Iduna : en undersökning om den nordiska fornålderns älskare och det nationella kulturarvet

Sammanfattning

In the beginning of the 19th Century, 12 Swedish men founded an association which they named the Gothic League (Götiska förbundet). They joined due to their shared admiration of the Nordic past and its remnants. Together they staged a performative, scientific and artistic scene where the heritage of the Old Norse were to come back to life and restrengthen the nationalist spirit of Sweden. A central aspect within this ambition was to select, construct and maintain a national heritage for the nation, a heritage which they meant owned a knowledge of the essential soul of the Swedish people. They spread this knowledge through their journal Iduna which was published 1811-1844. In this thesis the Gothic Leagues prescribed management procedure and evaluation of heritage is investigated, especially in the sense of what symbolism it was perceived to bear, and what kind of ideological and ontological positionings legitimized such practices. The findings were that historical remnants were put through a spatial and symbolic transformative process through the Leagues procedures, a process of heritagization. Remnants became heritagized through their reconstruction into mediators of the past and symbols of continuity, a shared identity, and tools to aim for a selected future. The historical stories which were attached to the heritage were intended to create a preferred national character and was as such a sort of nationalist propaganda. The league’s ideological perspective upon the heritagization process allowed them the power to become architects of memory and select what symbolic and historical frameworks were to be foundational for the Swedish national character. The past was considered particularly powerful to the League, as they considered its remnants to be mediators of a dynamic interaction between past and present, where both continuously affect one another. This process was seen to have a goal, when all historical eras came into recognition of each other, the supreme national character was to be fulfilled. In the thesis the concept synthetic temporality is suggested to describe such a dynamic and interdependent view upon the interaction between past, present and future. In the end the heritagization process was constructed and enacted by the Gothic League to create mediation between past and present to fulfill the ultimate end goal of an awoken and enlightened nation.