Since 2007,
this quote has been falsely attributed to Viktor Rydberg on
an
internet pagan cult-site
in an effort to
discredit him as a racist:
|
"To Aryan blood, the purest and noble, was I wed by a
friendly Norn."
-- Viktor Rydberg, author of
The
Future of the White Race
|
The fact is,
Rydberg never said this. It's pure fabrication. This line is
an abridged mistranslation of two lines, taken out-of-context, from one
of Rydberg's most famous poems titled Himlens Blå,
'Heaven's Blue' or 'Sky's Blue.' The poem has been
translated into English twice, so there is really no excuse for
this. The same site says that reliable information in English
concerning Rydberg and his work is difficult to find— an assertion
that is easily disproven.
Over a Century of Scholarship is readily accessible in several
places on the world wide web.
Rydberg, of course, did not write in
English. Had the cult-site perpetrating this deception had the
integrity to post the original words of the poem, the reader would
see that the lines in Swedish actually read:
"Till
ariskt blod, det renaste och äldsta,
till svensk jag vigdes av en
vänlig norna."
"To Aryan blood, the purest and the oldest,
to Swedish was I wed by a friendly norn."
As is immediately
evident, the words "till svensk" ('to Swedish') have been omitted,
fundamentally altering the meaning of the lines. The cult-site
obviously wants to make it appear as if Rydberg were proclaiming
'Aryan' racial superiority. So where is the evidence
of this? Quotes from his work are conspicuously absent. No doubt
because they would immediately dispell this surreptitious attempt to
smear Sweden's most famous author of the 19th century
.
The truth is that Rydberg fought for complete religious
freedom in Sweden and did not discriminate against any group of
people. He consistently and repeatedly includes all people into the
human family, which he divides into broadly defined 'races'. The
people of Europe were the 'white race', the peoples of Asia
were the 'Yellow Race', and so on. Each branch of the tree was then
broken down into further subdivisions. Among the white race, Rydberg
lists the Semites (Jews), Egyptians (Muslims) and the Aryans,
meaning the Indo-European peoples as a whole, which he further
differentiates into the 'European-Aryan' and the
'Asiatic Aryan' stems.
To
further highlight the underhanded tactics of the pagan site in
question, the author of the misquote drops the name of a posthumous essay
written by Rydberg in which he decries the social and physical ills
of modern urban life in the age of rapid industrialization titled "The Future of the White Race."
By the title alone, one might be left with the
impression that it is a racist tract. No doubt that was the web-author's
intent. Instead it advocates a return to country life and natural
living.
The cult-site strings together this and other
misleading text-bites to make it appear as if Rydberg's
racist racial attitudes not only foreshadowed but even stoked the racial atrocities
of the eugenics movement in the 1930s and Nazi Germany in the 1940s.
Nothing could be further from the truth. To accurately gauge Nazi
interest in Rydberg, one need only note that his two-volume set of
mythological studies were never
translated into German, nor were ever reprinted in Swedish after
their
initial publication. The first volume alone was translated into
English in 1889. Yet the entire work has been discussed and cited by scholars in
Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Norway, France, Great Britian and the
United States,
every decade since its publication.
Over a Century of Scholarship provides a truer portrait of
this great man.
The fact is none
of Rydberg's many biographers, commentators and even his critics
label him a racist. Simply said, because he wasn't.
The evidence, which I shall lay out shortly, squarely
supports this view.