From the Loony Bin: Norse code: are white supremacists reading too much into The Northman?

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/apr/22/norse-code-white-supremacists-reading-the-northman-robert-eggers

At the London premiere of The Northman in early April, the director, Robert Eggers, explained on stage how he was seeking to reclaim Viking history from rightwing groups. Many of these groups thrive on myths of an imagined European past: a time before racial mixing or progressive politics, when men were mighty warriors and women were compliant child-bearers.

Even before the film’s release, far-right voices were giving their approval on the anonymous message board site 4chan: “Northman is a based [agreeable] movie, all white cast and shows pure raw masculinity.” “Robert Eggers. He is restoring pride in our people with his great films. The Northman is going to be epic… Hail Odin.”

On the face of it, some images of Skarsgård in The Northman – bare-chested, pumped-up with battle rage, wearing a wolf’s pelt as headgear – are uncomfortably close to those of Jake Angeli, AKA the “QAnon Shaman”, the abiding mascot of the 6 January assault on the US Capitol. On that day in Washington, Angeli was similarly topless and animal-adorned, his torso bearing tattoos of Nordic symbols now associated with white-supremacist movements, including a stylised Mjölnir (Thor’s hammer), Ygdrasil (the “world tree” of Norse mythology) and the Valknut (an ancient symbol of interlocking triangles).

The far right’s love of Nordic lore goes back to the Third Reich and beyond, – and the connection is stronger than ever. The deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 was full of Nordic symbols on banners and shields. Anders Breivik, the Norwegian extremist who murdered 77 people in 2011, carved the names of Norse gods into his guns. The shooter at the 2019 massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, drew Norse insignia on his possessions and wrote “see you in Valhalla” on his Facebook page.

After the Charlottesville rally in 2017, Dorothy Kim, an Asian American medieval literature lecturer at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, argued that “medieval studies is intimately entwined with white supremacy and has been so for a long time”. Academics had not done enough to counter myths that medieval Europe was a bastion of racial purity, said Kim, who was attacked by academics and the far right as a result. These myths were largely established by 19th-century historians with nationalist agendas, but more recent research reveals that societies such as those in Viking-era Scandinavia were in fact multicultural and multiracial.

Some of Stormfront’s film recommendations are predictable: The Birth of a Nation, Triumph of the Will, Braveheart, Zulu, a lot of Jane Austen, Shakespeare and Clint Eastwood. Few will be surprised to see The Lord of the Rings movies come highly recommended. Neither JRR Tolkien nor Peter Jackson consciously framed the fantasy epic as white-nationalist propaganda, but, as with Nordic mythology, it harks back to an imaginary Eurocentric realm in which the heroes are considered to be white-skinned (and were cast as such in the movies) and the chief enemies, the orcs, are characterised as dark-skinned, ugly and uncivilised.

Taika Waititi, who is of Māori and Jewish descent, took things even further with part three, Thor: Ragnarok. As well as casting Tessa Thompson, a woman of mixed African, Latino and European heritage as the ostensibly bisexual Norse warrior Valkyrie, Waititi’s film dealt with narratives of displacement, enslavement, colonialism and white-male fragility. Thor’s all-powerful hammer, Mjolnir, that beloved symbol of white supremacism, is casually disintegrated by Cate Blanchett’s Hela. She then proceeds to bring down the Norse realm of Asgard, figuratively and literally.

“Look at these lies,” she says, stripping away a ceiling fresco to reveal an older one beneath, detailing how her father, Odin, built Asgard through violent conquest. “Proud to have it, ashamed of how he got it.” Judging by the trailer for the next instalment, Thor: Love and Thunder, Waititi is continuing down this road. There are hints of homoeroticism, while somehow Natalie Portman now wields Mjolnir. The far right is going to hate it.