Latest Contributions

The conference »Literary Prize culture in the Nordic Countries. Prizes as Engines of Comparison« was held at the Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität in Munich between the 5th and 7th October 2023, fittingly coinciding with the announcement of the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse as this year’s Nobel Prize winner.

The international Blue Humanities workshop The Sea in Scandinavian Literature held at Goethe University Frankfurt brought together scholars based both in German-speaking countries as well as in Scandinavia.

On March 4 and 5, 2024, the Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg in Greifswald hosted the third conference of the Fi-DACH-Network, an association of researchers in German studies and Fennist linguistics and literary studies.

Since the 19th century, the question of purity has been a risk area in the German search for identity. It oscillates between hygienic and racial ideological content. The latter achieved virulence when, from the 19th century onwards, Scandinavia became a place of longing for (racial) purity in the German völkisch milieu, due to its own sense of deficit. 

A few highlights are enough to reveal the importance of the sea for the history of the North. The literature of the North shows that the sea also permeates the stories that were and are told in this region. Our Special Issue is dedicated to this relationship between the sea and Scandinavian literature, which emerged from a working group at the Arbeitstagung der Skandinavistik in Munich in 2022.

To this day, Hans Kirk's novel Fiskerne (1928, The Fishermen, 1999) is very popular in Denmark. It has also repeatedly aroused interest in literary studies: While it was read against the background of psychoanalysis and criticism of religion in the 1930s, Marxist literary criticism of the 1970s received it as an example of socialist literature. These two approaches focus on the inner life and social interaction of the characters ...

Alexander Kielland’s first novel, Garman & Worse (1880), is considered today part of the Norwegian literary canon. Although the role of the ocean in this novel has already been analysed, most discussions limit themselves to its metaphorical dimension. This paper proposes a Marxist ecological reading of the novel.

In this contribution, in the spirit of Blue Ecocriticism, the ocean in August Strindberg’s I havsbandet (1890, »By the Open Sea«) is given the space it claims in the novel. The contribution examines how the novel blurs the boundaries between the supposedly dichotomous categories of nature and culture. 

This article examines the sea as a space for artistic performance in Karen Blixen's short stories, focusing on theatrical performances on the maritime stage.

The article presents Rakel Haslund Gjerrild’s novel Alle himlens fugle (2020) as a Scandinavian example of flood fiction, a genre that has been attracting scholarly attention in recent years.

This article explores women’s relationship to the sea and contributes with a gender perspective to Humanistic Ocean studies. In Swedish author Sara Stridsberg’s novel Happy Sally (2004) and Norwegian author Inger Bråtveit’s Dette er også vatn (2018), the themes of motherhood and marriage are connected to the motif of swimming in the sea.

This article engages with discussion on literary imaginaries and Anthropocene scales, by examining the Norwegian narrative nonfiction text Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark in a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean (2017), by Morten Strøksnes. 

Based on a literary analysis of Marit Eikemo’s reportage essay Alt søkk i havet (»Everything sinks into the Sea«), the article shows how Norwegian sources might be valuable for international research on urbanized seascapes.

The workshop “Queer\ing Scandinavia: Traditional Topics, Recent Research and Current Concerns”, which took place from November 27-28 2023 in Greifswald, was aimed at students and researchers alike and aimed to address queer topics in Scandinavia. With a focus on current research projects and discussions on theoretical perspectives and challenges, the aim of the workshop was to facilitate encounters.

This article examines the library architecture of the Deichman Bjørvika Library (DBO, 2020) in Oslo, with a particular focus on the structural effects on user behaviour and social interactions. The marvelling visitors are asked to position
themselves both in the concrete experience of the place and in terms of social space. The library’s offerings are structurally similar to those of a shopping mall, and visitors’ usage behavior is ...

In the 2024 editorial, Joachim Schiedermair looks at contemporary iconoclasm and compares icons of literature and activism: Norwegian Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse and Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg

This essay is an attempt to critically and carefully discuss the concept of development. Drawing on a personal biography written about my little sister Nadja, severely disabled since birth but gifted with skills seldomly counted as important in our contemporary society, I use queer temporality theory to investigate what a life like Nadja’s can teach us about growing sideways rather than up, living in circles rather than fast forward and ...

The workshop »Digital Research in Old Norse Studies: Data Management and Infrastructure Needs« was held at the University of Basel from 5th to 8th October 2022, bringing together renowned experts in Digital Old Norse Studies and research institutions to discuss the potential and challenges of the field’s digitization. The workshop aimed to identify common problems and discuss possible future collaborations. Discussions focused on various ...

The Überregionale Promovierendentagung der Skandinavistik offers doctoral candidates at any stage of their doctoral studies a protected space in which their own projects can be presented and discussed. The lectures come from of the field and thus also offer the opportunity to gain insight into topics outside of one's own focus. In addition, the conference also serves as an opportunity to learn about working and research ...

Like its predecessors, this year's DACH-Studierendentagung der Skandinavistik aimed to promote exchange between the various institutes and departments within German-speaking Scandinavian Studies. For this reason, and in order to offer the participants of the conference as broad a stage as possible for their current projects and interests, it was deliberately decided not to prescribe a general conference theme. This goal of a free ...

NORDEUROPAforum celebrates its 25th anniversary as a scholarly journal in 2023. Frederike Felcht and Clemens Räthel look back at the beginnings and summarize current editorial developments.

This article analyses knowledge production about itinerant groups such as Nightmen, Roma and Travellers in Denmark between 1800 and 1950. It puts forward the thesis of a Danish Sonderweg in this regard, not only compared with Germany, but also the Scandinavian neighbours. This Sonderweg was characterized by an underdeveloped interest of science and state authorities for respective groups and culminated into a rejection of forced ...

The five research articles published in this special issue of NORDEUROPAforum were originally presented as papers at the third workshop of the Ecocritical Network for Scandinavian Studies (ENSCAN), which had the overarching theme of »Environmental Change in Nordic Fiction«. Held in Tampere, Finland, in November 2019, the workshop provided a platform for scholars to discuss how environmental issues are represented in Nordic ...

Indigenous cultures have an integrated relationship with nature, and do not view it in opposition to culture, nor do they consider humans as separate from the environment. For example, the concepts of nuna and sila and the figure of Sedna, at the basis of the traditional Inuit thought, decenter the role of humans in the living world. In 2009, Greenlandic author Lana Hansen published a »tale about climate change«, Sila . ...

The novels of the Norwegian Nobel Prize winner Knut Hamsun can be seen as an ongoing discussion with modernity. In some parts his critique is reactionary, in other parts worth listening to. This article deals with his Segelfoss novels, Hamsun’s satirical representation of the commodity trade within the emerging capitalist market and the role of the consumer. The novels may be read as early and thought-provoking contributions to the ...

The essay studies Ulla-Lena Lundberg’s novel Ice , the story of which depicts the changing seasons and the formation of sea ice in the Åland archipelago. In the narrative, ice takes both mental and physical dimensions, and the analysis focuses on the workings of fictional minds in their specific natural and social environments. It is argued that nature both inspires and informs human experience and meaning making, even as it resists ...

The article presents an analysis of Urd by Ruth Lillegraven and Heime mellom istidene by Guri Sørumgård Botheim. These two works of poetry are studied from an ecocritical perspective primarily inspired by Timothy Morton’s concept of dark ecology and Timothy Clark’s idea of the Anthropocene. The main focus of the analysis is how the poems depict feelings of familiarity between modern humans, their ancestors, and ...

Norwegian contemporary climate fiction often portrays humans as in denial of climate change. In Erlend Nødtvedt’s transgressive novel Vestlandet (2017), an alternative story is presented. In contrast to conventional climate change denial, the two protagonists turn the situation upside down and literally celebrate death and climate change and the exceptional Western Norwegian »sublime« landscape. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s ...

This article is about the Swedish daily comic strip Rocky by Martin Kellerman. The article views Rocky as an example of autofiction due to Kellerman’s use of an anthropomorphic cartoon self and the daily comic strip’s narrative structure. One of the article’s goals is to show how the daily comic strip as a medium creates an original day-to-day space for exploring a life story.

Anna Sandberg from the University of Copenhagen looks back at 2021 and the formative events in Danish education policy: society debates the need for German and German language skills, there are to be cuts at universities as part of reforms, and the international community protests against the proposal to cut the Danish »Lectureship Scheme«.

»It’s still a question of whether it’s a kind of crime – reading so much human into nature. Whether it’s our fate to do so.« In these lines from her novel Om mørke (2013), the Danish author Josefine Klougart alludes to one of the most important questions of our time: how might a responsible relationship be shaped between humans and nature? Is it possible to correct and rethink anthropocentric points of view that subjugate ...

The notion that through human activity, the earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, is increas- ingly recognized in science and the public sphere. This article asks by what aesthetic means literary fiction, against the backdrop of this transition, contributes to a rethinking of the relations between non-human nature and human culture, human biological and geological time, the human individual and the human species, and ...

The following essay examines the idea of »interconnectedness«, which plays an important role particularly where new relationships between people and natural phenomena and an embedding of humans in complex life-nexuses are at stake. The approaches of two thinkers from posthumanist feminist theory, Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway, are discussed in relation to their thinking about interconnectedness and subjectivity. Some problematic issues ...

The article calls attention to how snow and ice are embodied as grievable entities in Nordic 21st century climate  change fiction, arguing that contemporary fiction is a valuable apparatus for processing ecological mourning. The  author draws theoretically on Ashlee Cunsolo’s work on ecological grief, while the overarching research question  is how scientific warnings about global warming and shrinking cryosphere are dealt ...

The series Svalbard (2014) by Norwegian photographer Mette Tronvoll (*1965) consists of analogue portrait and landscape photographs taken in Ny-Ålesund – an international research base on Spitsbergen (Norwegian: Svalbard). By means of art-historical, single-work analysis, this article examines the sequence of twenty large-format colour photographs, which has received little scholarly attention to date. Background information about ...

Nature and closeness to nature are two motifs that are often used in literary depictions or descriptions of the Sámi. This article researches the question of whether, in the book Zeichen der Zerstörung by Sámi author Kirsti Paltto, nature as a literary means is used to create or support a certain public image of the Sámi. The article will focus on  the elements of duottar (fell), sieidegeađgi (sieidi stone), ...

This contribution presents Gunnar Björling’s method style and proposes this term as a reasonable alternative to the terms author’s, personal or signature style. It emphasises that the writing styles and themes of Björling’s complete lyrical oeuvre cannot be examined separately. Rather, the how and what of the presentation permeate one another. Björling’s poems form a comprehensive oeuvre. They are famous for their expressive ...

Rejse ind i et mørkt hjerte is probably one of Peter Høeg’s most extensively analysed stories. In addition to post-colonial readings, intertextual analyses have so far predominated. This essay chooses a novel approach by reading Høeg’s text as a poetological reflection. It focuses on a key metaphor of the story that shapes the metafictional discourse: the theatre. The aim is to show that the text »parasitically« uses the theatre to ...

Der Wunsch, das hundertjährige Jubiläum der Grenzrevision zwischen Deutschland und Dänemark – abseits von Festakten – für eine interdisziplinäre Auseinandersetzung mit Grenzfragen zu nutzen, bildete den Ausgangspunkt der von der Fritz Thyssen Stiftung geförderten Tagung »Grenz\Raum – Grænse\Region«. Dass diese dreitägige Konferenz, als Start in ein Jahr voller geplanter Jubiläums- und Gedenkveranstaltungen, Kongresse und ...

Anniversary dates and centenary years carry a slight smack of atavism. Not even humanities scholars, situated as they are between faith in the Creator of time and, in the modern era especially, a heightened reverence for human calendarisation, are wholly free from the magic of historical commemorations; after all, these offer common ground for meeting the wider community where it feels at ease, namely to greet the regulated Return of the ...

Otto Höfler’s research on Männerbünde (men’s bands or men’s societies) has stimulated critical scholarly discussion on not only the existence of Germanic Männerbünde but also the concept of cultural continuity, the relationship between ritual and myth and historical representations of masculinity. Höfler’s research has also found resonance, though, in facets of ...

The article analyses the reception of Old Norse motifs in the literary concept of the Black Metal band Helrunar, which differs greatly from the usual adaptations in Metal culture. Helrunar understand Old Norse myth as a culturally grounded net of metaphorical modes of speaking, the myths becoming the working ground of an artistic programme aimed at borrowing and re-arranging ...

Unarguably, Robert E. Howard's Conan-stories are products of popular culture. They are part of a pulp series that focuses on mass production and economic sales strategy. Taking this into account, it becomes obvious that Howard’s fictional space of the North as Conan's place of origin refers to known clichés and concepts in order to attract a large body of readers. The North ...

The following article provides a contribution to the discussion about the Arctic identity of Norway and the Norwegian identity of Svalbard – which is already at an advanced stage in other research areas – through a comparative-chronological review of prose literature presenting a protagonist on Svalbard and mainly written by Norwegian authors. The article will furthermore ...

On the German book market, Scandinavian crime novels are seemingly the only publications that are presented and marketed as a homogenous, geographically defined category. As it grows increasingly obvious that this category, rather than being constituted by its content, is produced artificially, this article analyses the marketing tools on the book jacket: title and cover ...

This article envisages discussing the popularity and the persistency of dominant images of the sublime North. While media and their capabilities have undergone severe changes in the two decades since 2000, the number of images is increasing and the possibilities of their distribution has become more accessible. Nevertheless, the contemporary imagery of the North, its underlying ...

North is everywhere. This applies both to navigation and to the cultural phantasm of the »North«. Whether Nordic myths or specifically »Nordic« landscapes and their semantization - they are globally widespread. In heavy metal texts and fantasy novels, computer games and Netflix series, crime novels and comics, in lifestyle guidebooks and on advertising posters, images of the North are shaped and sometimes attract a great deal of ...

This article compares two audiobooks, (re)published in 2011, based on the Old Norse Brennu-Njáls saga. An overview of the various audio editions of Old Norse material in the German audiobook market will be given, along with a brief insight into the field of audiobook research. Afterwards, the inquiry will turn to the means by which the two very different audiobooks approach the medieval saga. While the first project is a strictly arranged ...

The seminar was conceived as a prelude to the celebration of the 250th birthday of Henrik Steffens (1773-1845) in Stavanger in 2023 and took place within the framework of Kapittel, Stavanger's annual international festival of literature and freedom of expression (September 18-22, 2019).

This report offers an analytical overview of the interdisciplinary conference »The ›Great White North‹? Critical Perspectives on Whiteness in the Nordics and its Neighbours«, held at the University of Helsinki in August 2019. It considers how the conference scrutinised the relational dynamic of »whiteness and otherness« in the Nordics, engaging with complex questions of ...

Henrik Steffens’ first scientific book publication, Udkast til en Lærebog i Botaniken (1794), was the translation of a botanical classic of the late 18th and early 19th century, Carl Ludwig Willdenow’s Grundriss der Kräuterkunde (1792). Based on this translation, the present article explores Steffens’ position as natural scientist between Enlightenment and Early Romanticism. On the one hand, Steffens is indebted to the scientific ...

Collective remembering is enacted, as we know, in the rhythm of chronological time. Anniversaries and landmark jubilees are needed for the collective commemoration of important historical events or of figures feted as special by a given community or culture. In Germany, 2020 is not only the year of Beethoven, Hölderlin and Hegel (marking the 250th birthday of each), but also the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration ...

Monsters have always been recognised as transgressive boundary-walkers, whose hybrid bodies combine things that are normally kept separate: formed of human and animal parts, of nature and culture, they operate at the intersection of seemingly opposing forces. The Sagas of Icelanders, however, focus less on hybrid bodies, instead foregrounding socially transgressive and ...

The article subjects the so-called Færeyinga saga to a reading on the grounds of the theory of »the third«, arguing that this concept can help elucidate narrative ambiguity in Saga literature. It can be shown that in Færeyinga saga, »third« elements cross the binarisms of its outer structure, which have been in the focus of scholars up to now. Adverse figures show ...

Being part of the ›Third‹, the »Half-giant« (hálfrisi, hálftrǫll) or »mixed-blood« (blendingr) for which Old Norse has a puzzling variety of expressions appears in many Icelandic tales. It is not only part of the ancestry of Scandinavian rulers but characterizes – as an ally or as a villain – the storyline of many a saga by taking a role he is qualified for by ...

The model of the "Threeness" has been constantly changing throughout history, and in the 20th century it led to a plurality of "the third", which is of great importance for society and culture. In Scandinavian medieval studies, this perspective of the "third" was previously limited to the ambivalent figure of the "trickster", but an interest developed in expanding this perspective as in modern literature. This question was discussed at the ...

The visibility of Scandinavia is manifested in various forms. We were well aware that Denmark was one of the world’s happiest countries, featuring in first place in theWorld Happiness Report for years (even though it has since been topped by Norway), but last year was Sweden’s turn for special visibility – although not under the sign of thehygge or lagom cult, of contentment or of happiness, but rather in connection with the government ...

The contribution analyses how the late medieval Harðar saga uses place-names as literary devices. It proposes that toponyms are employed not only to locate plot elements, but also for purposes of subversion, the dropping of keywords then taken up by the narrative in an often grotesque and ironic fashion, the creation of an (again, typically ironic) subtext, and the evocation of physical topographies and their visual appearance in the context ...

In the first part of this article the concept of utopia and the field of bio-politics are brought together from a historical and a theoretical perspective. In addition to that, two terms are discussed: »heterotopia« and »the figure of the third«. With help of these terms, it is possible to show how recent utopian / dystopian literature succeeds not only to criticise its own time but also to reveal a positive potential for the future. In ...

Knut Hamsun’s novel Markens grødehas been interpreted as advocating a simple and sustainable life in harmony with nature. However, when read retrospectively against the background of human-made environmental changes that have brought the planet into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, Markens grødecannot be considered an ecological text. What the novel actually delivers is a narrative of constant progress and growth, without ...

I was recently brought up short by this sentence: »The people of the North have a great talent for music.«

Well now, who would wish to dispute that – or the staggering banality of the statement, for that matter. I shall make no secret of its source, for it carries considerable and substantial explanatory weight: it is a sentence from a pamphlet issued by the High Command of the Wehrmacht and distributed to German soldiers from 1941: ...

Migration-related events have received overwhelming attention in mainstream media coverage within Europe in recent years. This study investigates the metaphorical framing of migration issues by comparing dominant discursive patterns from two national and two regional daily newspapers in Sweden and Germany. Applying a corpus-based critical metaphor analysis, the spotlight falls on metaphors prevalent in media articles published during the EU ...

It is an annual ritual: not only has the time come for a new editorial but traditionally, around the turn of the year, various countries also select their ›words of the year‹. These selections crystallise and establish the dominant contemporary discourses and key concepts in equal measure. The year 2016 marked the rise of post-truth to unarguable pre-eminence, as confirmed and enacted by nothing so much as the choice of post-truth as word ...

This contribution investigates how biopolitics comes into effect within society. It focuses on two Scandinavian novels, namely LoveStar by Andri Snær Magnason and Die Entbehrlichen by Ninni Holmqvist. Both novels map fictitious societies, which are based on biopolitical concepts. First, I will show how the respective society works. A special focus will be placed on the question how biopolitical concepts undermine the idea of human beings as ...

The contribution delves into the history of the term "biopolitics" and explains main features of the concept, focusing on the 'government of life#. An exemplary reading of August Strindberg’s I havsbandet ("By the Open Sea", 1890) illuminates the potentials of biopolitical perspectives on literary texts. Strindberg’s novel negotiates the possibilities and boundaries of the government of life in particular, including the government of ...

Part one gives an outline of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics and its further development by Deleuze, Negri/Hardt, and Agamben. The second part takes Swedish architecture of the 1930’s (funkis; short for functionalism) and the impact of social engineering as a specific form of Scandinavian biopolitics under scrutiny. Two literary examples serve as an illustration: a short story by Karin Boye and the Villa Villekulla in Astrid Lindgren’s ...

(In German only)