Vikings, Nazis, and Queers
Attempts to erase us from the historical record aren't new but have never been successful
Queer people - including trans people - have always existed and always will. Despite this truth, there have been concerted efforts over the centuries to minimise and deny this. Queerphobic oppression and violence has taken many forms at many times. One of those forms of violence is the erasure of the existence of queer people from the historical record, to try and deny the existence of queer people in the present. We have once again seen an example of this this week, with She Who I Will Not Name denying the Nazi's war crimes towards the trans and queer community.
The Nazis referred to their fascist regime as the Third Reich. The first and second reichs were the Holy Roman Empire and the German Empire. The Nazis believed they were the inheritors of a great history spanning two thousand years, all the way back to the early Germanic tribes of the first centuries AD. They were the Germanic, Aryan people, the Master Race, and only they could have such a noble and ancient history, that they believed to be continuous. In order to make sure Germany was home only to this master race, all 'undesirables' needed to be rid of. This included 6 million Jewish people as victims of the Holocaust, but beyond that the Nazis also persecuted Romani and Slavic peoples, liberals, socialists, communists, disabled people, Jehovah's Witnesses, and, of course, queer and trans people. But where do Vikings come in?
I am a somewhat-lapsed queer Viking historian - following my MA on the topic, I have continued to research and publish, including three peer-reviewed articles on Vikings, gender, queerness, and in the case of two of those articles, Nazi ideology. (In the last couple of years, I’ve had to take a step back to protect my mental health while we fight against the anti-gender movement.) My research has demonstrated the ways in which Nazi ideology informed scholarly undertakings regarding Viking history in the early twentieth century for their own ends. And some of those ends included the extermination of Berlin's thriving queer scene, the destruction of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, and the murder of thousands of queer people.
Before we go on, I want to clarify some terms and concepts so we're all on the same page. Strictly speaking, the people we refer to as the Vikings covers Germanic Scandinavian people (rather than indigenous Sámi people) from Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, who then expanded out to Iceland, the Faroe Islands, the British Isles, Greenland, and some parts of continental Europe. At our strictest definition, this covers the time frame of the late 700s to the 1000s. However, the concepts we'll talk about here go a bit broader, for a number of scholarly and ideological reasons. Therefore, we're also talking, to some extent, about early Germanic tribes within the Germanic region from the first century AD (who certainly weren't Vikings or anything resembling them at this stage), right through to the medieval period, which in Scandinavia starts around 1100 - roughly when Scandinavia was converting to Christianity - and runs to roughly 1500ish. You don't need to know much detail about all this beyond the fact that we're talking about many hundreds of years over a vast land mass - this was not one singular society but hundreds, if not thousands of them, with varied access to technology (including writing).
Viking scholarship talks about the concept of the Männerbunde, or 'bands of men'. This was coined by Heinrich Schurtz in 1902 when exploring gender-, age-segregated, and secret groups in Germanic history. This became a founding concept for Otto Höfler and Lily Wesier in the 1920s and 1930s, who wrote about these bands of warrior men of the Viking Age with certainty. Both Höfler and Wesier belonged to the 'ritualist' school of thinking about folklore, which long had the backing of Himmler and his SS.
Höfler's work on this was particularly important. He argued that secret men's societies had existed continuously, without interruption, since the 'ancient Germans.' Scholar Wolfgang Emmerich describes Höfler’s argument as 'a continuity mythos that included a pseudoscientific theory complete in line with fascist Germanic tribal and racial ideology.' It makes sense that Höfler would align with this ideology - in 1921 he joined the Association of Germanists, and in 1922 he joined the Odnertruppe, a foreunner to the SA, which was the Nazi Party's paramilitary before the SS. When we dig into Höfler's argument, we see claims of these secret groups which consisted exclusively of cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied men. The implication of his continuity mythos was the justification of the Holocaust: the continuation of this ancient history relies on ensuring only the correct people survived to continue it. One scholar, Irene Maria Meier, damns Höfler, stating that his work made him a 'spiritual pioneer for the SS'.
In creating this narrative of history - one which conveniently excludes the valkyries, mythical women named for battle, who chose who died on the battlefield, and defied gendered expectation, and their real-world counterparts - Nazi scholars could paint a picture devoid of queerness and transness, or any kind of gender subversion.
We're going back further now, to the first century AD, relying on the work of scholar Morten Ravn. A Roman scholar named Tacitus travelled around the Germanic regions, including up into the Jutland peninsular of modern Denmark. He wrote about his travels in a book known as Germania. In chapter 12, he talks about a Germanic tribe in the southern Scandinavian region that executed people by drowning them in bogs. Three groups of people were executed, including 'corpores infames'. The exact meaning of this Latin phrase is debated to this day: it translates as something roughly equivalent to 'those who defiled their bodies' - but we have no clarity on what that actually means, or how these individuals were defiling their bodies. However, in 1935, Karl August Eckhardt of the Nazi party translated this phrase to mean 'homosexuals' - with no evidence - and wrote in the SS weekly newspaper that the ancient Germanic peoples executed queer people in bogs. Himmler, of course, picked up on this. Now the Nazis had the argument that their ancient Germanic history was filled with cisgender, heterosexual men, who executed any queers who came along. They had their justifications for their next steps.
Neo-Nazis today continue to repeat these ideas. In 1993, black metal musician Varg Vikernes was sent to prison for murdering his bandmate. While there, he wrote his manifesto, Vargsmål. He argued for a so-called nationalist heathen ideology, arguing that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are invasive religions that destroyed the native paganism - Viking belief systems - of Europe.
In 2021, I created a silly meme based off a template that was viral at the time. The tweet itself went viral, and provided me plenty more research material on the anti-queer beliefs of neo-Nazis. Many tagged in Varg, who days before had shared an anti-queer blog post. I was also "accused" of being Jewish, "threatened” with bogs, and called a man in a clear attempt at transmisogyny.
Bringing us back to the present day, during JK's tweetstorm, Varg replied. He told her that now she is no longer 'part of the "woke" crowd' he's gone out and bought her books for his children. He's also tweeted in the last few days 'people say I am anti-Jewish, racist, intolerant, anti-Christian, anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT, anti-civilization, pro-tribalism, pro-mandatory abortion for all r******, that I killed a communist and I drive an electric car. I OBJECT to this SLANDER. I do NOT drive an e-car!' JK hasn't replied to Varg - she likely has no idea who he is - but it's very telling seeing his endorsement of her.
Being a queer historian is hard. You are constantly working against the fact that queer people have been consistently removed from the historical record at every turn. That exclusion perpetuates the notion that we are something new, that we haven't been here before. The reality is that we've always been here, and we've always been here, fighting against our erasure, fighting for our liberation. If the Nazis failed to get rid of us, JK's got no chance.
My work: