Over the past decade, the undercurrent of interest in the alt-right and white nationalism – the belief that white people need a unified culture and possible statehood – has grown into a movement worthy of serious academic and political interest. The progressive platform rallying against the history of colonialism, the privileges of men, and the supremacy of whites through identity politics has created new problems with its proposed solutions. White, working-class men feel dispossessed in a world where diversity can be defined by “fewer white men.” The working-class feels no privilege in their race or gender, but rather, frustration. What is privilege if not the comfort of wealth? Due to these political changes, whites, and working-class men in particular are searching for new forms of identity to be able to access influence through identity politics themselves while their grasp on demographic power wanes. White nationalism and Odinism – a modern iteration of Viking religion – progressively are becoming some of the few not-exclusively-Christian options for white male identity. While most do not openly advocate for racialized violence, they do not publicly denounce it either, encouraging traditionally masculine ideals of sexuality and warrior culture. This thesis seeks to provide a snapshot of how white, working-class men are involving themselves in identity-making in a multicultural world through ethnographic analyses of white nationalism and Odinism.

Focusing primarily on a number of small Heathen communities known as ‘kindreds’ and their ‘kith’ near Ottawa, Toronto and Montréal in Canada, this thesis approaches Heathenry as a potential means of ‘everyday’ self- and world-making. It examines the ways in which the ‘virtuous’ words and deeds of my interlocutors helped them to actively effect certain formations of self and world, and attempts to capture the significance of Heathenry as a practical process of formative interpersonal engagement and self-fashioning. Paying special attention to the ‘playful’ character of this process, it explores Heathenry as an aesthetic and ethical project of self-making – a project that produces and underpins particular kinds of ‘excellence’ and ‘authentic’ subjects. Emphasizing the creative poiesis entailed in this project, my thesis explores the ways in which Heathenry enables people to locate and orient themselves within a shared field of potentiality as subjects and agents questing for a ‘virtuous self’. I argue that both the end and means of this quest entails a reorientation in people’s aesthetic sensibility and personal ethical quality. The thesis concludes by illustrating how this highly personalized yet shared process of self formation facilitates people’s continuing journey to become increasingly ‘worthy’ Heathen subjects; that is, selves realized through their own virtuous acts of narrative objectification and those of others. As skillful and skillfully fashioned subjects, I suggest that my informants became able to experience their own potential virtuous development as a development of the ‘cosmos’ itself – a development, that is, of the very realms their quests embodied and manifested, and throughout which their virtuous selves came to be projected.

This study focuses on how Asatrú movements in Sweden are depicted and discussed in digital news articles through two different lenses: How are these movements depicted and which aspects of these movements and their faith are brought up most frequently? The theoretical framework for the study consists of Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory, positive and negative Essentialism as well as Erving Goffman’s theory of Stigma. The method consists of a qualitative content analysis focusing on analyzing the ideas, ideologies and narratives presented in the studied articles, and the material consists of digital articles picked from various Swedish news publications such as Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter and Expressen, published between 2015 - 2021. The study shows that the discussion of these Asatrú movements is dominated by their perceived connections to racism and right wing extremist groups. On the other hand, the articles and their authors also make attempts to counterbalance this depiction by discussing aspects of the religion such as Blót, ritual sacrifices, as well as by interviewing members of these movements to show their thoughts and feelings about their religion.