Nordic Race
The Nordic race was a racial concept which originated in 19th century anthropology. It was considered a
race or one of the putative sub-races into which some late-19th to mid-20th
century anthropologists divided the Caucasian race, claiming that its ancestral homelands
were Northwestern and Northern Europe, particularly to populations such as Anglo-Saxons, Germanic
peoples, Balts, Baltic Finns, Northern French, and certain Celts and Slavs. The supposed physical traits of
the Nordics included light eyes, light skin, tall stature, and dolichocephalic skull; their psychological traits
were deemed to be truthfulness, equitability, a competitive spirit, naivete, reservedness, and
individualism. In the early 20th century, the belief that the Nordic race constituted the superior branch
of the Caucasian race gave rise to the ideology of Nordicism.
With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become
obsolete. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: "The belief in 'races' as
natural aspects of human biology, and the structures of inequality (racism) that emerge from such
beliefs, are among the most damaging elements in the human experience both today and in the past."
Background
The Russian-born French anthropologist Joseph Deniker initially proposed "nordique" (meaning simply
"northern") as an "ethnic group" (a term that he coined). He defined nordique by a set of physical
characteristics: the concurrence of somewhat wavy hair, light eyes, reddish skin, tall stature and
a dolichocephalic skull. Of six 'Caucasian' groups Deniker accommodated four into secondary ethnic
groups, all of which he considered intermediate to the Nordic: Northwestern , Sub-
Nordic , Vistula and Sub-Adriatic , respectively.
Henry Keane's Man, Past and Present (1899) shows a Dane as an example
of the Nordic type.
The notion of a distinct northern European race was also rejected by several anthropologists
on craniometric grounds. German anthropologist Rudolf Virchow attacked the claim following a study of
craniometry, which gave surprising results according to contemporary scientific racist theories on the
"Aryan race". During the 1885 Anthropology Congress in Karlsruhe, Virchow denounced the "Nordic
mysticism", while Josef Kollmann, a collaborator of Virchow, stated that the people of Europe, be
they German, Italian, English or French, belonged to a "mixture of various races", furthermore declaring
that the "results of craniology" led to "struggle against any theory concerning the superiority of this or
that European race".