Geatish Society

When in 1800 the University of Copenhagen had made the debate the subject of a competition, the Danish Romantic Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger expressed himself in favor of Norse mythology.

Not only was it native, but because it had not become hackneyed and characteristically for the direction Northern European Romanticism nationalism was to take, because it was considered morally superior to Greek mythology.

The club published a magazine, Iduna, in which it printed a great deal of poetry, and expounded its views, particularly as regards the study of old Icelandic literature and history.

Ideologically there seems no obvious connection, save the common concerns with sentimental patriotic interest in ethnic folklore, local history and a "back-to-the-land" anti-urbanism that are commonplaces of National Romanticism, employed as critiques of modern urban industrialism and its degenerative impact; however, Viking imagery alludes to conceptions of pristine Germanic tribes unaltered either culturally or racially by contact with non-Germanic tribes and cultures like Judaeo-Christianity.

The idealized Vikings were associated with a warrior manliness that is transgressive of modern values; thus the imagery alludes to radical Nazi or pan-Germanic militarism.