It is always easier to describe the distant than the the close. The distance allows generalisations which the closeness impedes. When starting this page, or rather the last one which I crumpled up, I imagined myself explaining the essence of the term nordic, all on approximately one page- A rather ambitious project, one must say. Let´s say I will try to take one step at the time, starting today, and if it seems like it is worth reading I will continue.

The North and the South.The terms have many meanings. They can refer to any given point along a meridian, the one being meaningless unless put in relation to the other. They can also be qualitative terms. In Italien, South is mezzagiorno which means ”the middle of the day”, and the countries located in the South, ”il meridione” are ”the countries of the Sun”. North is on the other hand mezzanotte, ”the middle of night” and the countries up here ”il settentrione”, are named after the seven stars in the Great Bear. -What a perspective! The countries in the light, the enlightened ones, and the countries in the dark night. (-And what an interpretation!)

Seen from Rome 98 A.D. Scandinavia was the absolute periphery of Germania, and with that the world. What joined the germanic people, according to the Romans, was their difference as compared to the Romans and their wildness as compared to the civilized world.

An other southerner, the arab historian Al-mas´udi from Baghdad could in 956 A.D. tell his countrymen about the outermost island Tuli in Britania where the longest day was 20 hours long, and after which no cultivated land was to be found.

Tuli or Thule has for a long time figurated in the southerners imagination as the outermost island. It´s geographical location is obscure, but the meaning attached was clear. It was mankinds final frontier, and like the Nordic countries it was located at the edge of civilization, in the wilderness.

At this edge of civilization, existed a culture with itself as center of a pericular cosmology. A way of looking at the world which lined out its own wilds. The Nordic mythology contains a cosmological model which divides the world into an inner and an outer part , like two concentric circles. The inner circle, Midgard, was inhabited by men and their gods, while Udgard at the outside, was inhabited by the wildest bunch their imagination could come up with. The concentric cosmology illustrates a tendency in most cultures to seperate order from chaos, by segregating the wild ones from the civilized.

The Romans had their wild Teutons, the Chinese their Europeans, and in New-Guinea it is allways the next tribe who are the cannibals. Who were, or are the ”wild” ones from a nordic point of view?

-Let us see...- Maybe next time.