Odin myth

A text by Klinger (1952) mentions how the fabricated Odin Myth were spread around Europe:
“In addition to Jordanes' Scandza theory, the Odin myth also located the Goths in an Asiatic home. The Odin story is an invention of monkish chroniclers, a web of myth and real history which goes back to the Homeric and Virgilian accounts of the fall of Troy. …Odin knew that his people were destined to achieve a glorious destiny in the northern part of the world. Leaving his kingdom to his brothers, Odin led the Goths to Scythia. The story in the Prose Edda begins with the tower of Babel.” End of quote from Kliger, (1952).
I do not doubt that the origin of the Goths was in Asia, however it seems like a lot have been done to minimize and even deny this fact. Kliger’s book seems like an argument to dispute the theory about the Asian origin of the Goths. European thinking is racist to the very roots. By constructing such myths they made it seem like the origin of Europeans were in Scandinavia instead of accepting that many Europeans including the Goths are of Ancient Asian origin.

The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Thought by Samuel Kliger; Harvard University Press, 1952.



Jordanes make no efforts in explaining from where in Asia and why the Goths migrated from there, instead he makes a big issue about their Scandinavian origin (called “the Scandza theory of Jordanes”). The book by Kliger mentions on page 296 that the theories of Jordanes was central in Swedish nationalism. My comment to this issue is that the nationalist issue became important much later in history than Jordanes, so this was unlikely his motivation as an author. The Germanising of Sweden (and the Nordic in General) started with Christianity with Anskar, (the archbishop of Hamburg) who sent Missionary to Denmark and Sweden, 865 CE. The Archbishop seat for Sweden was from then Hamburg. The first Swedish archbishopric seat was in Uppsala from 1164. However the real colonization of the Nordic was a slower process and really escalated in the period between 1500 -1800eds. The issue about German immigration to Sweden is supported in new genetic research.
A new study of autosomal or autosomale genetics has shown that while Swedes are more related to Germans, Norwegians are more related to Danes and Dutch (Lao et al. 2008).

“Correlation between Genetic and Geographic Structure in Europe” Lao et al. (2008)