Borealism

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The Faroese folk metal band Týr performing in Copenhagen in 2007. Their development of a Viking-Faroese brand has been interpreted as self-exoticisation that capitalises on international enthusiasm for borealism.[1]

Borealism is a form of

stereotypes
are imposed on the Earth's northern regions and cultures (particularly the Nordic and Arctic regions).

The term was inspired by the similar concept of Orientalism, first coined by Edward Said.[2][3][4][5] An early form of Borealism can be identified in antiquity, especially Roman writings; but, like Orientalism, Borealism came to flourish in eighteenth-century European Romanticism and Romantics' fantasies about distant regions. Borealism can include the paradoxical ideas that the North is uniquely savage, inhospitable, or barbaric, and that it is uniquely sublime, pure, or enlightened.[6]

A further form of borealism is the explicit invocation of the boreal by

white-supremacist far-right politicians
.

Etymology

The term borealism derives from the

occidental
(denoting what lies in the west).

Boreal is not synonymous with northern,[citation needed] the latter qualifying what is north; the first indicates an absolute position, while the second indicates a relative position.

Borealism in art and culture

Examples of borealism include Icelandic financiers being imagined as '

Sámi people as strange and magical savages;[10] differences between Canadians and Americans being accounted for by Canadians' proximity to arctic wilderness;[11] and commentators imagining that the music of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós is the product of Iceland's distinctive geology of glaciers and volcanoes.[12]

Borealism was a prominent phenomenon in the reception of Nordic literature in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century. The so-called modern breakthrough movement, Scandinavian symbolism, impressionism, naturalism, decadence and new-romanticism reached most of the European countries (just as it was the case with Slavic literatures), which had a huge impact on the region's theatre, prose fiction and lyric. It was also the period, when the first professional translators (Hugo Kosterka, Henrik Hajdu, Margit G. Beke) from Swedish, Norwegian and Danish appeared on the literary scene.[13][14] The translations, reviews and articles were marked by a mythical reading of the cultures of Northern Europe. Literary borealism can be best understood as an unwritten set of rhetoric and poetic rules. Through this filter the peoples, territories and literatures of the Nordic countries are anthropologically, geographically and culturally distinctive from other nations. But most often it was the natural phenomena (ice, snow, mountains, seas, lakes, fjords, flora and fauna, volcanos etc.) that had a major effect on the individuals, according to the early 20th century borealists.

Borealism in far-right politics

Although the concept of "

Nazi Heinrich Himmler was a member, believed that the Aryan race came from the mythical northern province of Hyperborea.[citation needed
]

In twenty-first-century politics, the term boreal is used by politicians like

Front National.[15]

The term has also been used by Russian-nationalist movements since the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin wall as an indication of ethnic Russians.

In the Netherlands,

aurora borealis
or the northern lights. These are mainly Western countries in Europe and North America.

See also

References

  1. ^ Green, Joshua, 'From the Faroes to the World Stage', in The Oxford Handbook of Popular Music in the Nordic Countries, ed. by Fabian Holt, Antti-Ville Kärjä (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 111–29 (esp. p. 123).
  2. ^ Christopher B. Krebs, "Borealism. Caesar, Seneca, Tacitus and the Roman discourse about the Germanic North," in Gruen, E.S. (2010), Cultural Identity in the Ancient Mediterranean, Berkeley: 202-221, esp. 202-3. Kristinn Schram, 'Borealism: Folkloristic Perspectives on Transnational Performances and the Exoticism of the North' (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2011), p. 8.
  3. ^ Kristinn Schram, 'Banking on Borealism: Eating, Smelling, and Performing the North', in Iceland and Images of the North, ed. by Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson (Québec: Presses de l'Université du Québec, 2011), pp. 305-27 (p. 310).
  4. ISSN 0014-2115
    .
  5. ISSN 0014-2115. {{cite journal}}: |volume= has extra text (help
    )
  6. ISBN 9780190603908
    .
  7. ^ 'Boreal, adj.', Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press), accessed 26 July 2019.
  8. ^ Kristinn Schram, 'Banking on Borealism: Eating, Smelling, and Performing the North', in Iceland and Images of the North, ed. by Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson (Québec: Presses de l'Université du Québec, 2011), pp. 305-27.
  9. ISBN 9780190603908
    .
  10. doi:10.1177/1367549417722091
    .
  11. doi:10.1080/02722018909481462
    .
  12. doi:10.1017/S0261143018000442
    .
  13. OCLC 886190389.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link
    )
  14. ISSN 0324-4970
    .
  15. ^ Race blanche" : pour Jean-Marie Le Pen, Nadine Morano a "énoncé une évidence historique
  16. ^ Hoe Thierry Baudet aan de lippen hing van Jean-Marie Le Pen
  17. ^ On owls, women and the boreal world: 10 things Thierry Baudet has said
  18. ^ Meet Thierry Baudet, the suave new face of Dutch rightwing populism
  19. ^ The New Face of the Dutch Far-Right - Thierry Baudet once called politicians brain-dead. Now his upstart white nationalist movement has eclipsed Geert Wilders and won more Senate seats than the prime minister’s party
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