Nordic race

“ Well marked characters of the Nordic race, which were established in Neolithic times if not earlier, enable us to distinguish it definitely wherever it appears in history and we know that all the blondness in the world is derived from this source. As blondness is easily observed and recorded we are apt to lay too much emphasis on this single character. The brown shades of hair are equally Nordic.
When the Nordics first enter the Mediterranean world their arrival is everywhere marked by a new and higher civilization. ”

“ The vigor and power of the Nordic race as a whole is such that it could not have been evolved 170in so restricted an area as southern Sweden although its Teutonic or Scandinavian section did develop there in comparative isolation. The Nordics must have had a larger field for their specialization and a longer period for their evolution than is afforded by the limited time which has elapsed since Sweden became habitable. For the development of so marked a type there is required a continental area isolated and protected for long ages from the intrusion of other races. ”

“ The Nordic race, with all of its vigor and persistency, has {201} had a long and continuous life on account of its roving disposition and its perpetual contact with new conditions of its own choice. It has always had power to overcome, and its vigor has kept it exploiting and inventing and borrowing of others the elements of civilization, which have continually forced it forward. ”

“ This Nordic race is the one from which most English-speaking people come, the one whose blood runs in the veins of most first-class seamen to the present day, and the one whose descendants have built up more oversea dominions, past and present, than have been built by all the other races, put together, since the world began.
To the sturdy Nordic stock belonged all who became famous as Vikings, Berserkers, and Hardy Norsemen, as well as all the Anglo-Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans, from whom came most of the people that made the British Empire and the United States. ”

“ The Nordic race has been driven from many of its lands, but still grasps firmly the control of the world, and it is certainly not at a greater numerical disadvantage than often before in contrast to the teeming population of eastern Asia. ”

“ Men of the Nordic race may not enjoy the fogs and snows of the North, the endless changes of weather and the violent fluctuations of the thermometer and they may seek the sunny southern isles, but under the former conditions they flourish, do their work and raise their families. ”

“ In western and central Europe in relation to the Nordic race the Alpine is everywhere the ancient, underlying and submerged type. The fertile lands, river valleys and cities are here in the hands of the Nordics but in eastern Germany and Poland we find conditions reversed. That is an old Nordic broodland with a Nordic substratum underlying the bulk of the peasantry, which now consists of round skulled Alpine Slavs. On top of these again we have an aristocratic upper class of comparatively recent introduction and of Saxon origin in eastern Germany. ”

“ From the conception of race we attain that of people by considering the second as derived from the mingling of the first. Intercourse between the three great races of Europe has always existed as a result of migratory movements. The impulse to wander, however much it differed in each known instance, can usually be traced to a single determining cause, definable as the quest after comfort. This was the motive which led men of the Nordic race to abandon their uncomfortable habitat in the north. ”

“ Personally the writer believes that the finest and purest type of a Nordic community outside of Europe will develop in northwest Canada and on the Pacific coast of the United States. Most of the other countries in which the Nordic race is now settling lie outside the special environment in which alone it can flourish. ”

“ This superb and flexible language doubtless aided the Nordic race in its conquest of Europe, in its ever-westward journey across the Atlantic, in its Anglo-Saxon occupation of our continent, in its stamping of Anglo-Saxon institutions on American government and civilization. We all recognize that, like all other languages, Aryan is purely a linguistic and not a racial term, just as French is spoken equally by the Norman Nordics of the north of France, by the Alpines of the center, and by the Mediterraneans of the south. ”

“ This nation is unique in its unity of race, language, religion and social ideals.
Southern Scandinavia only became fit for human habitation on the retreat of the glaciers about twelve thousand years ago and apparently was immediately occupied by the Nordic race. ”

“ If England has deteriorated and there are those who think they see indications of such decline, it is due to the lowering proportion of the Nordic blood 210and the transfer of political power from the vigorous Nordic aristocracy and middle classes to the radical and labor elements, both largely recruited from the Mediterranean type.
Only in Scandinavia and northwestern Germany does the Nordic race seem to maintain its full vigor in spite of the enormous wastage of three thousand years of the swarming forth of its best fighting men. ”

“ The range of blond hair color in pure Nordic 26peoples runs from flaxen and red to shades of chestnut and brown. The darker shades may indicate crossing in some cases, but absolutely black hair certainly does mean an ancestral cross with a dark race—in England with the Mediterranean race.
It must be clearly understood that blondness of hair and of eye is not a final test of Nordic race. The Nordics include all the blonds, and also those of darker hair or eye when possessed of a preponderance of other Nordic characters. ”

“ Whatever may be its intellectual, its literary, its artistic or its musical aptitudes, as compared with other races, the Anglo-Saxon branch of the Nordic race is again showing itself to be that upon which the nation must chiefly depend for leadership, for courage, for loyalty, for unity and harmony of action, for self-sacrifice and devotion to an ideal. ”

“ It should be remembered also that many of the dark-haired, dark-eyed youths of Plattsburg and other volunteer training camps are often three-fourths or seven-eighths Nordic, because it only requires a single dark-eyed ancestor to lend the dark hair and eye color to an otherwise pure Nordic strain. There is a clear differentiation between the original Nordic, the Alpine and the Mediterranean strains; but where physical characters and characteristics are partly combined in a mosaic, and to a less degree are blended, it requires long experience to judge which strain dominates. ”

“ The slow but long-continued physical development of the Nordics has culminated in a powerful skeleton and musculature in sharp contrast to that of the Mediterranean race, to which the Nordic is more closely related than to any other. In fact, the mixture of Nordic and Mediterranean in the British Islands may possibly be one of the few advantageous racial crossings. ”

“ Many members of the Nordic race otherwise apparently pure have skins, as well as hair, more or less dark, so that the determinative value of this character is uncertain. There can be no doubt that the quality of the skin and the extreme range of its variation in color from black, brown, red, yellow to ivory-white are excellent measures of the specific or subgeneric distinctions 28between the larger groups of mankind but in dealing with European populations it is sometimes difficult to correlate the shades of fairness with other physical characters. ”

“ The Nordic Habitat The Nordics appear in their present centre of distribution, the basin of the Baltic, at the close 38of the Paleolithic, as soon as the retreating glaciers left habitable land. This race was probably at that time in possession of its fundamental characters, and its extension from the plains of Russia to Scandinavia was not in the nature of a radical change of environment. The race in consequence is now, always has been and probably always will be, adjusted to certain environmental conditions, chief of which is protection from a tropical sun. ”

“ Fringing the north and north-west border of Europe, occupying Scandinavia, and largely dominating Great Britain and Ireland (where it has overrun the earlier Iberian, or Pictish people) is the second great European race—the Nordic. It was formerly called the "Teutonic," but, as this term has been misapplied in Germany for political reasons, so as to include a large body of the last, or third, race, it is better to use the word "Nordic." The Nordic race is, like the Iberian, long-headed, but in contrast it is blond and very tall. ”

“ The early members of the Nordic race in order to reach the Mediterranean world had to pass through the Alpine populations and must have absorbed a certain amount of Alpine blood. Therefore the Umbrians in Italy and the Gauls of western Europe, while predominantly Nordic, were more mixed especially in the lower classes with Alpine blood than were the Belgæ or Cymry or their successors, the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Alemanni, Saxons, Franks, Lombards, Danes and 146Northmen, all of whom appear in history as Nordics of the so-called Teutonic group. ”

“ The Nordics first appear at the close of the Paleolithic along the coasts of the Baltic. The earliest industry discovered in this region, named the Maglemose and found in Denmark and elsewhere around the Baltic, is probably the culture of the Proto-Teutonic branch of the Nordic race. No human remains in connection therewith have been found. ”

“ The northern white race. This so-called Nordic race consisted primarily of the blue man plus the Andite but also contained a considerable amount of Andonite blood, together with smaller amounts of the red and yellow Sangik. ”

“ The pure Nordic peoples are characterized by a 229greater stability and steadiness than are mixed peoples such as the Irish, the ancient Gauls and the Athenians among all of whom the lack of these qualities was balanced by a correspondingly greater versatility.
The mental characteristics of the Mediterranean race are well known and this race, while inferior in bodily stamina to both the Nordic and the Alpine, is probably the superior of both, certainly of the Alpines, in intellectual attainments. ”

“ No nation, not even England although richly endowed with a Nordic gentry, can stand the loss of so much good blood. Here is the evidence, if such be needed, of the actual Passing of the Great Race.
Abundance of hair is an ancient and generalized character which the Nordics share with the Alpines of both Europe and Asia, but the light colored eyes and light colored hair are characters of relatively recent specialization and consequently highly unstable. ”

“ In classic, mediæval and modern times the Alpines have played an unimportant part in European culture and in western Europe they have been so thoroughly Nordicized that they exist rather as an element in Nordic race development than as an independent type. There are, however, many indications in current history which point to an impending development of civilization in the Slavic branches of this race and the world must be prepared to face changes in the Russias which will, for good or for evil, bring them more closely into touch with western Europe. ”

“ The so-called red-haired branch of the Nordic race has special characters in addition to red hair, such as a greenish cast of eye, a skin of delicate texture tending either to great clarity or to freckles and certain peculiar temperamental traits. ”

“ Their robustness and long-headedness, combined with their roaming instincts and devotion to the horse, which will become clearer as we proceed, have convinced me that we are here dealing with that tall, fair, long-headed type, now dominant in northern Europe, which we term the Nordic race. ”

“ The first is the Nordic or Baltic subspecies. This race is long skulled, very tall, fair skinned with blond or brown hair and light colored 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. ”

“ The claim that the Nordic race is a mere variation of the Mediterranean race and that the latter is in turn derived from the Ethiopian Negro rests upon a mistaken idea that a dolichocephaly in common must mean identity of origin, as well as upon a failure to take into consideration many somatological characters of almost equal value with the cephalic index. ”

“ In the present war one has merely to study the type of officer and of the man in the ranks to realize that, in spite of the draft net, the Nordic race is contributing an enormous majority of the fighting men, out of all proportion to their relative numbers in the nation at large. ”

“ The European Alpines retain very little evidence of their Asiatic origin except the skull shape and have been in contact with the Nordic race so long that in central and western Europe they are everywhere saturated with the blood of that race. Many populations now considered good Germans, such as the majority of the Würtembergers, Bavarians, Austrians, Swiss and Tyrolese are merely Nordicized Alpines. ”

“ It is the same melancholy tale when we apply the test of race. Of course the war bore heavily on all the white race-stocks, but it was the Nordics—the best of all human breeds—who suffered far and away the greatest losses. War, as we have seen, was always the Nordic’s deadliest scourge, and never was this truer than in the late struggle. ”