TheNordic race is anobsolete racial classification ofhumans based on a now-disproven theory of biological race.[1][2][3] It was once considered a race or one of the putativesub-races into which some late-19th to mid-20th centuryanthropologists divided theCaucasian race, claiming that its ancestral homelands wereNorthwestern andNorthern Europe,[4][5][6][7] particularly to populations such asAnglo-Saxons,Germanic peoples,Balts,Baltic Finns, NorthernFrench, and certainCelts andSlavs.[8][9][10] The supposed physical traits of the Nordics included light eyes, light skin, tall stature, anddolichocephalic skull; their psychological traits were deemed to be truthfulness, equitability, a competitive spirit, naivete, reservedness, and individualism.[11] In the early 20th century, the belief that the Nordic race constituted the superior branch of the Caucasian race gave rise to the ideology ofNordicism.
With the rise of moderngenetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete.[12] In 2019, theAmerican Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: "The belief in 'races' as natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past."[13]
The Russian-born French anthropologistJoseph Deniker initially proposed "nordique" (meaning 'northern') as an "ethnic group" (a term that he coined).He definednordique by a set of physical characteristics: the concurrence of somewhat wavy hair, light eyes, reddish skin, tall stature and adolichocephalic skull.[14] Of six 'Caucasian' groups Deniker accommodated four into secondary ethnic groups, all of which he considered intermediate to the Nordic:Northwestern,Sub-Nordic,Vistula andSub-Adriatic, respectively.[15][16]
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The notion of a distinct northern European race was also rejected by several anthropologists oncraniometric grounds. German anthropologistRudolf Virchow attacked the claim following a study of craniometry, which gave surprising results according to contemporaryscientific racist theories on the "Aryan race". During the 1885 Anthropology Congress inKarlsruhe, Virchow denounced the "Nordic mysticism", while Josef Kollmann, a collaborator of Virchow, stated that the people of Europe, be theyGerman,Italian,English orFrench, belonged to a "mixture of various races", furthermore declaring that the "results of craniology" led to "struggle against any theory concerning the superiority of this or that European race".[17]
Other supposed "Caucasian sub-races" were theAlpine race,Dinaric race,Iranid race,East Baltic race, and theMediterranean race.
American economistWilliam Z. Ripley purported to define a "Teutonic race" in his bookThe Races of Europe (1899).[18] He dividedEuropeans into three main subcategories: Teutonic,Alpine andMediterranean. According to Ripley theTeutonic race resided inScandinavia, northernFrance,northern Germany, theBaltic states andEast Prussia, northernPoland, northwestRussia,Great Britain,Ireland, and parts ofCentral andEastern Europe, and was typified by light hair, light skin, light eyes, tall stature, a narrow nose, and slender body type. It was Ripley who popularized this idea of three biological European races. Ripley borrowed Deniker's terminology of Nordic (he had previously used the term "Teuton"); his division of the European races relied on a variety ofanthropometric measurements, but focused especially on theircephalic index andstature.
Compared to Deniker, Ripley advocated a simplified racial view and proposed the concept of a single Teutonic race linked to geographic areas where Nordic-like characteristics predominate, and contrasted these areas to the boundaries of two other types,Alpine andMediterranean, thus reducing the "caucasoid branch of humanity" to three distinct groups.[19]
By 1902 the German archaeologistGustaf Kossinna identified the original Aryans (Proto-Indo-Europeans) with the north GermanCorded Ware culture, an argument that gained in currency over the following two decades. He placed theIndo-European Urheimat inSchleswig-Holstein, arguing that they had expanded across Europe from there.[20] By the early 20th century thistheory was well-established, though far from universally accepted.[citation needed] Sociologists were soon using the concept of a "blond race" to model the migrations of the supposedly more entrepreneurial and innovative components of European populations.
By the early 20th century, Ripley's tripartite Nordic/Alpine/Mediterranean model was well established. Most 19th century race-theorists likeArthur de Gobineau,Otto Ammon,Georges Vacher de Lapouge andHouston Stewart Chamberlain preferred to speak of "Aryans", "Teutons", and "Indo-Europeans" instead of a "Nordic race". The British-born German racialistHouston Stewart Chamberlain considered the Nordic race to be made up ofCeltic andGermanic peoples, as well as someSlavs. Chamberlain called those peopleCelt-Germanic peoples, and his ideas would influence the ideology ofNordicism andNazism.
Madison Grant, in his 1916 bookThe Passing of the Great Race, took up Ripley's classification. He described a "Nordic" or "Baltic" type:
"long skulled, very tall, fair skinned, with blond, brown or red hair and light coloured eyes. The Nordics inhabit the countries around the North and Baltic Seas and include not only the great Scandinavian and Teutonic groups, but also other early peoples who first appear in southern Europe and in Asia as representatives of Aryan language and culture."[21]
According to Grant, the "Alpine race", shorter in stature, darker in colouring, with a rounder head, predominated inCentral and Eastern Europe through to Turkey and the Eurasiansteppes ofCentral Asia andSouthern Russia. The "Mediterranean race", with dark hair and eyes,aquiline nose,swarthycomplexion, moderate-to-short stature, and moderate or long skull was said to be prevalent inSouthern Europe, theMiddle East, andNorth Africa.[22][23]
Only in the 1920s did a strong partiality for "Nordic" begin to reveal itself, and for a while the term was used almost interchangeably with Aryan.[24] Later, however,Nordic would not be co-terminous with Aryan, Indo-European or Germanic.[25] For example, the later Nazi minister for Food,Richard Walther Darré, who had developed a concept of the German peasantry as a Nordic race, used the term 'Aryan' to refer to the tribes of the Iranian plains.[25]
InRassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Racial Science of the German People), published 1922,Hans F. K. Günther identified five principal European races instead of three, adding theEast Baltic race (related to the Alpine race) andDinaric race (related to the Nordic race) to Ripley's categories. This work was influential inEwald Banse's publication ofDie Rassenkarte von Europa in 1925 which combined research by Deniker, Ripley, Grant,Otto Hauser, Günther,Eugen Fischer andGustav Kraitschek.[26]
Carleton S. Coon in his book of 1939The Races of Europe subdivided the Nordic race into three main types, "Corded", "Danubian" and "Hallstatt", besidesa "Neo-Danubian" type[27] and a variety ofNordic types altered by Upper Palaeolithic or Alpine admixture.[28][29][30]Types found in "places distant from the present northwestern European center of Nordic concentration" that he determined to be morphologically Nordic, were called "Exotic Nordics".[31]
Coon took the Nordics to be a partially depigmented branch of the greater Mediterranean racial stock.[32] This theory was also supported by Coon's mentorEarnest Albert Hooton, who in the same year publishedTwilight of Man, which stated: "The Nordic race is certainly a depigmented offshoot from the basic long-headed Mediterranean stock. It deserves separate racial classification only because its blond hair (ash or golden), its pure blue or grey eyes".[33][32]
Coon suggested that the Nordic type emerged as a result of a mixture of "the Danubian Mediterranean strain with the later Corded element". Hence his two main Nordic types show Corded and Danubian predominance, respectively .[34] A third "Hallstatt" type Coon took to have emerged in the European Iron Age, in Central Europe, where he said that it was subsequently mostly replaced, but "found a refuge in Sweden and in the eastern valleys of southern Norway."[35]
Coon's theories on race were widely disputed in his lifetime,[36] and are consideredpseudoscientific in modern anthropology.[37][38][39][40][41]
The depigmentation theory received notable support from later anthropologists, thus in 1947Melville Jacobs noted: "To many physical anthropologists Nordic means a group with an especially high percentage of blondness, which represent a depigmentated Mediterranean".[42] In her workRaces of Man (1963, 2nd Ed. 1965)Sonia Mary Cole went further to argue that the Nordic race belongs to the "brunette Mediterranean" Caucasoid division but that it differs only in its higher percentage of blonde hair and light eyes. TheHarvard anthropologistClaude Alvin Villee Jr. also was a notable proponent of this theory, writing: "The Nordic division, a partially depigmised branch of the Mediterranean group."[43]Collier's Encyclopedia as late as 1984 contains an entry for this theory, citing anthropological support.[44]
The Swedish anthropologistBertil Lundman introduced the term "Nordid" to describe the Nordic race in his bookThe Races and Peoples of Europe (1977) as:
"The Nordid race is light-eyed, mostly rather light-haired, low-skulled and long-skulled (dolichocephalic), tall and slender, with more or less narrow face and narrow nose, and low frequency of blood type gene q. The Nordid race has several subraces. The most divergent is the Faelish subrace in western Germany and also in the interior of southwestern Norway. The Faelish subrace is broader of face and form. So is the North-Atlantid subrace (the North-Occidental race of Deniker), which is like the primary type, but has much darker hair. Above all in the oceanic parts of Great Britain the North-Atlantic subrace is also very high in blood type gene r and low in blood type gene p. The major type with distribution particularly in Scandinavia is here termed the Scandid or Scando-Nordid subrace."
Some forensic scientists, pathologists and anthropologists up to the 1990s continued to use the tripartite division of Caucasoids: Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean, based on their cranialanthropometry. The anthropologistWilton M. Krogman for example identified Nordic racial crania in his work "The Human Skeleton in Forensic Medicine" (1986) as being "dolichochranic".[45]
A popularinternet meme most often referred to as the "Yes Chad" or "Nordic Gamer", which depicts an idealized Nordic-looking man as a masculine and confident "chad", originated inalt-right memes on4chan's/pol/imageboard in 2016. The earliest forms of the meme, which echoed obsolete racial anthropology tropes, depicted the character in competition with a "Mediterranean" figure. The meme crossed over into mainstream culture by late 2020. It has been used in a wide variety of contexts, including the expression ofleftist politics and support for diversity and inclusion, despite its roots. There has been discourse about whether the usage of the character serves as tacit normalization of racist symbols, similar to controversies about other internet memes likePepe the Frog andwojaks.[46][47][48][49]
{{cite book}}:ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters.
The term Neo-Danubian has been used in this work to designate a general class of central and eastern European blond or partially blond brachycephals who seem to be derived in a racial sense from a de-Corded Nordic (and hence Danubian) prototype brachycephalized by Ladogan admixture.
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