Merrill Kaplan, a scholar at Ohio State University, came to UW-Madison on Friday to give a lecture on how white nationalists leverage Norse symbology in their favor.
Kaplan began by citing the casting of Idris Elba, a black actor, as Heimdall in the recent Marvel movie Thor: Ragnarok as a case of inauthenticity. She also elaborated that authenticity is not actually a real concept.
“All authenticity is fake,” Kaplan said. “Authenticity is a made-up idea. There is never an authentic version of anything, or all things are authentic, one or the other.”
Kaplan said the idea of the Old Norse past is attractive to white nationalists because it gives the image of “the rampaging Viking with his hyper-masculine, barbarian vigor.” It also alludes to Europe both as an ethnically homogeneous and anti-Semitic society.
Kaplan said just because white nationalists point to Europe’s history of ethnic homogeneity and anti-Semitism as authentic does not mean that it is a valid argument for ethnic homogeneity and anti-Semitism today.
“Maybe sometimes we should embrace the inauthentic,” Kaplan said.
Kaplan also said that medieval Europe was not completely white to begin with. There was an African presence, a Muslim presence and other forms of diversity in medieval Europe.
She said a call has gone out among academics to look into whether Europe was more diverse than historians initially believed.
However, Europe as a diverse and pluralistic society was also a problematic idea to Kaplan.
“The image of a happy, pluralistic, pre-racist Middle Ages is a legitimizing authorizing narrative for liberal values,” Kaplan said. “It imagines an authentic and authenticating past for white people where, actually, they were never racist.”
Kaplan ended her talk by stating that “maybe authenticity is overrated” when representing Norse mythology.
