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Mapping the Old Norse World in the Comics Imaginary
Malmö University, Faculty of Education and Society (LS), Department of Society, Culture and Identity (SKI).ORCID iD: 0000-0001-7680-9402
2018 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

There is today a vast literature on the topic of the Old Norse world’s reception and representation across the world and over more than a millennium. We know fairly well what meanings the Vikings, their culture, and their religion have been imbued with over this span, and we know how and why in the past they have been made into carriers of many different, and often contradictory, ideas and ideals. What seems less clear, however, is how this kind of meaning-making is still taking place; although contemporary visual culture is replete with examples of ideologically and politically charged Old Norse representations, the medium of comics and its many forms, one of the most active and vivid forums in which this contemporary representation and renegotiation occurs is often dismissed as meaningless. Indeed, the end of the Old Norse world’s meaningful reception history has been proclaimed more than once with reference to comics. In his book about the understanding of Thor throughout history, for example, Martin Arnold segues from comics into a brief epilogue, in which he proclaims that “[i]n the final analysis, whatever stance one might adopt concerning the beliefs held by societies long past, and whichever theory one chooses to advance to explain or assess the impact of mass culture, it is possible to conclude that the reception history of the Thunder god is, in any meaningful sense, at an end.” To the contrary, however, the past century of global comics production is loaded with representations of Old Norse imaginaries, in the form of Vikings and their gods. The most famous example, Marvel Comics’ Thor, alone comprises the largest single archive of stories about the Old Norse thunder god ever assembled in history. On top of this, every major global comics culture – the Scandinavian, the Franco-Belgian, the British, Japanese manga, and Korean manwa – all provide numerous noteworthy examples. Despite this fact, however, there is almost no comics scholarship on the topic, and scholarship on the long-term reception of Old Norse imaginaries has yet to take comics into account. Taking as its starting point Brian Attebery’s contention that the Old Norse myths are “legitimately part of a cultural commons, available to anyone who wishes to tap into archaic mysteries,” this paper maps Old Norse reception and representation in contemporary comics, beginning in Sweden in the 1940s and expanding, to cover global comics cultures into the present day. By using examples from each comics culture, it aims to correct the misperception about comics’ value as a source for understanding contemporary shifts and trends in the reception and representation of Old Norse imaginaries. It also aims to deepen our understanding of the Old Norse world’s enduring appeal by using comics as its primary material. Through this, the paper will illustrate how, rather than being meaningless, comics is the latest stage in Old Norse reception history, and a vibrant one that seems poised to continue its redefinition of the past for a long time still. The purpose is to begin filling an open gap in existing scholarship on Old Norse reception and representation, by mapping the many ways in which comics have attempted to define and redefine the meaning of the Old Norse world in and for their own time and place.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2018.
Keywords [en]
Vikings, comics, comics book
National Category
Humanities and the Arts
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:mau:diva-11943Local ID: 28024OAI: oai:DiVA.org:mau-11943DiVA, id: diva2:1408989
Conference
Medievalism, Public History, and Academia : The Recreation of Early Medieval Europe, c. 400–1000, Malmö, Sweden (26–28 September 2018)
Available from: 2020-02-29 Created: 2020-02-29 Last updated: 2020-03-17Bibliographically approved

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Lund, Martin

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