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Menacing Environments

Ecohorror in Contemporary Nordic Cinema

By Benjamin Bigelow

Analyzes a film genre's confrontation of a regional identity

Known for their progressive environmental policies and nature-loving citizens, Nordic countries also produce what may seem a counterintuitive film genre: ecohorror, where distinctions between humans and nature...

The Swedish Theory of Love

Individualism and Social Trust in Modern Sweden

By Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh. Translated by Stephen Donovan

In 2020 Sweden's response to COVID-19 drew renewed attention to the Nordic nation in a way that put the finger on a seeming paradox. Long celebrated for its commitment to social solidarity, Sweden suddenly emerged...

Christian Krohg's Naturalism

By Øystein Sjåstad

The definitive English-language account of a singular Nordic artist

The Norwegian painter, novelist, and social critic Christian Krohg (1852–1925) is best known for creating highly political paintings of workers, prostitutes, and Skagen fishermen of the 1880s...

Sámi Media and Indigenous Agency in the Arctic North

By Coppélie Cocq and Thomas A. DuBois

Digital media–GIFs, films, TED Talks, tweets, and more–have become integral to daily life and, unsurprisingly, to Indigenous people’s strategies for addressing the historical and ongoing effects of colonization. In Sámi Media and Indigenous Agency in...

Seawomen of Iceland

Survival on the Edge

By Margaret Willson

Finalist for the 2017 Washington State Book Award in General Nonfiction / History

The plaque said this was the winter fishing hut of Thurídur Einarsdóttir, one of Iceland's greatest fishing captains, and that she lived from...

Sacred to the Touch

Nordic and Baltic Religious Wood Carving

By Thomas A. DuBois

With near-mythical forests of birch and pine, the Nordic and Baltic countries boast a rich tradition of religious wood carving that is in many ways emblematic of their cultures. Sacred to the Touch examines the...

Fascism and Modernist Literature in Norway

By Dean Krouk

Fascism and Modernist Literature in Norway illuminates the connections between literature and politics in interwar Europe. Focusing on the works of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Knut Hamsun and modernist poets Asmund Sveen and Rolf Jacobsen, all...

Roy Andersson’s “Songs from the Second Floor”

Contemplating the Art of Existence

By Ursula Lindqvist

Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson’s celebrated and enigmatic film Songs from the Second Floor, his first feature film in twenty-five years, won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000. The “songs” of...

Icons of Danish Modernity

Georg Brandes and Asta Nielsen

By Julie K. Allen

Julie Allen utilizes the lives and friendship of the Danish literary critic George Brandes (1842-1927) and the silent film star Asta Nielsen (1881-1972) to explore questions of culture and national identity in early twentieth-century Denmark....

The Power of Song

Nonviolent National Culture in the Baltic Singing Revolution

By Guntis Smidchens

The Power of Song shows how the people of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania confronted a military superpower and achieved independence in the Baltic “Singing Revolution.” When attacked by Soviet soldiers in public displays of violent...

Church Resistance to Nazism in Norway, 1940-1945

By Arne Hassing

Church Resistance to Nazism in Norway, 1940-1945 examines the evolution of the Lutheran state Church of Norway in response to the German occupation. While German Protestant churches generally accepted Nazism and state incorporation, Norway’s churches...

Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (The Celebration)

By C. Claire Thomson

Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg's searing film Festen (“The Celebration”) was the first film from the Dogme 95 stable. Adhering to Dogme's cinematic purity — no artificial lighting, no superficial action, no credit for the director,...

Danish Folktales, Legends, and Other Stories

By Timothy R. Tangherlini, Timothy R. Tangherlini

Danish Folktales, Legends, and Other Stories is a collection of translated and annotated Nordic folklore that presents full repertoires of five storytellers along with extensive archival material. The printed book presents some of the most...

Nikolai's Fortune

By Solveig Torvik

As a child, Solveig Torvik heard stories of a lost, mysterious great-grandfather who left Finland for America to make his fortune - leaving Torvik’s great-grandmother and his unborn daughter behind. As a reporter, Torvik determined...

Lukas Moodysson’s Show Me Love

By Anna Westerstahl Stenport

Lukas Moodysson is one of the most accomplished and unconventional filmmakers of his generation in Sweden. Moodysson, now well known for his English-language film Mammoth (2009) as well as his heartbreaking indictment of sex-trafficking in...

100 Danish Poems

From the Medieval Period to the Present Day

By Thomas Bredsdorff, Anne-Marie Mai, John Irons

The poems harvested for this collection provide a concise overview of Danish poetry, with a representative selection of works by 65 poets. The fresh translations of the poems, the majority of which have not previously...

Lone Scherfig's Italian for Beginners

By Mette Hjort

Lone Scherfig was the first of a number of women directors to take up the challenge of Dogme, the back-to-basics, manifesto-based, rule-governed, and now globalized film initiative introduced by Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and...

Nordic Exposures

Scandinavian Identities in Classical Hollywood Cinema

By Arne Lunde

Nordic Exposures explores how Scandinavian whiteness and ethnicity functioned in classical Hollywood cinema between and during the two world wars. Scandinavian identities could seem mutable and constructed at moments, while at other times they were...

Dagur Kari's Noi the Albino

By Bjorn Nordfjord

Dagur Kari’s Noi the Albino (Noi albinoi, 2003) succeeded on the international festival circuit as a film that was both distinctively Icelandic and appealingly universal. Noi the Albino taps into perennial themes of escapism and...

Ingmar Bergman's The Silence

Pictures in the Typewriter, Writings on the Screen

By Maaret Koskinen

Ingmar Bergman's 1963 film The Silence was made at a point in his career when his stature as one of the great art-film directors allowed him to push beyond the boundaries of what was acceptable...