Old Norse Mythology and Ideology (and Entertainment)

Abstract According an argument by Georges Dumézil, Ideological use of the mythology may go back to Indo-European times, and it certainly goes back to Viking and medieval Scandinavia, where a “ruler ideology” can be discerned within it. In early modern Denmark and Sweden, the mythology served to create great national pasts, and later it served the needs of national romanticism in Scandinavia and Germany. Later still it was appropriated and twisted by Nazi ideology and that of white supremacy. After WWII, leading fiction writers produced works inspired by it, such as Villy Sørensen (Ragnarøk, 1988) and A. S. Byatt (Ragnarök: The End of the Gods, 2011), who related eschatological themes to the world in which we live, and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001) pits the old gods against the new “gods” of technology. Within pop culture the mythology reflects dominant social notions, and even the wonderful Danish cartoon series Valhalla (1979-2009) may be seen as exemplifying Danish values.