**Interviewee has had named changed to protect identity. I own all the original transcripts of the interview. **

The stealing of Nordic beliefs by White Supremacist is perhaps one of the most overlooked problematic issues today. (I call this “Nordic faiths” to group in many different religious groups who follow similar Gods but don’t follow the same religious practices.) Many outside of the pagan or heathen faiths don’t bat an eye because they already hold negative views of those who exist outside of Christianity, Islam, or Abrahamic traditions. There is also another layer to this stealing. Individuals see Viking or Nordic culture as fair game, as something that they can appropriate. These white men take the image of the Viking male because they associate these men as “pure” whites.

The Nordic faith stretches from the regions of Scandinavia to Iceland, following wherever Vikings settled. What the belief system was called before Christianity spread is unknown. In the 20th century peoples outside of the Nordic countries have gained access to the mass mythology of the Nordic and Germanic lands. While some only see Norse mythology in pop culture like Thor in the Avengers, Lord of the Rings, or The 13th Warrior; others have stumbled across the religion among Wiccan beliefs. Charlette, a woman of the Nordic path, found Nordic paganism through her interest as a young girl in Wicca and witchcraft: “Um…*lip smack*..it basically started out being interested in wicca because like most teenagers you get into the occult witchy type of stuff and so getting into wicca kinda bounced off….because you know wicca is kinda one of those….religions where it steals a lot of different things from other religions.” She would find Norse paganism by reading various mythologies, to eventually stumbling across the Norse tradition. The choice to stick to this path was because the mythology “clicked” or connected to her in a way that Wicca could not.

Norse mythology is polytheistic with two different branches of Gods, the Æsir and the Vanir. Among these beliefs are those of giants, elves, and dwarfs. The Vanir are a type of gods associated with nature, fertility, witchcraft, and magic; they lost the battle with the Æsir. The Vanir hail from Vanaheimer, while the gods live in Asegard. There does not seem to be a hierarchy for believers in whom they worship and how they perceive the gods. Charlette worships all the gods in the pantheon, but deals the most with Fenrir, “I deal with the most would be Fenrir…I don’t know why. I tend to be drawn to more of the darker uh gods and goddess. I would say Fenrir..Odin is probably a big one and then one is not that well known is Nerthus.” She mentions how Nerthus is hard to find information on since she is “almost a Germanic goddess…technically a Norse goddess” In the Germania written by the Roman historian Tacitus (McCoy, n.d.) the goddess was worshiped by Germanic tribes. Charlotte further tries to explain Nerthus, “Nerthus would be well its speculated whether its Njor’s sister who he was actually married to at some point and some people think maybe the Germanic tribes might of gotten confused and she might actually be a version of Njorn its kinda up to debate. So basically, most people believe she is Njors sister and wife, sister wife.” Nerthus was represented concealed in a cart in a sacred grove. The statue would be cleansed in a sacred lake, one female writer associates her with sacrifice (Krasskova, 2011), she believes the bog bodies found throughout Northern Europe were sacrifices to her. The Krasskova (2011) further explains the goddess as, “I almost think that She regulates such interactions. She guards the boundary and the doorway to a holy power so immense that those unprepared face obliterations. Even the way in which sacrifices were made to Her: drowning in a bog, is, to my mind, significant: a bog is a place that is equally of earth and of water.”

The gods provide guidance to their worshippers through various means, but a great source of inspiration is through the mythologies of the gods. Charlotte looks towards the gods for guidance, “Odin lays out all the you know rules of how to live how to respect guest and I mean I look to certain teachings that gods have as things I would want to live by but I mainly just kind of like I guess the certain deities that I am particularly closest to I try to live my life accordance to with would they approve of this is this something they would like at me and be like I am proud that you know she is living her life in this certain manner.” Odin is a big inspiration for her when conducting certain values to live by. The god Odin is one of the most popular gods in Norse mythology, such so that his image has become the symbol of neo-Nazis around the world. There is not a lack of information on the god Odin, which makes it easier for women like Charlotte to use his teachings as ways to conduct her life. Yet the information out there on any of the gods in most pagan traditions are untrustworthy and often they need to be taken with a “grain of salt”. According to Morgan Daimler (2018) the name of Odin is derived from the proto-Indo-European word wodeno which means “inspired, raging, or mad”. This god inspires both poetry and berskeness in warriors, those warriors who die in battle go to Valhalla to wait to do battle at the end of times. Not all people who die end up in Valhalla, in fact, there are numerous outcomes for one’s soul. Souls can be reincarnated, naming children after dead ancestors might lead to the rebirth of that said ancestor. Yet naming a child after a living relative is considered bad luck, similar to some Jewish practices. Charlotte has not named her children after living subjects but instead named her daughter after the Celtic goddess of war and death, adding to her fascination with death.

The idea of Odin has been hijacked by neo-Nazi’s something that Charlotte is not too keen about, or many people of the faith for that matter, “cause for some reason a lot of neo-Nazis looked at the Norse traditions, the whole Viking aesthetic and for some reason they chose Odin who is literally a disabled dude who has been known to also dress up as a woman and pretend to be a woman…. Like the Norse gods are all gay basically they are all so gendered fluid their sexuality are so fluid and I’m like why would a neo-Nazi a white supremacist and look at this and be like hmm I’m going to take over this religion and say that we only like white people who are like pure blood.” Not all people interested in Viking aesthetics like those neo-Nazis. Nicholas Ahlmark (2020) remarks that “Neo-Nazis will often turn up at Viking fairs, seeking Viking paraphernalia. During my research phase, I even talked to one Viking enthusiast who recounted the story of a group of neo-Nazis leafleting at a Viking fair.”

The article “Vikings vs Neo-Nazis: Battling the Far Right in Sweden” , posted on the Aljeezera website by Nicholas Ahlmark (2020), has similar feelings and concerns about neo-Nazi’s that Charlotte has. The Vikings were not a “pure-bred” white race of individuals with one set of cultures. In the nineteenth century, the Vikings were praised as a German master race, starting with the Nazis in the 1930s. The word Viking itself is a verb to go exploring, the Swedish people or Danes would go ‘viking’. The routes of the Vikings spread all the way from Canada to Afghanistan, creating a vast network of trade and pillaging. These people were able to adapt to the cultures that they plundered and traded from, such as from the Muslims of the Abbasid Caliphate. Vikings took slaves from their trips, as were the customs of those eras, bringing in people from all walks of life into the Norse world. The rise of nationalism in Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, and other parts of Europe also saw the revision of Nazi Germany’s pure race. The surge of nationalism may be the cause of the recent Syrian immigrant problems and the rising Islamophobia in the Western world. Neo-Nazi’s want to forget that many of those so called “pure” whites were in fact not pure Swedish and sometimes were in fact those hated Muslims.

When further asked to explain her feelings towards neo-Nazi’s Charlotte explains that she doesn’t like how they are very masculine centered, “I mean you have the white supremacist that try to invade our spaces and they are very like ‘oh we are tough men and you’re just there for breeding’” Further elaborating she explains that the Goddesses were not about breeding or weakness, “like people who practice Norse paganism who are traditionalist who actually follow true traditions not who are fuckin racist assholes misogynistic they…women basically rule society because women were seen as more valuable not only can we bear children but we can fight we can farm and a lot of times women were the ones who managed finances… so I feel like it’s more a feminine tradition you also have you have gods but those gods have wives that they obsess over..” The Norse path to Charlotte is very feminist, where women were in control of much of daily life. The Norse shamans known as völva, were solely female.

During the 2021 Washington riots, where white persons invaded the capital there could be seen obvious religious heathen garb. In 2017 an Icelandic high priest was bothered to see Ásatrú (heathenry) symbols being used in the white supremacist’s marches in Charlottesville. Hilmar Hilmarsson, the high priest, knew that these white men were using Thor’s hammer as a symbol for the white race. This apportion can be seen not just in the United States but throughout the Western world by whites. This use of Nordic faith symbols into white supremacist hands is linked with Nazis, where Viking symbols were incorporated into Third Reich symbology (like the swastika).  The organization Nornirs Ætt researches how heathen symbology is appropriated in white supremacist groups.

Many of these white supremacists who don heathen symbols don’t actually believe in the faith but do believe Vikings represent the pure white male. Hence is why Charlotte linked white supremacy with white men using it for both racism and for misogyny. It is interesting that these men appropriate a faith’s symbols to represent something that the faith overall doesn’t represent. People like Charlotte no longer feel comfortable wearing Thor’s hammer because doing so could mark them as a white supremacist to both supremacist and non. The fact that most media outlets ignore this symbology further helps create this false narrative that all those who follow Heathenry are racist, sexist, and white. To top it off pagan faiths often get slandered as fake or evil; having a hard time being taken seriously. When they are taken seriously it seems it will be through a negative lens. This negative lens is something that all Muslims understand all too well.