Mathias Nordvig
Danish researcher
Mathias Nordvig is a Danish Scandinavian studies scholar. He specialises in Old Norse literature and culture and has studied the impact of volcanoes in Icelandic literature. Holding a PhD title from Aarhus University, he is an assistant professor and head of Nordic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Nordvig has been involved in modern paganism in Denmark and co-hosted the Nordic Mythology Podcast, which is about topics related to the Viking Age and Nordic mythology.
Early life and education
Mathias Nordvig was born in Denmark and partially grew up in Greenland. With a mother practicing modern asatro—modern paganism of a Nordic variety—he was interested in the Viking Age and Norse mythology from childhood. He studied Scandinavian studies at Aarhus University.
Academic career
Nordvig obtained a doctorate from Aarhus University in 2014 with a dissertation on Viking Age Iceland's relationship to volcanoes and their impact on mythology and literature. The dissertation was the basis for his monograph Volcanoes in Old Norse Mythology: Myth and Environment in Early Iceland, published in 2021 by ARC Humanities Press. Nordvig challenges a common view that the lack of unambiguous references to volcanoes in textual sources means that they left little trace in Viking Age and medieval Icelandic culture.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mathias Nordvig” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.