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In:History of Linguistics 2017: Selected papers from the 14th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, (ICHoLS 14), Paris, 28 August – 1 September
Edited by Émilie Aussant and Jean-Michel Fortis
[Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 127] 2020
► pp. 101–112

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Nation and race in the twentieth century scientific discourse on Viking Age runestones

 | University of Gothenburg
Published online: 20 May 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/sihols.127.07hol
Abstract
The boom for researching runestone inscriptions in the early twentieth century coincided with a renewed romantic and often nationalistic interest in the Viking Age. This study investigates how a passage of the most famous runestone inscription, the Rök Runestone, was interpreted as a reference to the Ostrogoth emperor Theodoric the Great. It focuses on the work of two linguists, Otto Höfler (1901–1987) and Elias Wessén (1889–1981), who engaged in a three-decade-long debate on this issue. The analysis unfolds a discursive tension between race and nation in the legitimisation of the supposed Gothic connection.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical perspective and analytical focus
  • 3.Data
  • 4.Wessén’s and Höfler’s positions in the Rök Runestone debate
  • 5.Wessén and Scandinavian linguistics before the Second World War
  • 6.Höfler and the Nazi cultural policy during the Second World War
  • 7.The Höfler–Wessén debate on the Rök Runestone
  • 8.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (42)
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