Ár var alda - At the dawn of Ages

Brute Norse began in 2014 as an educational blog and Q&A service about Norse culture, called Tulen. As time passed it became evident that the concept would not stay in the box, as initially separate projects and aspects of my authorship began to spill over to the blog.

One driving motivation behind Tulen was to dispell the many popular misconceptions about the Viking Age and Norse culture, and bridge the gap between scholarship and the public. However, the need to provide examples that went beyond descriptive academia soon surfaced, as I myself grew increasingly disillusioned with traditional academic outlets. To myself it had always been self-evident that a standing stone, or snippet of Medieval literature, or the etymology of a word, was a powerhouse of existential meaning, connecting us with something archaic and intangible. Small pieces of the human puzzle. Most people don't think like this, and I realized that I needed to lead by example and, for my own sake, find new modes of expression.

The name, and the full transformation of Brute Norse only came in 2017, abandoning Norwegian language content for English. At the same time, I began incorporating more artistry, and more of my long running metaphysical essays, unveiling Brute Norse as a tool of reconciliation between academia, art, and philosophy. And doing so, I became more true to myself, and my motivations.

Working with art, I slowly began to articulate my paradigm, though a work in perpetual development. Because Brute Norse is grounded in the cultural history of the archaic and ancient Nordic, I have chosen to call it Scandifuturism. This philosophical baseline of Brute Norse concerns itself with the mutual interaction of past and present. I have attempted to it the five points below, but for a good example I suggest reading my essay The Trollish Theory of Art, published in Scandinavian Kunstforum.

Five Aspects of Scandifuturism

Scandifuturism is not intended to be a coherent ideology or movement by any means. Rather, it serves as a makeshift paradigm or filter that allows us approach the past in a way that is recursive and diachronic. Facilitating a non-linear perspective of history in which emphasis lies on awareness of mutual dialogue between past, present, and future. It is only in the present that we can be fully aware of the mutual exchange of past and present, and it should be assumed that this would apply also to any other temporal context. The Scandi- prefix is incidental to Brute Norse’s scope and aims, but is assumed to function in any cultural historical context.

There is no specific codex of Scandifuturism as such, but what follows are some out of many potential considerations.

First: Commemoration and Recontextualisation

The only dead culture is one not remembered. Brute Norse considers Scandinavian cultural heritage as good a filter as any other to be applied in the creation of meaning, looking for timelessness in modern issues. Scandifuturism retains a holistic perspective of the reception of Norse heritage, traditional livelihoods, and their insertion into modern contexts.

Second: Mystery

Because Scandifuturism represents an aesthetic, philosophical, and didactic paradigm, it celebrates the captivating power of stories, myths, and symbols on the human mind. Working with and not against the imagination. The

Third: Scholarship

At its core, traditional academic approaches the basis for any Scandifuturist scholarship. The archeological and philological tradition are, at their core, not much different from that of physical artisans. They have an oral culture and a tradition that is not automatically transferable to purely the nomadic autodidactic realm. Information, craft, and skill are pivotal to the creation of meaning. Therefore, a source criticism is not only an academic responsibility, but an artistic and spiritual conviction. For the case of subject, Scandifuturism becomes a tool of analysis and creative discourse on the contemporary application of the pre-modern Nordic.

Third: Holism

As above, so below. Complementary forces, contrast and opposition as fact of nature. We acknowledge this as a positive force, exemplified in the carnivalesque. The king and fool, the hero and the monster, culture and counter-culture are mirror images of one another. It is not Brute Norse's object to intervene, but observe, comment, educate, and create.

Fifth: Sacralization

We encourage an enchanted worldview, but one existing within the loop of the world we live in, rather than without it. Scandifuturism is syncretic and nonlinear by definition. It regards the past as a sacred space, connected to us through magical and speculative realism, but not isolated in the vastness of human experience.