is always dangerous: two cultures, them and us. Denmark
vs. Sweden. But in Iceland, the Faeroe Islands or Finland a certain binarism
often dominated discourses. The tree metaphor, as I said, excludes the Finns;
and the three-brother-metaphor privileges the three Scandinavian nations. SAS
reflects this. In 1936 five flying swans were introduced as a symbol and they
included Finland and Iceland. They came from a poem by Hans Hartvig See-
dorff Pedersen.
Another popular metaphor uses classes or guilds to describe differences.
The Swedes are the aristocrats or first class, the Danes the burghers or second
class and Norwegians the peasants or third class. Sometimes one says the
Swedes are the lyric poets, Danes the epic poets and the Norwegians the dra-
matic poets.
There have been three breakthroughs: the first was Danish and epic, the
next was Norwegian and dramatic and the final one Swedish and lyrical.
The Swedes are the Aeoleans, the Danes are the Ionians and the Norwe-
gians the Dorians. But whereas the Greek dialects disappeared and became
“Greek”, this did not happen with the Nordic literatures. I take some of these
ideas from a book, Nordboer, by Vilhelm Andersen, the first professor of Dan-
ish literature. He has a wonderful description of the epic-narrative Danes. Den-
mark has its Iliad and Odyssey. Grundtvig wrote the heroic poem about the
people and Kierkegaard the epic about the individual. Vilhelm Andersen lived
at a time, when it was still possible and respectable to think in terms of essen-
tial national characteristics. He preferred an ethno-psychological explanation
to the metaphorical one with the three branches. Nordic folk psychology was
dualistic or dialectical (Tvestrenget), he argued.14 It consisted of the interplay
of two forces: the melancholic and the sanguine one. A double mind, he also

14 Vilh. Andersen, Nordboer: Litteraturbilleder (Copenhagen and Kristiania: Gyldendalske

Boghandel, 1919), 16.

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 Nordic Sameness and Difference 35

called it, and for him this found expression in humour and irony. It was a kind
of natural temper, which reflected the humorous climate with short summers
and long winters: Winter-angst vs. the pleasures of summer.
Culture was at its highest, when the two forces challenged and balanced
each other: Oehlenschlaeger/Grundtvig (summer) vs. Kierkegaard/Paludan-
Müller (winter); Bjørnson vs. Ibsen, Heidenstam/Lagerlöf vs. Strindberg. Today
in Norway it would be Jan Kjærstad/Erlend Loe vs. Karl Ove Knausgård/Hanne
Ørstavik, in Iceland Hallgrímur Helgason vs. Einar Kárason. Contemporary
Danish and Swedish writers are cod-intellectual winter-writers.

Icelandic Sagas: The Purloined Manuscripts

The Danish use and scholarly studies of Icelandic sagas are examples of “Scan-
dinavian Orientalism” or as I call it “Northientalism”. As a version of oriental-
ism it tells us next to nothing about the Icelandic past but a lot about eight-
eenth-century Danish romanticism and nation building. Since there was no
Old Danish literature one simply filled the lack with sagas.
When I was at school Njal’s Saga was part of the canon. This seems to
be the case even today. In a literary history for primary schools from 1993
(Litteraturhistorie for folkeskolen) there is an excerpt from the same saga. Jør-
gen Aabenhus edited the book. I once heard him tell about teaching sagas to
Muslim immigrants. According to him they had no problems in understanding
them, whereas they had problems with contemporary literature. Apparently,
he believed they could easily relate to descriptions of arranged marriages and
codes of honour.
And finally: My copy of Njal’s Saga is in N. M. Petersen’s (1791–1862) trans-
lation.15 He was the first professor of Nordic philology and an active national-
ist. One republished his translations during the Occupation of Denmark in
1943 in a three-volume edition with a foreword by an Icelandic scholar. It was
clearly part of the resistance against the Germans; the frontispiece, however,
looks almost like a piece of national socialist propaganda featuring an awe-
some looking Viking. The sagas have always been used for political and nation-
alist causes. A year later, in 1944, the Americans occupied Iceland and it
declared itself a republic. The sagas are deliberately kept alive by the educa-
tional system and by a spate of contemporary Icelandic – and even English
(Tolkien, Ridpath) – novels.

15 N. M. Petersen, Islændingenes Færd Hjemme og Ude (Copenhagen: Det tredje Standpunkts

Forlag, 1942)

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36 Hans Hauge

If one moves back in time to the beginning of many literatures one often
first encounters not literature but written laws. Whilst literature in twelfth-
century Denmark was in Latin, the first laws were in Danish (the so-called
“Landskabslove” (regional laws)). They were common law codified. Old Norse
literature can also be said to begin with laws or as law – it even adheres to
the law of genre.
It is difficult to read the sagas without also discussing law. They are about
law. Njal’s Saga could almost be called a “see-you-in-court” or a “see-you-at-
Althing’et”-saga.16 Icelandic history books similarly begin with describing the
law. The law comes first. This reminds one of the differences between the North
Americans, the Canadians, and the Americans south of the border. Iceland is
like Canada.17 In the Canadian West the Mountie was there before the immi-
grants arrived and he represented the law. In the US there was first a commu-
nity without the law and then the sheriff arrived and introduced the law. Ice-
landic culture literally began as law or as something like law, a codex: the
Codex Regius. It appeared authorless seemingly out of nowhere. It was an event
with no prehistory, which created an oral prehistory.
Around 1800 the Scandinavians, as I said, imported or “stole” Icelandic
literature and made it their own and thus supplemented our literatures. Or
perhaps they invented it or took it back. This is what I mean by Scandinavian
Orientalism. The loss of empire made us idealise the past. Today it is called
‘appropriating other people’s stories’. So when contemporary Icelandic novel-
ists continue to use the sagas thematically and structurally in their novels we
can interpret it as a form of reclaiming them and making them their own. A
version of the empire writing back.
The so-called “Icelandic handwritings” had been sitting in Copenhagen
for years, but in 1965 a bill was passed in parliament and high court ruled that
the texts be returned to Iceland. It was a kind of decolonizing gesture. In itself
this is a wonderful story of the Codex regius in 1971 being sailed back to the
republic on a warship.
By that time the Codex (and the Flatøbog) had become nationalist symbols.
The texts are like the Elgin Marbles. The texts were not Icelandic, but Nordic
or Norwegian. The manuscripts belonged to the Danish monarchy and hence
the state. They all became Icelandic by an act, which nationalized them. The
Codex regius was given to the Danish king, Frederik the Third, by bishop Bryn-

16 Rewritings of the sagas such as Nobel prize winner Halldór Laxness’ novels contain literally
hundreds of lawsuits.
17 No wonder that Icelanders felt at home in the Canadian prairies. There is a rich Icelandic-
Canadian literature.

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 Nordic Sameness and Difference 37

jolfur Sveinsson. Had these manuscripts not been sent to Copenhagen they
would – just like the Elgin Marbles – have been destroyed and the Icelanders
would not have had them. The nationalization of the Codex is a post World
War Two phenomenon and the nationalizing impetus had, as always, its centre
in a university amongst intellectuals: in the University of Reykjavik. “No nation
is capable of learning culture from another nation”, said the minister of culture
and education, Gylfu Gíslason in 1971 on receiving the manuscripts. Could this
handing back of the monarch’s rightful property also be seen as a result of
1968 and the anti-imperialist ethos? Not only are the sagas about the law, a
law also decided where they would sit.
Jesse Byock’s Viking Age Iceland begins by quoting the beginning of Njal’s
Saga about Mord – Mørd in Danish18 – the lawmaker.19 In that way both the
scholarly work and the saga begin in the same way with the making of laws.
The author of Njal’s Saga took most of the legal material from a written source:
the Grágás. Experts inform us that the author knew next to nothing about laws
and legal matters but used the law as a narrative device. He fictionalized –
that is to say he lied.
Byock, however, is also – metaphorically speaking – breaking a law. He
announces that he is not going to treat the sagas as literature, myths, or fic-
tions. So did Paul du Chaillu in his books about the Viking age20 (1889), which,
he surmised, was the origin of the history of English-speaking peoples. In
terms of genre the sagas are romances,21 but Byock does not respect the law
of genre. He will read the sagas as sources – mirrors? – of Icelandic society
and as sources for anthropological studies. This would be like using Walter
Scott’s romances as sources for the life and manners of Medieval Scotland.
When beginning with the beginning of Njal’s Saga Jesse Byock also points
out how that particular saga breaks with, if not tradition, then at least our
expectations. We would not – and who is we? – have expected Mord to be a
lawyer. Indeed not. This is an American speaking. The lawyer is seldom a
popular figure in American TV series.
Whereas Byock reads the sagas as ethnographic sources, the lawyer Henry
Ordower reads them as pure twelfth century fictions22 and he is the one who

18 Mord means “murder” in Danish.

19 Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland (London: Penguin, 2001), 21.
20 Paul B. Du Chailly, The Viking Age: The Early History Manners And Customs Of The English
Speaking Nations, V2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890)
21 Literary historian Håkon Stangerup called them naturalist novels. They could also be read
as primers for immigrants – sort of how-to-behave-books.
22 Twelfth century because they were committed to parchment at that time.

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38 Hans Hauge

claims that the law in them serves fictional or narrative purposes.23 Byock
adopts a kind of Aristotelian stance combined with reconstructive hermeneu-
tics. Mord’s story may have happened. The story was, he thinks, plausible for
the original Icelandic audience. His reading sounds liberal and American: The
story shows that “duels and recourse to violence, though legal, rarely settled
underlying economic and family issues.”24
Or it shows something quite different. Let us take the episode from Njal’s
Saga with the heathen Thorgeir. There were two groups present: the heathens
and the Christians. They wanted two sets of laws. It sounds much like discus-
sions about whether you can have two law systems: shariah and Christian-
national laws. Thorgeir is chosen to decide (the full story is related in the
Kristnisaga and Islandigabok) about what to do.
When the heathen Thorgeir finally emerges from his blanket after thinking
about matters he decides: We need to have just one common law, and he asks:
‘Do you want the law I give you’? All say yes. ‘Then the origin of our law is
that all people in this country must be Christians and believe in one God,
Father, Son and Holy Ghost, refrain from idolatry, stop setting out children
and not eat horse’s meat.’ From that moment on the law had form. Thorgeir’s
act was a happy speech act. For him law and Christianity were one. This shows
how law as an event creates a Christian society and not Christians. Swedish
judge and historian of law, Jacob W. F. Sundberg, highlighted this particular
scene from Njal’s Saga in order to show what he called the poetry of law. For
him the point is that it is not the law, which speaks, but a person (lagmannen –
the law man): “The lagmann’s ‘I’ and poetic art bestows upon the laws fresh-
ness and a beauty that astounds.”25

Swedish Crime Novels: Capitalism is a Crime

The “Northern Sagas are … the creation of medieval Christendom”, said English
historian Christopher Dawson.26 The Nordic crime novel is the creation of post-
modern, Nordic secularism and the Nordic welfare state.

23 Henry Ordower, “Exploring the Literary Function of Law and Litigation in ‘Njal’s Saga.’,”
Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, 3.1 (Spring – Summer 1991): 41–61.
24 Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland (London: Penguin, 2001), 23.
25 Jacob W. F. Sundberg, fr.Eddan t. Ekelöf: Repetitorium om rättskällor i Norden, (Stockholm:
Juristförlaget, 1990), 45.
26 Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European
Unity, (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1956/68), 24.

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 Nordic Sameness and Difference 39

The Nordic crime story emerged as around 1800 with the Danish-German
writer Lauritz Kruse – for instance his Fortællinger efter Criminal-Acter (1820).
In the 1890’s crime stories were already immensely popular in the Nordic coun-
tries, and they were published in thin pamphlets in Sophus Kriedt’s “Kriminal-
bibliothek”.
The first Swedish crime story novelist was “Frank Heller” (1886–1947)
(Gunnar Serner) from Lund. He and the Norwegian journalist Sven Elvestad (or
Stein Riverton) were known in Europe in the 1920’s. Today Heller has even
become a cult writer. Heller was a somewhat decadent writer and an expert
on Swinburne and lived most of his life outside of Sweden. Stieg Trenter (espe-
cially with Narr på nocken, 1956) and Maria Lang (Dagmar Lange) were the
next internationally known Swedish crime novel writers.
Elvestad became famous with his Lys og Skygge: Originale Detektivfortæl-
linger. In Elvestad’s novels the hero is Knut Gribb and the villain, who always
escapes, is Thomas Ryer. Both Heller and Elvestad were marginal and bohe-
mian aesthetes – Elvestad was probably gay. Another well-known writer was
the Norwegian Øvre Richter Fich, whose hero is the amateur detective Jonas
Fjeld. Mention should also be made of Rudolf Muus, who by 1910 had sold
700,000 books.
Contemporary Swedish crime writers are marginal in a political sense,
since they more often than not belong to the left side of politics and different
from other writers of novels and poems since they make a lot of money.
The contemporary Swedish crime novel is political. It has revitalised the
crime novel by combining the commercial and popular crime novel (“pussel-
deckare”) with socialist realism and radical feminism.27 It is the product of
the Swedish welfare state when seen from a reception-aesthetic point of view,
whereas the producers of the novels are critics of the same welfare state. That
is to say: readers living in secure, law-abiding societies with little crime con-
sume them voraciously disregarding the political messages. Furthermore such
messages disappear when the novels are made into TV series.
Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö came first as political writers and as journal-
ists writing police novels. They wrote Raymond Chandler-like ones and broke
with the “pusseldeckar”-tradition. However, their political message did not
really emerge until in 1968 with Den skrattande polisen, which was the fourth
of the so-called Beck novel. Beck, the policeman and main character, was their
creation. Ed McBain, by the way, accused them of plagiarizing his novels. Some

27 This does not mean that there aren’t non-socialist crime writers: Håkon Nesser, Lars Kepler,
Kristian Lundsted and so on. And there have been other examples of “socialist” thrillers,
namely Eric Ambler’s.

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40 Hans Hauge

have claimed that Sjöwall and Wahlöö assert that capitalists, racists and neo-
nazis have destroyed the Swedish Folkhem (the comforting metaphor for the
powerful social democratic state). Hence they long back to when the welfare
state was pure as it apparently was in the 1950s. There is also another explana-
tion as to why the Swedish crime novels are much more “political” than other
kinds of literature and the media. In his book on the Swedish welfare state,
Göran Hägg, points out one extraordinary thing about post-war Sweden28
There was a tacit agreement, which said that one could discuss everything,
but one was never to discuss politics. In such a depoliticised climate politics
emerges in other places than usual: in popular fiction, which in many other
countries appears rather non-committed. Sweden is also different because of
unsolved political murders – especially the one on Oluf Palme. The country is
much more violent, than the other Nordic ones.
Henning Mankell, who created the character Wallander, Arne Dahl and
Stieg Larsson continue the left-wing socialist tradition. They are or were com-
munists or very radical leftwing socialists. In this way the Swedish welfare
state has produced a literature, which is highly critical of the same state. And
the free market has produced a literature, which has the purpose of undoing
the free market and hence makes crime novels superfluous. Larsson’s books
have sold 35 million copies. Interestingly Män som hatar kvinnor (Men who
hate women) was translated as The Tattooed Woman. It is equally ironic that
many of the places where the novels take place have become tourist attrac-
tions. Even if not given its real name, the idyllic and very Swedish island north
of Stockholm, where the action takes place now attracts crowds of tourists.
Thus these anti-capitalist novels contribute to what is called the experience
economy. The feminist Liza Marklund,29 however, once remarked that we read
crime novels because life is so tranquil and peaceful in the modern Nordic
welfare states. Murder stories are a form of escapism. We read them and thank
ourselves that we don’t live in such a society. We escape from the criminal
world into our tranquil suburban lives. “The Guilty Vicarage” sums it up quite
nicely. It is the title of W. H. Audens’s wonderful essay on the detective novel.
Literary historian Göran Hägg calls them “Folkhemmets förbrytare” (the crimi-
nals of the folk home (the Swedish metaphor for the welfare state)).30
Classical Marxist philosophy of law and right foresaw a society without
law and lawyers, no right and no state.31 And there are and were many socialist

28 Göran Hägg, Välfärdsåren: Svensk historia 1945–1986, (W og W, Stockholm: 2005), 84.

29 Whose picture is always on the front-cover.
30 Göran Hägg, Den svenska litteraturhistorien (Stockholm: W og W, 1996), 345.
31 Jacob Sundberg has a list of works on the subject.

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 Nordic Sameness and Difference 41

legal philosophers in Sweden. Minister and jurist Carl Lidbom (1926–2004)

(one time member of Oluf Palme’s government) once expressed the standard
socialist view of the law: “Laws can never be regarded with servile respect.
They are tools, which we use to achieve our political goals”.32 Lidbom was part
of a Swedish socialist legal tradition going back to the legal philosopher
Anders Vilhelm Lundstedt (1882–1955). His view was that right (retten) always
expresses the will of the ruling class. Such views are easily detectible in the
contemporary Swedish crime story. Very often the journalist is a representative
of justice seldom if ever the lawyer or any representative of the state. Often
especially the secret police, SÄPO, are depicted as villains. The novels do not
respect the law or the lawgiver, but they are obedient to the law of genre. They
never break literary rules.33
The novels describe Sweden as a racist, woman hating society ruled by
old or neo-Nazis. Sweden is, it is true, a country with many unresolved murders
and a far higher murder rate than the other Nordic countries and violence has
often been used to solve political problems. The Palme murder is just one
example. Capitalism, however, is the real villain and criminal in these novels.
Sjöwall herself says unabashedly that she would like to rob a bank and hence
take the law in her own hands.
Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium-trilogy” features a heroine who acts as police
and the novel openly appeals to the reader as lynching mob. The message is
clear. The law is always a class law and it is gendered (male) and therefore
there to be broken. Taking the law in one’s hand also seems to be the only
solutions in Jens Lapidus’s crime novels – for instance in Cash.
The crime or detective novel as such is a theological genre in a special
sense. Incidentally both Kracauer and Auden invoke Søren Kierkegaard when
dealing with it. It is the genre of the death of God. Hence it really could become
a most popular novelistic form with the disappearance of religion. It is a post-
protestant genre – indeed therefore a Nordic one. One seldom comes across
Italian or Spanish crime novels even though of course they exist. Crime-novels
were also produced in the GDR – one of the last ones to be published – by the
Miltärverlag – was Otto Bonhoff’s Die Letzte Begegnung: Kriminalerzählung.
Interestingly, the villain in DDR-Krimis often has a hidden Nazi background –
just like in Larsson’s – however; the police are always good, honest and dull
servants of the benevolent state.
It is the specific Nordic context and setting, which makes the Nordic crime
novels different. It is the peaceful, dull, secure life in a nanny state, which

32 Jacob W. F. Sundberg, fr.Eddan t. Ekelöf: Repetitorium om rättskällor i Norden, (Stockholm:

Juristförlaget, 1990), 223.
33 Rule-breaking crime novels exist – especially written by Canadian women.

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42 Hans Hauge

makes crime literarily interesting. To read about crime is something entirely

different if you happen to live in Columbia or Botswana34 from how it is in the
idyllic Swedish island of Gotland. Crime is difficult to explain in a society
where there ought not to be crime at all if crime is believed to be the result of
inequality.
Since the Scandinavian countries are the most godless, it is very easy to
see why especially Sweden should be the country to produce so many crime
novels. Since the Scandinavian countries are the happiest, richest and most
equal in the world the crime novels have to depict society as much worse than
it actually is.
In his famous essay about the detective novel from 1925 the sociologist
Siegfried Kracauer35 demonstrated how the detective is a substitute for God in
a completely rationalised civilised society. The hotel lobby had replaced the
church.36 The detective is never married, since he only serves godlike reason.
He is, so to speak, the incarnation of reason. When Kracauer used the word
“civilised” he meant modern and probably according to a certain German tradi-
tion used the word as the opposite of culture. He noted how international
the detective novels were. At that time detective fiction was primarily Anglo-
American, precisely because the English-speaking world represented civilisa-
tion or modernity. Kracauer has a discussion about the law in connection with
reflections on an Anatole France story, “Les juges intègres”, about either one
God-given immutable law or law as a reflection of social and natural life
Today Sweden is the spearhead of secular modernity. Yet these novels are
also very Swedish. They illustrate so beautifully Benedict Anderson’s idea of
how novel reading is the imagining of a national and political community. We
all read the same novel(s). They sit on all coffee tables. In the Swedish crime
novels the police rarely represent reason, but, as I said, the outsider or the
journalist does. The state and its representatives represent irrational law and
in that way the crime novel is a comedy. In a comedy the father represents the
old society, and the young couple represents the new society. The comedy is
the literary form closest to a trial. This has been known since antiquity as we
see it in the poetics of the comedy, the Tractatus Coisilianus. It divided up the
comedy into pistis (opinion) and gnosis (proof). The comedy moves from a
society controlled by arbitrary law (Swedish capitalism) to a free society or it

34 I am thinking of Alexander McCall Smith’s detective novels set in Botswana with the lady
private detective Mma Ramotswe. Yet Smith – onetime professor of Medical Law – is an
Englishman and not from Botswana.
35 Siegfred Kracauer, “Der Detektiv-Roman. Eine Deutung.” in Werke, I (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2006).
36 This is the case for instance in Arnaldur Indridason’s Stemmen (The Voice).

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 Nordic Sameness and Difference 43

moves from illusion to reality.37 In the beginning nothing and nobody are like
they appear. At least we have proof and the rulers have their true identities
revealed as capitalists, neo-Nazi or women haters.
In Stieg Larsson’s “Millenium-trilogy” the heroine is a Pippi Longstocking-
for-grown-ups, Lisbeth Salander,38 and the main character is a grown-up ver-
sion of Astrid Lindgren’s boy-detective Kalle Blomkvist.
The novels are called the “Millennium” after the name of a journal in the
novel, (Expo in real life) but naturally it also signals a utopian, chiliastic
element; the novels’ principle of hope. Just as in Tegnér’s Svea. The novels
thus make readers believe that it is man or rather woman who control the
machines and not vice versa. This is clearly the novels’ anti-modern message.
They can, however, only achieve this end by making Salander’s power an irra-
tional or even fantastic one. In that way a non-realistic feature is introduced
into the crime novel. She is even a kind of Jesus-like figure. If in the classic
crime story the detective was reason’s god, Salander may be reason’s Jesus. It
is remarkable how religion plays a role in the novels. And Blomkvist’s daughter
who cracks the Bible-code has joined some kind of neo-religious sect.
Salander appeals, as I said, to the lynching mob. I remember from the film
how the cinema audience cheered when she tortured precisely the lawyer who
had once raped her. It seems that what Kracauer called the novel of the most
rationalized and civilized societies in the hands of writers like Larsson have
introduced certain anti-modern elements – for instance in its treatment of the
man-machine nexus and by introducing fantasy elements in order to solve
crimes, just as in children’s literature. Sherlock Holmes always and only used
reason and logic. The rational, male detective (here journalist) is displaced.
An anorectic woman with supra-natural powers represents the new society
without the law and state.
Also Icelandic crime novels seem to be quite successful on the interna-
tional market. The crime novels by Icelandic journalist Arnaldur Indridason
feature a policeman very like policemen in American crime fictions and they
depict a modern Iceland, which is like any other modern society. The detective
is divorced – like in Stieg Larsson – again because he serves the rational god.
His daughter is a drug addict.
Hence Indridason demythologizes Iceland and it emerges as a totally
rationalized, godforsaken civilized society, to use Kracauer’s words. Finally, it

37 For further details see Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (New York: Atheneum, 1968),
288 ff.
38 This genealogy is mentioned in the novel. The main character has his name from Astrid
Lindgren, too. Pippi herself is based on Lucy Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables.

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44 Hans Hauge

should be mentioned that Indridason’s most well-known thriller is called:

Codex Regius. Thus the sagas keep turning up in novel places.
Finally to round this off, let me mention the newest crime novel by English
writer Michael Ridpath, Where the Shadows Lie. It is fantastic novel about
hidden and stolen sagas. It takes place in post-credit-crunch Iceland, has an
American-Icelandic policeman called Magnús as main character, and uses
elements from Tolkien and the Volsungs. On the plane from Boston to Iceland
Magnús reads Njal’s Saga. The novel opens with the murder of an Icelandic
literary scholar who is an expert on Icelandic manuscripts. In Ridpath’s novel
sagas and crime combine to create a new kind of fiction.

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