While the Scandinavian branch emphasizes pantheist spirituality rooted in medieval and contemporary Scandinavian folklore, the American branch postulates a " native religion of the peoples of Northern Europe " reaching back into the paleolithic.

In Scandinavian folklore, the creature is said to possess a distinctly human form, with the exception that its head is composed entirely of seaweed.

Elves are first attested in Old English and Old Norse texts and are prominent in traditional British and Scandinavian folklore.

In Scandinavian folklore, which is a later blend of Norse mythology and elements of Christian mythology, an elf is called elver in Danish, alv in Norwegian, and alv or älva in Swedish ( the first is masculine, the second feminine ).

The elves are typically pictured as fair-haired, white-clad, and ( like most creatures in the Scandinavian folklore ) nasty when offended.

Freyja is attested in the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources ; in the Prose Edda and Heimskringla, both written by Snorri Sturluson in the 13th century ; in several Sagas of Icelanders ; in the short story Sörla þáttr ; in the poetry of skalds ; and into the modern age in Scandinavian folklore, as well as the name for Friday in many Germanic languages.

Category: Scandinavian folklore

Loki is attested in the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources ; the Prose Edda and Heimskringla, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson ; the Norwegian Rune Poems, in the poetry of skalds, and in Scandinavian folklore.

* Helhest, the three-legged " Hel horse " of later Scandinavian folklore

A troll is a supernatural being in Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore.

Later, in Scandinavian folklore, trolls became beings in their own right, where they live far from human habitation, are not Christianized, and are considered dangerous to human beings.

One of the most famous elements of Scandinavian folklore, trolls are depicted in a variety of media in modern popular culture.

Sea serpents also appear frequently in later Scandinavian folklore, particularly in that of Norway.

Category: Scandinavian folklore

A tomte, nisse or tomtenisse ( Sweden ) (), nisse ( Norway and Denmark ) () or tonttu ( Finland ) is a humanoid mythical creature of Scandinavian folklore.

The tomte is one of the most familiar creatures of Scandinavian folklore, and he has appeared in many works of Scandinavian literature.

His father, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, was an ethnologist and professor of Irish, Scandinavian, and comparative folklore at the University of Lund.

In Iceland, the tales of the Völsung cycle were expanded with native Scandinavian folklore, including that of Helgi Hundingsbane, which originally appears to have been part of a separate tradition, that of the Ylfings, and form the material of the epic poems in the Elder Edda and of Völsunga saga, which preserves material from lost poems.

The Askafroa ( Swedish " wife of the ash tree "), also known as the Danish Askefrue and German Eschenfrau, is a type of legendary creature in Scandinavian and German folklore, similar to the Greek Hamadryads.

* Mara ( folklore ), a specter or wraith-like creature in Germanic and particularly Scandinavian folklore

* Scandinavian folklore

A more recent classification based on mutual intelligibility separates modern spoken Danish, Norwegian and Swedish into a Mainland Scandinavian group while Icelandic and Faroese are placed in a separate category labelled Insular Scandinavian.

The distribution of stød in the lexicon is clearly related to the distribution of the common Scandinavian tonal word accents found in most dialects of Norwegian and Swedish, including the national standard languages.

In Dutch, Easter is known as Pasen and in the Scandinavian languages Easter is known as påske ( Danish and Norwegian ), påsk ( Swedish ), páskar ( Icelandic ) and páskir ( Faeroese ).

Similarly, many place-names in areas of Danish and Norwegian settlement have Scandinavian roots.

While at sea the French had some success at Boulogne but Nelson's Royal Navy destroyed an anchored Danish and Norwegian fleet at the Battle of Copenhagen ( 1801 ) because the Scandinavian kingdoms were against the British blockade of France.

The Nobel Prize (, Swedish definite form, singular: Nobelpriset ; Norwegian: Nobelprisen ) is a set of annual international awards bestowed in a number of categories by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and / or scientific advances.

Together with Faroese, Icelandic and Norwegian it belongs to the West Scandinavian group, separating it from the East Scandinavian group consisting of Swedish, Danish and Gutnish.

The modern descendants of the Old West Norse dialect are the West Scandinavian languages of Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian and the extinct Norn language of the Orkney and the Shetland Islands ; the descendants of the Old East Norse dialect are the East Scandinavian languages of Danish and Swedish.

The Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish languages form a dialect continuum and are known as the Scandinavian languages — all of which are considered mutually intelligible with each other.

A Scandinavian origin has been proposed ( compare, for example, Norwegian slengenamn, which means " nickname "), but is discounted by the Oxford English Dictionary based on " date and early associations ".

The Scandinavian colonization was principally Danish, with a strong Norwegian element.

The word comes to English from Norwegian, but related words are used in several Scandinavian languages-in many cases to refer to any long narrow body of water, rather than the more specific meaning it has in English.

Unlike the languages spoken in the other Scandinavian countries, for example Swedish and Norwegian which are North Germanic languages, Finnish is an Uralic language, and is structurally considered an agglutinative language.

Scandinavian settlement in Greenland declined over the years and the last written record is a marriage recorded in 1408, although the Norwegian claims to the land remained.

The modern Scandinavian form is Fredag in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish, meaning Freja's day.

Norway is a country located in Northern Europe on the western and northern part of the Scandinavian Peninsula, bordering the North Sea in southwest and the Skagerrak inlet to the south, the North Atlantic Ocean ( Norwegian Sea ) in the west and the Barents Sea to the northeast.

Norwegian literature was virtually nonexistent during the period of the Scandinavian Union and the subsequent Dano-Norwegian union ( 1387 — 1814 ).

Major airlines based in Norway are SAS Scandinavian Airlines, Norwegian Air Shuttle and Widerøe.

It is hub for the two major Norwegian airlines Scandinavian Airlines System and Norwegian Air Shuttle, and for regional aircraft from Western Norway.

Variants of the name include: Alfonso ( Italian and Spanish ), Alfons ( Catalan, Dutch, German, Polish and Scandinavian ), Afonso ( Portuguese and Galician ), Affonso ( Ancient Portuguese ), Alphonse, Alfonse ( Italian, French and English ), Αλφόνσος Alphonsos ( Greek ), Alphonsus ( Latin ), Alphons ( Dutch ), Alfonsu in ( Leonese ), Alfonsas ( Lithuanian ).

One of the two Merseburg Incantations names Balder, and mentions a figure named Phol, considered to be another name for Baldr ( as in Scandinavian, Falr, Fjalarr ; ( in Saxo ) Balderus: Fjallerus ).

The name Alca is a Latin derivative of the Scandinavian word for Razorbills and their relatives.

Related, but not identical, is the Scandinavian tribal name Geat ( the inhabitants of Swedish Götaland / Geatland ), from the Proto-Germanic * Gautoz ( plural * Gautaz ).

Examples of goddesses attested in Norse mythology include Frigg ( wife of Odin, and the Anglo-Saxon version of whom is namesake of the modern English weekday Friday ), Skaði ( one time wife of Njörðr ), Njerda ( Scandinavian name of Nerthus ), that also was married to Njörðr during Bronze Age, Freyja ( wife of Óðr ), Sif ( wife of Thor ), Gerðr ( wife of Freyr ), and personifications such as Jörð ( earth ), Sól ( the sun ), and Nótt ( night ).

* Heiðabýr is derived from old Scandinavian sources and is the oldest known name.

After the album's completion, the band were forced to change their name after Dreja issued a cease and desist letter, stating that Page was only allowed to use the New Yardbirds moniker for the Scandinavian dates.

The team was officially named the Minnesota Vikings on September 27, 1960 ; the name is partly meant to reflect Minnesota's place as a center of Scandinavian American culture.

As a Scandinavian forename, it was extracted from the Frankish ruler Charlemagne's Latin name " Carolus Magnus " and re-analyzed as Old Norse magn-hús = " house of might / power ".

* Nanna ( given name ), a Scandinavian female name

* Nordic Bronze Age, the name given by Oscar Montelius to a period and a Bronze Age culture in Scandinavian pre-history, c. 1700-500 BC, with sites that reached as far east as Estonia

However, that the name " Greuthungi " has pre-Pontic, possibly Scandinavian, origins still has support today.

* Riksråd, generic name for various Imperial Councils in Scandinavian countries

The term Scandinavia is usually used as a cultural term, but in English usage, it is occasionally confused with the purely geographical term Scandinavian Peninsula, which took its name from the cultural-linguistic concept.

Ohlin was also a leading figure within the school of doctrine with the same name, the so-called Stockholm school ; a group of leading Scandinavian economists influenced by Knut Wicksell, most of them active in Stockholm, either at the Stockholm School of Economics or the Stockholm University College.

In old Scandinavian sagas, Saaremaa is called Eysysla and in the Icelandic Sagas Eysýsla, which means exactly the same as the name of the island in Estonian: " the district ( land ) of island ".

That the name Tervingi has pre-Pontic, possibly Scandinavian, origins still has support today.

Also, there is yet another rare earth element, scandium, which is named after the entire region of the Scandinavian Peninsula, via its old name of " Scandia ".

His great work was to awaken in the breasts of his countrymen an enthusiasm for the poetry and religion of their ancestors, and this he performed to so complete an extent that his name remains to this day synonymous with Scandinavian romance.

The name " Rollo " is a Latin translation from the Old Norse name Hrólfr, modern Scandinavian name Rolf ( cf.

* Ayn Rand included in her book Atlas Shrugged a character who is a modern-day Scandinavian pirate, to whom she gave the first name " Ragnar ".