The Nordic race was one of the putative sub-races into which some late-19th to mid-20th century anthropologists divided the Caucasian race. People of the Nordic type were mostly found in Scandinavia, Northwestern Europe,^[1][2][3] and countries surrounding the Baltic Sea, such as Balts, Germanic peoples and Finnic peoples.^[4][5] The psychological traits of Nordics were described as truthful, equitable, competitive, naïve, reserved and individualistic.^[6] Other supposed sub-races were the Alpine race, Dinaric race, Iranid race, East Baltic race, and the Mediterranean race.

Defining characteristics

It was the Russian-born French anthropologist Joseph Deniker that 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.^[7] 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.^[8][9]

American economist William Z. Ripley purported to define a "Teutonic race" in his book The Races of Europe (1899).^[10] He divided Europeans into three main subcategories: Teutonic (teutonisch), Alpine and Mediterranean. According to Ripley the "Teutonic race" resided in Scandinavia, Northern France, northern Germany, Baltic states and East Prussia, northern Poland, northwest Russia, Britain, Ireland, parts of Central and Eastern Europe and was typified by light hair, light skin, blue eyes, tall stature, a narrow nose, and slender body type. Georges Vacher de Lapouge had called this race "Homo Europaeus".

Madison Grant, in his book The Passing of the Great Race, took up Ripley's classification. He described a "Nordic" or "Baltic" type:

"long skulled, very tall, fair skinned, with blond, brown or red hair and light coloured eyes. The Nordics inhabit the countries around the North and Baltic Seas and include not only the great Scandinavian and Teutonic groups, but also other early peoples who first appear in southern Europe and in Asia as representatives of Aryan language and culture."^[11]

According to Grant, the "Alpine race", shorter in stature, darker in colouring, with a rounder head, predominated in Central and Eastern Europe through to Turkey and the Eurasian steppes of Central Asia and Southern Russia. The "Mediterranean race", with dark hair and eyes, aquiline nose, swarthy complexion, moderate-to-short stature, and moderate or long skull was said to be prevalent in Southern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.^[12][13]

20th century

By 1902 the German archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna identified the original Aryans (Proto-Indo-Europeans) with the north German Corded Ware culture, an argument that gained in currency over the following two decades. He placed the Indo-European Urheimat in Schleswig-Holstein, arguing that they had expanded across Europe from there.^[14] By the early 20th century this theory was well established, though far from universally accepted^{[citation needed]}. Sociologists were soon using the concept of a "blond race" to model the migrations of the supposedly more entrepreneurial and innovative components of European populations. As late as 1939 Carleton Coon wrote that "The Poles who came to the United States during the 19th century, and the early decades of the 20th, did not represent a cross-section of the Polish population, but a taller, blonder, longer-headed group than the Poles as a whole."^[15] The "high brow"/"low brow" distinction, derived from such theories, also became enshrined in language.

It was the already mentioned work of sociologist/economist William Z. Ripley which popularized the idea of three biological European races. Ripley borrowed Deniker's terminology of Nordic (he had previously used the term "Teuton"); his division of the European races relied on a variety of anthropometric measurements, but focused especially on their cephalic index and stature.

Compared to Deniker, Ripley advocated a simplified racial view and proposed a single Teutonic race linked to geographic areas where Nordic-like characteristics predominate, and contrasted these areas to the boundaries of two other types, Alpine and Mediterranean, thus reducing the 'caucasoid branch of humanity' to three distinct groups.^[16]

By the early 20th century, Ripley's tripartite Nordic/Alpine/Mediterranean model was well established. Most 19th century race-theorists like Arthur de Gobineau, Otto Ammon, Georges Vacher de Lapouge and Houston Stewart Chamberlain preferred to speak of "Aryans," "Teutons," and "Indo-Europeans" instead of "Nordic Race". The British German racialist Houston Stewart Chamberlain considered the Nordic race to be made up of Celtic and Germanic peoples, as well as some Slavs. Chamberlain called those people Celt-Germanic peoples, and his ideas would influence Adolf Hitler's Nazi ideology.

Only in the 1920s did a strong partiality for "Nordic" begin to reveal itself, and for a while the term was used almost interchangeably with Aryan.^[17] Later, however, Nordic would not be co-terminous with Aryan, Indo-European or Germanic.^[18] For example, the later Nazi minister for Food, Richard Walther Darré, who had developed a concept of the German peasantry as Nordic race, used the term 'Aryan' to refer to the tribes of the Iranian plains.^[18]

The notion of a distinct northern European race was also rejected by several anthropologists on craniometric grounds. 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".^[19]

Gunther 1922

In Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Racial Science of the German People), published 1922, Hans F. K. Günther identified five principal European races instead of three, adding the East Baltic race (related to the Alpine race) and Dinaric race (related to the Nordic race) to Ripley's categories. This work was influential in Ewald Banse's publication of Die Rassenkarte von Europa in 1925 which combined research by Joseph Deniker, William Z. Ripley, Madison Grant, Otto Hauser, Hans F. K. Günther, Eugen Fischer and Gustav Kraitschek.

In The Racial Elements of European History Gunther further identified a race he named Hither Asiatic in Southern Spain and Morocco which he believed was carried into Europe through the Moorish invasions. He identified an Inner Asiatic race residing in Northern Scandinavia and Northern Russia. He also identified the Oriental race residing and originating from Arabia, as well as the Near Asiatic race originating from Persia.

Gunther concluded that Germany was one of the most racially diverse nations of Europe and that all racial groups, in varying distributions, could be found in any European nation. Gunther argued Jews are a nationality and not a race, comprising several racial groups including Nordics, but predominantly Hither Asiatic and Oriental.^[20]

Coon (1939)

Carleton Coon in his book of 1939 The Races of Europe subdivided the Nordic race into three main types, "Corded", "Danubian" and "Keltic", besides a "Neo-Danubian" type^[21] and a variety of Nordic types altered by Upper Palaeolithic or Alpine admixture.^[22][23][24] "Exotic Nordics" are morphologically Nordic types that occur in places distant from the northwestern European center of Nordic concentration.^[25]

Coon takes the Nordics to be a partially depigmented branch of the greater Mediterranean racial stock. He suggests that the Nordic type emerged as a result of a mixture of "the Danubian Mediterranean strain with the later Corded element". Hence his two main Nordic types show Corded and Danubian predominance, respectively .^[26] The third "Keltic" or "Hallstatt" type Coon takes to have emerged in the European Iron Age, in Central Europe, where it was subsequently mostly replaced, but "found a refuge in Sweden and in the eastern valleys of southern Norway."^[27]

Coon further recognizes the following terminology of earlier authors:^[28]

• Fenno-Nordic, "a hypothetical eastern branch of the Nordic race"
• Noric, "a blond, Dinaricized Nordic"
• Osterdal type, "the classic Iron Age Nordic, as found today in the eastern valleys of Norway"
• Sub-Nordic, "a racial group which would fall partly in the East Baltic and partly in the Neo-Danubian categories"
• Trønderlagen type or Trønder type, "a variety of Nordic with an excessive Corded element and Upper Palaeolithic mixture"
• Anglo-Saxon type, "a sub-type of Nordic which contains unreduced Upper Palaeolithic mixture"

Depigmentation theory

Coon's (1939) theory that the Nordic race was a depigmentated variation of the greater Mediterranean racial stock was also supported by his mentor Earnest Albert Hooton who in the same year published Twilight of Man, which notes: "The Nordic race is certainly a depigmented offshoot from the basic long-headed Mediterranean stock. It deserves separate racial classification only because its blond hair (ash or golden), its pure blue or grey eyes".^[29][30] A 1990s study by Ulrich Mueller found that depigmentation of Nordic peoples around the Baltic Sea likely occurred due to vitamin D deficiency amongst peoples living there 10,000-30,000 years ago who had a lack of access to vitamin D foods such as dairy products at the time. Depigmentation allowed greater amount of ultraviolet B light to be absorbed through the skin to synthesize to produce vitamin D.^[31]

Early criticism: depigmentation theory

Nordicism was subject to substantial criticism. Carleton Steven Coon in his work The Races of Europe (1939) subscribed to depigmentation theory that claimed that Nordic race's light-coloured skin was the result of depigmentation from their ancestors of the Mediterranean race.^[30] The depigmentation theory received notable support from later anthropologists, thus in 1947 Melville Jacobs noted: "To many physical anthropologists Nordic means a group with an especially high percentage of blondness, which represent a depigmentated Mediterranean".^[32] In her work Races of Man (1963, 2nd Ed. 1965) Sonia Mary Cole went further to argue that the Nordic race belongs to the "brunette Mediterranean" Caucasoid division but that it differs only in its higher percentage of blonde hair and light eyes. The Harvard anthropologist Claude Alvin Villee, Jr. also was a notable proponent of this theory, writing: "The Nordic division, a partially depigmised branch of the Mediterranean group."^[33] Collier's Encyclopedia as late as 1984 contains an entry for this theory, citing anthropological support.^[34] Early 21st century genetic studies have provided new insights into the origins of Irish people as well as their neighbours from other parts of the British Isles. Correspondingly, researchers in the field have suggested that migrations from prehistoric Iberia can be viewed as the primary source for their genetic material, having demonstrated marked similarities with modern representatives of the aforementioned time period in that of the Basque people. However, the majority of Irish males fall under the R1b sub-clade L-21, which is quite rare for Basques.^[35][36]

Lundman (1977)

In his work The Races and Peoples of Europe (1977) the Swedish anthropologist Bertil Lundman introduced the term "Nordid" to describe the Nordic race, described as follows:

"The Nordid race is light-eyed, mostly rather light-haired, low-skulled and long-skulled (dolichocephalic), tall and slender, with more or less narrow face and narrow nose, and low frequency of blood type gene q. The Nordid race has several subraces. The most divergent is the Faelish subrace in western Germany and also in the interior of southwestern Norway. The Faelish subrace is broader of face and form. So is the North-Atlantid subrace (the North-Occidental race of Deniker), which is like the primary type, but has much darker hair. Above all in the oceanic parts of Great Britain the North-Atlantic subrace is also very high in blood type gene r and low in blood type gene p. The major type with distribution particularly in Scandinavia is here termed the Scandid or Scando-Nordid subrace."

Forensic anthropology

Some forensic scientists, pathologists and anthropologists up to the 1990s continued to use the tripartite division of Caucasoids: Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean, based on their cranial anthropometry. The anthropologist Wilton M. Krogman for example identified Nordic racial crania in his work "The Human Skeleton in Forensic Medicine" (1986) as being "dolichochranic".^[37] In his work "Forensic Pathology", published in 1991, Bernard Knight, a Professor of Forensic Pathology, also uses the tripartite model and identifies the Nordic race based on its dolichocephalic skull shape.^[38] Forensic anthropologists of the 21st century however no longer continue to use the tripartite division of Caucasoids, but instead only recognise Caucasoid, Negroid and Mongoloid through analysis of skeletal remains and not subraces of these racial groups.^[39]

21st century

In the 21st century there is a prevailing view amongst many anthropologists and biologists that completely "pure" races do not and have not existed.^[40]

The 2014 edition of The World Factbook, produced by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, describes Spain's population as a "composite of Mediterranean and Nordic types".^[41]

Population genetics

The emergence of population genetics further undermined the categorisation of Europeans into clearly defined origin groups. A 2007 study on the genetic history of Europe found that the most important genetic differentiation in Europe occurs on a line from the north to the south-east (northern Europe to the Balkans), with another east-west axis of differentiation across Europe.^[42][43][44] However, Finns seem to mark an exception in European genetic groups, as they seem not to share strong genetic relationship ties with other European countries, but instead appear to be genetically a rather isolated group.^[45]

When looking at the Y-chromosome there are three large haplogroups which account for most of Europe's patrilineal descent.^[46]