4. Norwegian Nationhood and the Germanic Race, 1890-1910
While the Norwegian historians, philologists and archaeologists who attained academic positions in the 1870s and 1880s were generally opposed to the racial ideas of ‘the Norwegian School of History’, Arbo’s anthropological research and Andreas Hansen’s grand theory can be seen as revivals of these ideas. So how did Norwegian humanities scholars respond to the rise of racial science, and what impact did the notion of Germanic racial supremacy have upon the scholarly debate over Norwegian history and national identity? These questions can be elucidated by studying Andreas Hansen’s relationship to Ernst Sars, the most influential public intellectual among Norwegian historians around the turn of the century.
The evolution of morality
We have seen that in the 1870s and 1880s Darwinism and positivism were introduced into Norwegian public debates and turned into watchwords for the Venstre movement. Hansen and Sars belonged to the same urban Venstre intelligentsia, and they both hailed the Venstre movement as the vanguard of ‘evolution’, each man producing national narratives that were based on ‘scientific’, ‘positivist’ and ‘evolutionary’ ideals.137 A basic prerequisite of these national narratives was the use of ‘evolution’ as a yardstick for normative evaluations: everything that was in line with evolution was good, but everything that was out of step with evolution was bad. This was not only an implicit notion underpinning Sars and Hansen’s social views; they explicitly put forward this viewpoint in public, notably when they participated in the moral debates of the 1880s which were closely followed by the Norwegian public.
The controversy arose when a group of cultural radicals began criticising what they regarded as a blatant example of social hypocrisy: extramarital sex was considered acceptable for men, but unacceptable for women, and prostitution was common. The so-called bohemians wanted to replace this moral double standard with sexual liberation for both sexes, but they were opposed by a group of ‘neo-moralists’ who held that both men and women should abstain from extramarital sex. While the established morality was often defended with religious arguments, both bohemians and neo-moralists were inclined to use evolutionary arguments to advance their views.138 Ernst Sars and Andreas Hansen belonged to the neo-moralist camp, and their main adversary was the leading figure of the bohemian circle, the author Hans Jæger. Both Sars and Hansen agreed with Jæger that morality should no longer be based on religion and that the idea of free will had to be abandoned, because all human acts, including moral choices, were determined by biology. However, they disagreed on the role of morality within this evolutionary-determinist worldview. Jæger claimed that the very idea of guilt should be abandoned: since human actions are determined by biological dispositions, individuals cannot be held responsible for their actions.139 Hansen, on the contrary, claimed that the feeling of guilt was a natural phenomenon, and that morality was a physiological function embedded in the central nervous system of human beings. According to Hansen, we only imagine that we make free moral choices, while in reality our ‘choices’ are determined by nature: it is our ‘moral organisation’ that reacts, partly without involving our consciousness.140 Thus the moral feelings of the bourgeoisie were just as natural as Jæger’s sexual drives, and the bohemian revolt against morality was in fact a revolt against nature. Moral instincts were products of evolution, according to Hansen, and their evolution was driven by the evolution of society—‘the social organism’—towards ever-greater complexity. Increasing division of labour led to the development of improved social abilities among members of society, resulting in inheritable biological changes in their brains. In line with this conception, Hansen claimed that Jæger’s promiscuous lifestyle was an ‘atavism’, a step backwards in the evolution of social instincts that put him on the level of ‘a wretched polar Indian’.141
Sars embraced Hansen’s arguments, and his way of reasoning implies that he, like Hansen, ranked individuals and social groups in a moral hierarchy according to their level of evolutionary development. He placed himself and his peers at the top of this hierarchy.142 According to his biographer Narve Fulsås, Sars saw himself as a member of an intellectual elite whose progressive ideas were often out of tune with the general public but who still had a greater right than others to make decisions about the future of society, since the elite represented the evolutionary avant-garde.143
Hansen and Sars’ arguments may have been indirectly or directly inspired by the ideas of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. Both Comte and Spencer believed that the rise of civilisation was intertwined with growth in intelligence and progress in morality, and that these developments led to inheritable changes in the anatomy of the brain. Spencer held that increasing division of labour and an increasingly complex society led to the formation of progressively more advanced human brains, enhanced social abilities and strengthened faculties for rational, abstract reasoning. This meant that there were average inherited differences in intellectual abilities between both social groups and nations. Thus, like Paul Broca, Herbert Spencer believed that the social hierarchy and the hierarchy between civilised and less civilised nations to some extent mirrored a hierarchy of intellectual and cerebral evolution.144
Narve Fulsås has characterised Sars as an idealist evolutionist. Sars believed that the nation was organised around certain core ideas that underwent a historical process of growth and were more strongly embodied by some social groups than others. In accordance with this belief, Sars saw cultural evolution and the hierarchy of nations and of social groups as purely cultural phenomena, not as biological ones.145 However, given the neo-Lamarckian idea that cultural growth can lead to the biological transformation of the human brain, it is difficult to distinguish this kind of socio-cultural evolutionism from a biological theory of evolution.
Norwegian Folk Psychology and the struggles over national identity
Hansen’s book Norwegian Folk Psychology (1899) was founded on the same basic assumptions as his arguments a decade earlier in the debate over sexual morals. These assumptions were that mankind is undergoing a psychological and moral evolution, that nations and groups of people within nations are ranked in a hierarchy of evolutionary stages which also indicates their moral worth, and that a national elite exists with higher intelligence and greater moral worth entitling them to a leading role in society and culture. However, there was one crucial change in Hansen’s point of view: he no longer believed that moral progress was driven by a mutual interplay between nature and nurture, and regarded their association instead as a one-way causal relationship. Culture was reduced to race: moral superiority and national virtues were embedded in the central nervous system of the Aryan-Germanic race, and social progress required the dominance of this race over others. This idea was incompatible with Sars’ school of evolutionary nationalism, on which Sars, in contrast to Hansen, never changed his opinion.
In 1900, the year after the launch of Norwegian Folk Psychology, Sars, along with the folklorist Moltke Moe, published an article in which they discussed the psychological characteristics of the Norwegian people. They cited as a generally known scientific fact that Norwegians were a mixture of two or more races, but they rejected the notion that psychological characteristics had anything to do with skull shape. By doing so, Moe and Sars were implicitly dismissing the basic theoretical assumptions of anthroposociology. They rejected the idea that racial anthropology was relevant to the study of political, cultural and social questions, and they disregarded Hansen’s theories on Norwegian national psychology. According to Sars and Moe, the Norwegian national character sprang from a common Germanic Nationalkarakter or race, which had given birth to the different ‘racial’ characters of a number of nations. But they argued that both the Germanic and the Norwegian race or Nationalkarakter had arisen through gradual socio-historical evolution, not through the struggle for survival between anthropological races with set intellectual abilities.146 There are two probable reasons behind Moe and Sars’ dismissal of racial explanations. Racial determinism conflicted with the idea of socio-cultural evolutionary growth, which was at the core of Sars’ national narrative. At the same time, Hansen’s idea of a racially divided nation was at odds with a national ideology of cultural unity, another linchpin of both Sars’ and Moe’s cultural, political and academic activities.
Hansen developed his theory of national psychology in response to an ongoing cultural and political conflict that divided the Venstre movement. Venstre was an alliance between progressive urban elites and rural national-democratic, anti-establishment elements. The latter had their stronghold in rural communities in southwestern Norway and advocated low taxes, resistance to growth in state bureaucracy and a cultural policy aimed at building a national culture founded on the cultural heritage of agrarian societry. Hansen argued that political tensions coincided with racial differences. As we have already discussed, the dark, short-skulled Anaryans from western Norway represented cultural conservatism, irrationality, backwardness, detrimental populism, greed, envy and pettiness, and were thought more likely to vote for Høyre, the conservative party. However, those Anaryans who did not champion the conservative party tended instead to support the ‘mainly anti-bureaucratic rural fraction’ in the Venstre movement.147 This was in contrast to the blond, long-skulled Aryan-Germanics in eastern Norway, who represented the racial backbone, the Viking heritage of the nation, and were the pinnacle of progress and scientific rationality. The Aryan-Germanics were most likely to support the ‘liberal’ ideas—in a European sense—that were the true essence of the Venstre movement. It is unsurprising, then, that due to ‘Ammon’s Law’ the long skulls were most prevalent among the urban elite of the capital.148
Among the rural, democratic nationalists, it was common to argue that Norway consisted of two nations. One of these nations was made up of the urban elite with foreign roots who had established themselves during the years of Danish rule and who were the bearers of a foreign, academic, urban culture. The other was the true Norwegian nation grounded in a traditional rural culture with historical roots in the golden age of the Norwegian medieval state. Hansen’s theory was an uncompromisingly urban, elitist negation of this ideology, while Moe and Sars were leading figures in a group of intellectuals who tried to mitigate the conflict and maintain that Norwegian nationality was a product of historical interaction between the peasantry and the educated elite.149
It seems clear that professors Sars and Moe had both professional and ideological reasons for dismissing Hansen’s racial notion of nationhood, and it is likely that their views had greater academic, public and political impact than Hansen’s. Sars was the leading historian of his generation and an influential ideologue of the Venstre movement. Moltke Moe was also a well-known and influential figure in the Norwegian cultural sphere. His father, Jørgen Moe, was famous for his key role in collecting and publishing Norwegian folktales. These had an impact on Norwegian national identity comparable with that of the Brothers Grimm in Germany. Moltke Moe had followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming the first Norwegian professor of folkloristics and the founding father of Norwegian folklore studies. He was also well-known and respected for his role as a mediator in the political struggles over language and national identity.150
Moreover, the book in which Sars and Moe’s article on Norwegian national psychology appeared was highly prestigious. The grandiose, richly-illustrated two-volume work, Norway in the 19th Century, was initiated by university professors, funded by the government and published on the centennial. Written and illustrated by the country’s foremost artists, scientists and authors, the book described Norway’s natural environment, society, science, literature and art, and aimed at promoting national pride among Norwegians and at demonstrating a distinct Norwegian nationality to the Swedes and the outside world.151 Norway in the 19th Century was backed by leading members of the academic and cultural establishment and can be described as a state-led attempt at nation-building. Moe and Sars’ article concluded Volume One and served as an introduction to the first part of Volume Two, which featured a series of articles describing people’s temperament, culture and way of life in different parts of Norway. The articles suggest that racial interpretations of local mindsets and national psychology were commonly shared by leading Norwegian scholars and intellectuals. Nevertheless, most of the articles did not have racial determinism and the idea of a Germanic master race as principal features.
Many of the contributors to the book used words like ‘race’ or ‘type’ when characterising local populations, with some even referring directly to an anthropological concept of race and to anthropological theories. However, most writers used the word ‘race’ in a vague Lamarckian sense, often combining it with loose comments on pigmentation, skull shape or other anatomical traits. Local differences in psychological dispositions were mainly explained by social factors and variations in natural environment. The description of the population in the Gudbrandsdalen valley by Hans Aanrud, one of the authors, is typical. The people in Gudbrandsdalen are self-conscious, strong, honest and mindful, but never talkative, adventurous or dangerous.152 Aanrud claimed that the people living in the valley had been moulded by their natural environment, and this in turn had resulted in a ‘harmonic configuration of humans and society’, with people living in concord with one another and their environment.
The articles in Norway in the 19th Century seem to indicate that Hansen’s style of racial thought had some support among the Norwegian intellectuals who engaged in cultural nation-building at the turn of the twentieth century, but that Ernst Sars and Moltke Moe’s reasoning was more commonly accepted. According to Sars and Moe’s narrative, Norwegian nationhood was not a biological entity inherited from the ancient Germanics, but first and foremost a social and cultural entity that had arisen as the result of a slowly evolving historical process.
It is important to note, however, that although Ernst Sars rejected the supremacy of the Germanic race, he did not reject white supremacy. In 1903 he gave a lecture in which he dismissed the historical relevance of any psychological differences between European races, while simultaneously arguing for a deep and significant racial divide between ‘the Indo-European race, the Negro race, the Malay race and the Mongolian race’.153 Sars claimed these major races of humankind were so different that intermixture would lead to racial deterioration, and this belief affected his views on Norwegian nationhood. It implied that the Sami (who supposedly belonged to the ‘Mongolian’ race) were so racially different that Norwegians did not see them as fellow countrymen, even though they were citizens of the same nation. How, then, could Sars still believe in the unity of the Norwegian nation? According to Narve Fulsås, Sars solved this problem by ignoring the Sami, claiming that they were so few in numbers that it was not necessary to take them into account.154 Thus, although Sars saw Norwegian nationhood as a socio-cultural entity, it was also in part a racially-delineated entity: there was a biological limit to the racial variation that could be assimilated into the Norwegian ‘social organism’.
Was the Norwegian nation a racial entity?
We have so far discussed what impact the idea of Germanic superiority had on notions of nationhood among Norwegian scholars. It is now time to ask what influence the idea of European racial supremacy had upon Norwegian nationalism. And since the Sami were generally seen as a non-European people, the best way to shed light on this question is to study Norwegian scholars’ attitudes towards the Sami. Despite the fact that the Sami were Norwegian citizens, they were not generally regarded as members of the Norwegian people. The question is whether they were considered to be outside the nation because of their cultural and linguistic distinctiveness, or because of their perceived racial inferiority. Norwegian scholars who studied Sami language, culture, history and race in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had differing attitudes on this issue.
In the 1830s and 1840s, the Norwegian state and the Church of Norway implemented a paternalist and pluralist minority policy. The Sami and the Kvens were encouraged to preserve their language, and the university gave language training to pastors destined for service in Sami and Kven communities. This laid the foundation for the discipline of ‘lappology’—the philological and historical study of Sami language and culture. One of the principal goals of the discipline was to develop the written language and create a Sami literature that could give its readers access to enlightenment and the Christian gospel.155 The great pioneer of lappology was Jens Friis, who was a lecturer in the Sami language from 1851 and in 1874 became the first Norwegian professor of Sami and Finnish languages. He undertook comprehensive studies of the Sami language, religion and culture, wrote fiction and travel literature about the Sami and advocated a liberal minority policy.156
The debate on minority policy shifted during Friis’ years at the university. The last decades of the nineteenth century saw rising threats towards Sami culture. Agricultural and industrial expansion into Sami districts coincided with the emergence of evolutionary ideas in public debates, and it became common to argue that Sami culture was a relic of the past, destined for extinction. An increasingly harsh policy of cultural and linguistic assimilation, directed at both the Sami and the Kvens, was implemented in the schools. At the end of the century, the political debate was not about whether the minorities should be ‘Norwegianised’, but about the methods by which the process could be accelerated. An important motivation for this assimilationist policy lay in national security concerns and fears of Russian expansionism. The Norwegian state wanted to secure its territorial control through linguistic and cultural assimilation of the territories bordering the Russian empire.157
The scholarly study of the Sami was affected by this change in the political climate. When Friis died in 1896, Parliament decided not to renew the chair in Sami and Finnish. They determined that the sole obligation of the Norwegian state towards the Sami and the Kvens was to educate pastors who could speak their language: there was no need to conduct scientific research on their language and culture. In 1911 the professorship was re-established, but by now its justification was purely scientific. Lappology and Finno-Ugrian linguistics were prestigious research fields in which Norway could achieve international acclaim, and it would be embarrassing to leave this research to neighbouring countries. Thus, from the mid-nineteenth century, the social legitimacy of lappology had changed. It was no longer part of a paternalist and pluralist policy aimed at developing the Sami language and culture into tools for cultural progress. Instead, it was legitimised as a purely academic study of a language and a culture that the state, ironically, wanted to eradicate.158
The Sami as an object of ethnographic interest
Apart from the professorship in lappology, a main institutional impetus for the study of Sami culture was the Ethnographic Museum in Kristiania. This museum was established following the first World’s Fair in London in 1851. Among the enterprises that moved into the spectacular Crystal Palace exhibition hall at the end of this great event was an ethnographic museum directed by Robert Latham. In order to obtain Sami objects to exhibit, he relied on the assistance of his friend, Ludvig Kristensen Daa, to arrange a trade with the University of Kristiania. A number of Sami artifacts were shipped to London, along with plaster casts of the heads of three Sami men. In return, the university received cultural objects from Sumatra, Borneo, Australia and British Guinea.159 This prompted the establishment of a Norwegian Ethnographic Museum in 1853.
The Ethnographic Museum was initially a rather modest institution. Its first director was the history professor Peter Andreas Munch, who put little effort into this aspect of his professorial duties. But when Daa took over the professorship ten years later, he began expanding and renewing the museum. Daa believed that the museum had a special obligation to maintain a representative collection of Sami artefacts and to display Sami culture. He established an open-air exhibition featuring a replica Sea Sami farm in the garden of the university building, and in 1867 he undertook an ethnographic field trip to the Finnish-Norwegian-Russian border region along with his friend, the lappologist Jens Friis.160 As we saw in chapter 2, Daa had a paternalistic and philanthropic attitude towards the Sami. He thought they had an inferior culture, but in line with his monogenist views, he did not consider this inferiority to be racially determined or immutable. Daa believed that the Norwegians should help the Sami become civilised.
According to Daa, the museum ought to provide a coherent picture of all the cultures in the world, as illustrated by their ‘industrial products’. Thus he split the museum’s exhibits into thirteen cultural-historically, climatically, ‘ethnologically’ and religiously defined groups. Four of these were European and included both the Norwegian and the Sami cultures. In Daa’s vision, both Sami and Norwegian cultural artefacts were to be exhibited along with objects from distant, ‘primitive’ tribes as examples of the cultural variety of humankind.161 After Daa’s death in 1877, however, the museum changed its character: from being a museum of human cultures, it became a museum of non-Western cultures. During this transformation, the Norwegian and Sami collections assumed new meanings. While the Sami artefacts were kept at the Ethnographic Museum as objects of great interest, the Norwegian items were removed and transferred to a national museum of culture and history.
In the 1860s, Daa had initiated a campaign for collecting artefacts typical of early-modern Norwegian rural culture. The enterprise was continued by his successor at the museum, Yngvar Nielsen, but Nielsen abandoned the plan of displaying the Norwegian artefacts at the Ethnographic Museum, since he held that such museums should only ‘represent the primitive peoples and those peoples, whose civilisation is based on a foundation totally different from Europe’.162 From the 1880s onwards, the rural culture campaign received funding from the government, but even among the politicians the idea of putting ‘the Norwegian farmer’ on display side by side with ‘half-wild peoples from the South Sea Islands’ was highly controversial.163
The debates over Norwegian rural culture and the Ethnographic Museum were entwined with the proposal to build a new national history museum, which was to house both the Ethnographic Museum and the National Antiquities Collection. The planned museum was meant to include the Norwegian rural artefacts, not as part of the ethnographic department, but as a separate exhibition connected to the National Antiquities Collection. The aim of this arrangement, as previously mentioned, was to offer the visitor a journey through national history from the Stone Age to the present day, thus illustrating the cultural development of ‘our’ nation.164 There were mainly pragmatic reasons for locating the Ethnographic Museum in the same building as the national-historical collections, but this was also justified pedagogically: visitors would get a better understanding of past stages in the cultural evolution of Norway if they could compare it to the culture of contemporary primitive peoples, including the Sami.
By the time the new historical museum was finally opened in 1904, after decades of debates, quarrels and setbacks, the Norwegian rural artefacts had already been transferred to another institution, the Norsk Folkemuseum (Norwegian Museum of Cultural History), a new type of museum focusing on the daily life of pre-industrial Norway. Cultural objects were displayed in an open-air museum, its old buildings located in a scenic landscape on the outskirts of the capital. The Norsk Folkemuseum was the first of a number of similar establishments established in Norway over the following decades. These museums have had a significant impact on Norwegian notions of cultural roots, and they became a key site for research into the material culture of pre-industrial society.165
However, the Sami collection was not transferred to the Norsk Folkemuseum, most likely because it was not regarded as part of the nation’s cultural heritage. Instead it was retained with the non-European cultures at the Ethnographic Museum, where it fed the more general ethnographic interest in ‘Arctic cultures’ represented at the museum. With the Arctic expeditions of Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen around the turn of the century, Norway became renowned as a ‘polar nation’, and Arctic research became highly prestigious.166 The Arctic explorers were mainly interested in natural science, but they also undertook studies and collected artefacts from the people they encountered, some of which ended up at the Ethnographic Museum. When, after the turn of the century, the museum became a site for professional ethnographic research for the first time, interest focused on ‘Arctic cultures’ and special attention was paid to the Sami.167
A primitive people or a primitive race?
We have seen that minority policy was influenced by the notion of the Sami as a relic of the evolutionary past. We have also examined how the study of Sami culture was separated from that of the national heritage and was institutionally categorised as a subject for ethnographic study—defined as a non-European, ‘primitive’ and Arctic culture. This raises the question of whether this categorisation of Sami culture was based on notions of race. Were the Sami considered an object of ethnographic research and a vanishing people because they were assumed to be culturally primitive, or because they were considered to be racially inferior? Yngvar Nielsen, the head of the Ethnographic Museum, gave a straightforward answer to this question. In an article in Norway in the 19th Century, he claimed that the Sami belonged to an ‘inferior race’, one that stood outside ‘the European civilisation’ and that was going to go extinct in their encounter with the superior Norwegian people. It was both natural and legitimate that Norwegians should take over the traditional lands of the Sami, he argued, claiming that ‘our’ civilised ‘concepts of law’ should triumph over outdated Sami notions of ‘divine right’ to the land. The Sami people were doomed, and the only thing ‘we, the superior, the stronger people’ could do about this was ‘to show gentleness and kindness’ in the times to come.168 Yngvar Nielsen’s line of reasoning suggests that he used the word ‘folk’ in a biological sense and that he saw the Sami as racially inferior.
The difference in attitude between Nielsen and his predecessor Daa bears witness to the emergence of Social Darwinism and racial determinism in Norwegian attitudes towards the Sami. It is important to note, however, that the ideas Nielsen advocated were not universally accepted. Ole Solberg, who became assistant professor at the museum in 1906 and succeeded Nielsen as head of the museum in 1916, was most likely opposed to Nielsen’s style of racial thinking. Around the turn of the century, Solberg had studied anatomy and physical anthropology under Gustav Guldberg in Kristiania and the Professors Wilhelm von Waldeyer-Hartz and Rudolph Virchow in Germany. It is likely that he was familiar with Virchow’s liberal attitude to race when he decided to switch to ethnography in 1901. Over the next decade he spent a total of six years at German ethnographic museums, and he also visited the U.S., where he did field work among the Hopis in Arizona and studied the ethnographic collections in New York, Washington and Chicago. According to his successor, Gutorm Gjessing, Solberg did not adhere to any particular school of research.169 However, he seems to have been particularly influenced by Adolf Bastian, head of the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde (1873-1905), and by the leading figure of German ethnography during the last decades of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Ratzel, who was famous for his studies of the interaction between human populations and their environments. Solberg’s ideas also appear to have been shaped by Franz Boas, the founding father of American cultural anthropology.170 The research of all three men was based on the idea of the psychic unity of mankind; they dismissed racial differences as an appropriate explanation for cultural differences. This attitude was especially typical of Franz Boas who, in the early decades of the century, engaged in a long-running campaign against scientific racism.
Solberg was personally acquainted with Boas, who visited Norway in 1924 in connection with the launching of a cross-disciplinary programme for the study of ‘Arctic’ cultures. The programme, which Solberg had designed, was based on the assumption that all the Arctic peoples, regardless of their racial roots, shared a common Arctic way of life. As they were all forced to adapt to the harsh Arctic environment, there were basic similarities between their cultures across Norway, Russia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland. According to this line of reasoning, though the Sami stood outside European civilisation, the essential dividing line was not racial, but rather the fact that the Sami belonged to an Arctic cultural region.171
The Sami: indigenous people or newcomers?
As we saw in chapter 2, the racial succession scheme advocated by Retzius, Nilson, Keyser and Munch was rejected in the 1860s. This implied that the Sami had lost their status as the descendants of the original inhabitants of the Scandinavian Peninsula. In 1866 and 1867, the Swedish archaeologist Karl Hildebrand and his Norwegian colleague Oluf Rygh put forward a hypothesis of two Scandinavian Stone Age cultures. The Sami were descended from ‘Arctic’ hunters who used slate tools and were culturally connected with peoples further east, whereas the Norwegians were descended from a Germanic, long-skulled, agricultural people, who used flint tools and were connected to cultural areas further south.172 As the archaeologist Ole Furset has demonstrated, this theory was characterised by ethnic stereotypes. While a steady line of progress led from the dynamic southern Scandinavian Stone Age to contemporary Norwegian society, the ‘Arctic’ Stone Age was seen as a stagnant culture, fitting well with the past of the supposed primitive Sami people.173 This theory went unquestioned for forty years and implied that even if the Sami had never inhabited all of Scandinavia, they were still the indigenous people of the north. But at the turn of the century, even this assumption was contested. Over the years, an increasing number of slate tools and other artefacts associated with the ‘Arctic’ Stone Age had been found in south Scandinavia, demonstrating that geographic distribution of the assumed ‘Arctic’ Stone Age culture did not match the distribution of the present-day Sami population.
Andreas Hansen was one of the first to raise questions regarding the two Stone Age cultures. He argued that the distribution of typical ‘Arctic’ Stone Age findings coincided with the present-day geographical distribution of dark, short-skulled individuals, and he claimed that the short-skulled Anaryan race had been the representative of both the southern Scandinavian (flint-using) Stone Age and the northern Scandinavian (slate-using) Stone Age. These were the forefathers of the dark, short-skulled Norwegian coastal dwellers in the south as well as the dark, short-skulled Sea Sami in the north. But while the Anaryans along the south Norwegian coast had adopted the Aryan-Germanic language of ‘our’ forefathers, the Anaryans along the northern coast had taken up the Sami language of the reindeer-herding nomads of the inland. These nomads, the original Sami people, had not settled in Norway before the tenth century.174
Hansen even claimed that the Anaryan, non-Sami ancestors of the Sea Sami had continued to exist as a distinct people into historical times. One of his arguments was the existence of respectful descriptions of the Sea Sami written by Norwegians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These descriptions may have matched the Anaryans, he argued, but they did not match the Sami, since the Norwegians had always scorned the Sami for their ‘dwarf-like stature’, their ‘thin limbs’ and their ‘characteristic inferiority’. In spite of Hansen’s generally negative assessment of the short-skulled Anaryans, when he compared them to the ‘true’ Sami, they appeared brave, strong and clever. His reasoning was based on a racial hierarchy with the long-skulled Aryans at the top, the Anaryans at a lower level, and the Sami at the bottom.175
One of Hansen’s key arguments was the discovery of what he saw as Anaryan skulls in a number of ancient graves in Eastern Finnmark, excavated by the merchant and ‘gentleman-archaeologist’ Andreas Nordvi in the mid-nineteenth century. Before Christianisation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Sami had a tradition of building burial sites in screes, where stone slabs were erected as roof and walls around the deceased. In the 1840s, Andreas Nordvi, who ran a trading company in Eastern Finnmark, began excavating these ‘stone-coffins’. Nordvi had studied archaeology in Copenhagen and wanted to understand the pre-Christian burial customs of the Sami; he was not primarily interested in the skulls. But in the 1870s and 1880s, he faced financial problems and began selling Sami skulls to scientific institutions. Some of these skulls found their way into the anatomy department at the University of Kristiania, and became the object of Hansen’s interest.176 He claimed to have found marked anatomical differences between the typical Sami skull and the typical Anaryan skull, and argued that the ‘stone coffin graves’ of Eastern Finnmark were Anaryan, not Sami.177
The Arctic-Baltic Stone Age
Hansen’s theory was at odds with a number of established historical, linguistic, anthropological and folkloristic views of Sami and Norwegian prehistory. He dismissed established interpretations of ancient and medieval sources that were taken as evidence of ancient Sami presence, and he rejected established folkloristic theories about remnants of Norse mythology in Sami folk traditions, as well as linguistic theories about Norse or proto-Scandinavian loanwords in the Sami language which implied ancient Sami settlement in Scandinavia. However, as Hansen himself had to admit in 1901, the leading Norwegian lappologists—Professor Konrad Nielsen and the rector Just Qvigstad—were not willing to accept Hansen’s views and abandon their theory of ancient Sami presence in Scandinavia.178
Even if Hansen’s theory did not win general scientific acclaim, it led to a public debate, shaking established views and causing doubt about the Sami’s status as first-comers in northern Scandinavia. This uncertainty became even stronger when the young, aspiring archaeologist Anton Wilhelm Brøgger published Studies of Norwegian Stone Age (1906) and Arctic Stone Age (1909).179 Brøgger dismissed Hansen’s theory and upheld the hypothesis of a separate Arctic Stone Age, but in the latter work he agreed that the Sami did not descend from the Arctic Stone Age people. When he published these studies,180 Brøgger was still in his early twenties and untrained as an archaeologist, but his work was instrumental in establishing Stone Age archaeology as an academic field of research in Norway. These publications helped launch a career that would culminate in Brøgger’s appointment as head of the University’s Antiquities Collection in 1915.
As with Hansen, the young Brøgger based his arguments in part on notions of racial superiority and inferiority. According to the archaeologist Wenche Helliksen, Brøgger’s Stone Age studies were partly inspired by Gustav Kossinna,181 the Berlin archaeology professor who championed the Aryan-Germanic theory and developed the influential school of ‘settlement-archaeology’. Kossinna linked cultural superiority to biologically superior races and assumed that cultures spread through human migration (in particular through the spread of the Aryan-Germanic race). By studying the geographical distribution of different types of archaeological finds, Kossinna established a mosaic of distinct cultural regions, and by presupposing that each region’s culture was tied to a certain ethnic group, he thought this method enabled him to reveal the prehistoric distribution and movement of peoples.
Brøgger’s Stone Age studies were based on similar ideas. By analysing the spatial distribution of certain types of artefacts, in particular slate tools and a certain type of ceramics, he drew a boundary between two cultural areas: a dynamic southern Scandinavia connected southwards to the continent, and a more backward Arctic-Baltic area, later swallowed by the southern Scandinavian culture. Brøgger claimed that it was likely that the Arctic Stone Age had been dominated by a clearly-defined race, and by matching historical, archaeological, linguistic and physical anthropological evidence, he thought he could show that it was not ‘lappish’. The Arctic-Baltic Stone Age sites had been inhabited instead by a dolichocephalic people, who resembled the contemporary population in the assumed Scandinavian distribution area of the Arctic Stone Age.182
Brøgger explicitly claimed that there was no necessary overlap between physical-anthropologically defined races, linguistically-defined ‘peoples’, and archaeologically-defined cultural regions. Still, his reasoning was based on the assumed existence of such a correlation, and he also presupposed a racial hierarchy with the Sami at the bottom. Brøgger assumed the Sami had lived in a Stone Age society until historical times, but claimed there was no historical evidence to indicate that they had ever had the advanced ceramics or stone tool production found in the Arctic-Baltic Stone Age. He also noted that such an industry would have been difficult to combine with the life of nomadic reindeer herders. This implies that he believed that Sami culture, static and unchanged, had been defined by reindeer husbandry since the Stone Age, and that such a culture was inferior to that of the Arctic Stone Age.183
The Sami Iron Age
The same year that Brøgger wrote his work on the Arctic Stone Age, Ole Solberg published his first and most important study of the Sami, demonstrating the existence of a Sami Iron Age and refuting the commonly-held view that, until historical times, the Sami had lived in a Stone Age society. Simultaneously, Solberg established beyond any reasonable doubt that there had been Sami settlements in Finnmark since the early eighth century at least. Solberg’s work was based on the excavations of two ancient settlements at Kjelmøya, an island near the Norwegian-Russian border. The settlements had already been excavated in the mid-nineteenth century by Andreas Nordvi, who had assigned them to a Sami Stone Age. Solberg’s new investigations showed that the Kjelmøya settlers had used iron tools, and this convinced him that the previously-mentioned ‘stone coffin graves’ in the same area also belonged to a Sami Iron Age. He did not, however, offer any racial, anthropological proof for the Sami identity of the Iron Age inhabitants of Kjelmøya. His key evidence was a written source from the Viking age—a travelogue recorded by the English King Alfred in the ninth century. In this text, the Viking chief Othere describes a trip along the coast of Finnmark and the Kola Peninsula and his encounters there with a people called ‘Finns’, the traditional Norwegian name for the Sami.184
Solberg’s conclusion was severely criticised by Andreas Hansen, who argued that Othere’s ‘Finns’ were identical to the Anaryans, and that it was the Anaryans, not the Sami, who had populated the Kjelmøya dwellings.185 Hansen was not able to prevent Solberg’s conclusions from winning general scientific acceptance, however. For many decades, the Kjelmøya settlement was recognised as the oldest Sami finding in Scandinavia, and it became an uncontested starting point for explorations of the prehistory of the Sami.186
The political implications of Sami prehistory
The public controversy between Hansen and Solberg must be understood against the background of the political implications of Sami prehistory. The indigenousness or foreignness of the Sami were opposing arguments in the debate over the policy of cultural assimilation. This debate flourished after the turn of the century when additional pressure in favour of Norwegianisation provoked the rise of an ethno-political Sami movement.187 The dissolution of the Norwegian-Swedish union in 1905 also helped to place these issues on the public agenda. One of the disputes that the Norwegian and Swedish negotiators were unable to resolve in 1905 was that of the Sami nomads’ right to move their reindeer herds across the Norwegian-Swedish border. The negotiations, which continued until 1919, were primarily over the traditional rights of the Swedish Sami to summer pastures in Norway; the Swedish government wanted to retain them, and the Norwegian government wanted them abolished. The Swedish argument centred on the idea that the ‘Lapps’ were an aboriginal people, perfectly adapted to their nomadic way of life, who should be allowed to continue their ancient customs. The Norwegian government, in contrast, denied the indigenousness of the Sami and argued that their backward nomadic culture had to give way to a ‘higher social goal’—the expansion of Norwegian agriculture.188
The negotiations over reindeer pastures created a demand for research on Sami culture and history, and particularly on the question of Sami prehistoric presence in Scandinavia. Andreas Hansen’s theories about the Sami as latecomers to Scandinavia were well-adapted to the position of the Norwegian government. In public debates he accused his academic opponents of lacking not only scientific rigour, but also patriotism; by assigning the Sami a more ancient presence in Norway than they themselves could rightly claim, his opponents weakened the bargaining power of the Norwegian government. Solberg countered this critique by mocking Hansen for attempting to serve up ‘scientific’ arguments to the Norwegian government. If Norwegian negotiators based their argumentation on Hansen’s fanciful and dubious theories, he claimed, they were bound to fail.189
There is much to suggest that the Norwegian government agreed with Solberg. The fact is that the government commissioned not Hansen, but his academic adversaries—Ole Solberg and the lappologists Konrad Nilsen and Just Qvigstad—as expert advisors in the negotiations with Sweden. This indicates that despite the potential political usefulness of Hansen’s theories, they lacked the scientific credibility necessary to be politically effective. But though the government did not engage Hansen as a scientific expert in the reindeer-pasture negotiations, his research was still financed by the state, and even if his theories of Sami prehistory met with strong criticism from leading experts, they did not disappear into oblivion. Instead, in the interwar years, Hansen’s theories became an important starting point for anthropological research into the racial history of the Sami when the Department of Anatomy launched a huge project of excavating and investigating Sami skulls.
Race and nationhood
At the turn of the century, a number of Norwegian academics believed in the superiority of the Germanic race and held that the struggle between races was a main driving force of human history. These ideas were accepted as scientifically valid and were discussed within academic institutions, but this does not mean that they were scientifically uncontroversial, nor does it mean that Norwegian scholars in general championed a national ideology centred on the idea of a Germanic master race. The notion that Europeans could be split into a hierarchy of races was controversial, as was the idea of Norwegians as members of a Germanic elite among the European races.
In fact, it is arguable that Norwegian academia was dominated by the concept of the nation as a social organism shaped by certain historical preconditions and by adaptation to a particular geographical environment. The Norwegians were commonly thought to have originated with groups of Germanic-speaking peoples who had settled in Norwegian territory during a long prehistoric period. These peoples did not, however, become Norwegians until they had cultivated the land and undergone a slow evolutionary process of adaptation to the Norwegian landscape. This process was construed as the establishment of a hierarchy of cultural-evolutionary levels, as the growth of a characteristic Norwegian national character and as an increasing and still ongoing social integration to certain national values.
But even if ‘race’ was not the core feature of this prevailing notion of Norwegian nationhood, it was still an important element in the national identity. It was common to assume that peoples could be ranked in a hierarchy from primitive to civilised, and even if there were differing views about the extent to which these distinctions were racially determined or culturally malleable, there were few who would totally rule out the significance of inherited racial characteristics. In addition, although not everyone supported the idea of a Germanic master race, few questioned the notion of white supremacy. It was common to consider Norwegians racially superior to non-Europeans. The scholarly works we have discussed were all formulated within a frame of reference whereby peoples could be ranked in a hierarchy of evolutionary levels, but there were huge differences in the extent to which this hierarchy was considered racially-determined or not. While race was irrelevant to Solberg when construing the boundary between the Sami and the Norwegians, it was the decisive criterion for Yngvar Nielsen and Andreas Hansen. The majority of other works were situated somewhere between these extremes, though in most cases race was given some significance in the delineation of the national community.
It is important to note, however, that if we leave the academic debates for a moment and instead look at the minority policy that was actually implemented in Norway, we find that ‘race’ was of little relevance. Not only the Sami, but also other minorities, notably the Kvens and the Roma, were subjected to a harsh policy of assimilation from the late nineteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century. This policy rested on the assumption that these peoples could, and should, be transformed into Norwegians, even though they were assumed to be racially different and even inferior. Thus, notions of huge racial difference were no impediment to the implementation of a hardline policy aimed at melting together different ethnic groups into an ethnically homogeneous Norwegian nation.
137 Narve Fulsås, Historie og nasjon. Ernst Sars og striden om norsk kultur (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1999), p. 159; Knut Kjeldstadli, ‘Andreas M. Hansen’, in Norsk biografisk leksikon, Jon Gunnar et al. (ed.) (Oslo: Kunnskapsforlaget, 1999-2005), http://nbl.snl.no/Andreas_Hansen.
138 Gro Hagemann, ‘Det moderne gjennombrudd 1870-1905’, in Aschehougs Norgeshistorie. Vol. 9 (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1997), pp. 119-21.
139 Andreas M. Hansen, Om determinisme og moral. Foredrag den 27. januar 1886. Den frisinnede studenterforenings foredrag og diskussioner I (Kristiania: [n. pub.], 1886); idem, Om pressefrihedens grænser i tilknytning til diskussionen om justitsforfølgningen mod Hans Jæger. Den frisinnede studenterforenings foredrag og diskussioner II (Kristiania: [n. pub.], 1886).
140 Hansen, Om determinisme og moral, p. 11.
141 Hansen, Om determinisme og moral, pp. 15-20.
142 Om pressefrihedens grænser, p. 19.
143 Fulsås, Historie og nasjon, p. 225.
144 J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (Aldershot: Gregg Revivals, 1992), pp. 108-09, 124, 150; Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 353, 563ff., 600 ff., 617-20, 626, 631.
145 Fulsås, Historie og nasjon, p. 225.
146 Nordahl Rolfsen et al., Norge i det nittende aarhundrede, Vol. 1 (Kristiania: Cammermeyer, 1900), pp. 431-32.
147 Andreas M. Hansen, Norsk folkepsykologi: med politisk kart over Skandinavien (Kristiania: Jakob Dybwad, 1899), p. 49.
148 Hansen, Norsk folkepsykologi, pp. 50-51, 57.
149 Ole Dalhaug, Mål og meninger. Målreisning og nasjonaldannelse 1877-1887 (Oslo: Norges forskningsråd, 1995), p. 54; Bodil Stenseth, En norsk elite: nasjonsbyggerne på Lysaker 1890-1940 (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1983), pp. 56-58.
150 Knut Liestøl, Moltke Moe (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1949).
151 Rolfsen et al, Norge i det nittende aarhundrede; Geir Hestmark, ‘En nasjonal-evolusjonær katekisme’, in Norsk litteraturhistorie, sakprosa fra 1750 til 1995, Vol. 1, 1750-1920 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1998), pp. 708-17; Torben Hviid Nielsen, Arve Monsen, Tore Tennøe, Livets tre og kodenes kode Fra genetikk til bioteknologi Norge 1900-2000 (Oslo: Gyldendal akademisk, 2000), p. 34.
152 Rolfsen et al., Norge i det nittende aarhundrede, Vol. 2, citation at pp. 63-65.
153 Fulsås, Historie og nasjon, p. 240.
154 Ibid.
155 Helge Dahl, Språkpolitikk og skolestell i Finnmark 1814-1905 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1957), pp. 1-13, 36.
156 Lars Ivar Hansen and Einar Niemi, ‘Samisk forskning ved et tidsskifte: Jens Andreas Friis og lappologien—vitenskap og politikk?’, in Eli Seglen (ed.), Vitenskap, teknologi og samfunn (Oslo: Cappelen akademisk forlag, 2001), pp. 372f, 358f.
157 Knut Einar Eriksen and Einar Niemi, Den finske fare. Sikkerhetsproblemer og minoritetspolitikk i nord 1860-1940 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1981).
158 Harald Dag Jølle, ’Nordpolens naboer’, in Einar-Arne Drivenes and Harald Dag Jølle (eds.), Norsk polarhistorie 2 (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2004), pp. 259-326 (p. 302).
159 Yngvar Nielsen, Universitetets ethnografiske samlinger 1857-1907 (Kristiania: W. C. Fabritius og sønner, 1907), pp. 3-7.
160 Ibid., p. 46.
161 Ibid., pp. 31, 76.
162 Ibid., p. 77; Stortingsforhandlinger, 1880, p. 241.
163 Stortingsforhandlinger, 1880, p. 251.
164 Ingvald Undseth, Om et norsk National-Museum (Kristiania: Cammermeyer, 1885), pp. 5, 10.
165 Haakon Shetelig, Norske museers historie (Oslo: J. W. Cappelens, 1944), pp. 214-31.
166 Jølle, ‘Nordpolens naboer’, p. 299.
167 Gutorm Gjessing and Marie Krekling Johannessen, De hundre år: Universitetets etnografiske museums historie 1857-1957 (Oslo: Universitetets etnografiske museum, 1957).
168 Rolfsen, Norge i det nittende aarhundrede, Vol. 2, p. 120f.
169 Gjessing and Johannessen, De hundre år.
170 Jon Røyne Kyllingstad, ‘Menneskeåndens universalitet’ Instituttet for sammenlignende kulturforskning 1917-1940. Ideene, institusjonen og forskningen (Ph.d. thesis, University of Oslo, 2008), pp. 334-41.
171 ISKF-archive: Arktisk utvalg, ring binder ‘Arktisk utvalg’, 21.10.23, Memorandum from Solberg to Institutt for sammenlignende kulturforskning/Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture.
172 Inger Storli, ‘Fra “kultur” til “natur”. Om konstitueringa av den “arktiske” steinalderen’, Viking, Vol. 56 (1993), pp. 7-22.
173 Ole Jacob Furset, Arktisk steinalder og etnisitet. En forskningshistorisk analyse (Master’s thesis, University of Tromsø, 1994).
174 Andreas M. Hansen, Landnåm i Norge. En udsigt over bosettingens historie (Kristiania: Fabritius, 1904).
175 Hansen, Landnåm i Norge, cited after Audhild Schanche, Graver i ur og berg. Samisk gravskikk og religion 1000 f.kr. til 1700 e. Kr. (Ph.D. thesis, University of Tromsø, 1997), p. 40.
176 Schanche, Graver i ur og berg, pp. 23-28.
177 Hansen, Landnåm, pp. 259-68.
178 Andreas M. Hansen: articles appearing in the newspaper Verdens Gang on 16, 18, 19 March 1910.
179 Anton W. Brøgger, Den arktiske stenalder i Norg, Skrifter, Videnskabselskapet i Kristiania, HF-kl. (Kristiania: I kommisjon hos Dybwad, 1909); idem, Norges Studier over Norges steinalder (Kristiania: I kommission hos Jacob Dybwad, 1906).
180 Waldemar C. Brøgger, Strandliniens beliggenhed under stenalderen i det sydøstlige Norg (Kristiania: Aschehoug, 1905), pp. v-vi.
181 Wenche Helliksen, Evolusjonisme i norsk arkeologi: Diskutert med utgangspunkt i A.W. Brøggers hovedverk 1909-25 (Oslo: Universitetets oldsaksamling, 1996).
182 Anton W. Brøgger, Den arktiske stenalder i Norge. Skrifter, Videnskabselskapet i Kristiania, HF-kl. (Kristiania: I kommisjon hos Dybwad, 1909), pp. 174, 182.
183 Ibid., p. 165.
184 Ole M. Solberg, Eisenzeitfunde aus Ostfinmarken (Kristiania: I Kommission bei Dybwad, 1909), 125ff.
185 Ibid., p. 127. Hansen: articles in Verdens Gang, 16, 18, 19 March 1910.
186 Bjørnar Olsen, ‘Kjelmøyfunnenes (virknings) historie og arkeologi’, Viking, Vol. 54 (1991), pp. 65-88.
187 Regnor Jernsletten, Samebevegelsen i Norge (Tromsø: Senter for samiske studier, University of Tromsø, 1998).
188 Eriksen and Niemi, Den finske fare, pp. 93, 118-19.
189 Kyllingstad, ‘Menneskeåndens universalitet’, p. 331.