All Roads Lead to the Snow-Capped Mountains: An Examination of Snow in Norwegian Nation Building During the Late 19th Century. Uppsala University: Dep. of History of Science and Ideas, Bachelor of Art’s thesis, spring term 2024. This essay examines three literary works by Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen. The purpose is to explore the ways in which snow played a part in Norwegian nationalism at the end of the 19th century. At the time that Nansen’s books were originally published, Norway had been at the political and cultural mercy of its neighboring nations for the past five centuries. An ambition for complete independence was brewing, and Fridtjof Nansen became part of a group of intellectuals tasked with creating a new national identity, one that was constructed through the creation of cultural borders and visions of a nation aligned with a perceived glorious past. National romanticism had a strong grip on Europe in general during this time, and infusing the national identity with a romanticized nature was commonplace. Norway is no exception to this, but the argument put forth here is that snow played a particular part in creating the new nation, aside from the rest of nature. Fridtjof Nansen personified, through his own activism and resistance to the unions, the Norwegian identity, and became in a sense synonymous with it. Through his personal relationship with snow, snow became personal to the nation.

This thesis is about the scalar paradoxes of islands as seen through the cultural movement of a small island nation in the nineteenth century. As the divide between Celticism and Teutonism grew in Britain, the cultural movement of the Isle of Man created a hybrid heritage of both. Antiquarians, archaeologists, and cultural activists that were settled in the island organised themselves for the preservation and eventually revitalisation of a Manx past, in communication with scholars in the British Isles and the North. By investigating three major societies from this movement; the Manx Society (1858), the Isle of Man Natural History and Antiquarian Society (1879) and the Manx Language Society (1899); this thesis follows the development of a national exceptionalism through their selective identification with Nordic, Celtic, and British spaces, caught in between a Western large state ideal of progress and its antithesis: the imaginative geography of an isolated island. Lefebvrian theory shows that their navigation in a past of Celtic settlers and Viking invaders led to a multifunctional transnational history that could be transferred and repurposed for opposing social spaces. It is argued that this transnationalism functioned as cultural shelter, in accordance with how political and economic shelter from larger states has proven successful for small island nations. It shows that if Manx history was to be regarded as a legitimate and valuable addition to the history of nations in the late nineteenth century, it required manifold connections abroad that could be translated to different transnational agendas. And while this type of (trans-) national exceptionalism was adapted to their situation as a small island nation, its inherent co-dependency on transnational connections was only enforcing an inferiority complex within existing hierarchies in Northern European history.