This bachelor’s thesis in the field of History analyzes the journal Iduna: En Skrift för den Nordiska Fornålderns Älskare, published by the Geatish Society (Göthiska Förbundet) between 1811-1845. The study investigates how the Geatish Society utilized the journal to construct a national identity and how the political discourse regarding the estate society and meritocracy were articulated in said journal during a period of significant societal transition. Using a qualitative critical discourse analysis, the research is supported by Stuart Hall’s identity theory and Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities to examine how the society added to and was influenced by identity discourses surrounding nation, culture, history and politics. The aim is to understand how the Geatish Society was promoting their national identity in Iduna, and to discuss their reasonings based on their political and societal commentary.  

The thesis reveals that the Geatish Society reacted against the perceived moral decline of their era and the individualistic mindset of the people by seeking roots in an idealized old Norse past. Their strategies to promote their national identity involved creating poetry and music, and by writing about archeology, scaldic poetry, history and Nordic mythology. The goal was ultimately to create an emotional connection to the motherland and a connection between its inhabitants in the form of an imagined community, as well as legitimize the society’s members as moral and intellectual guides. Simultaneously, the results indicate a clear intent to maintain the structures of the estate society. The society argues that the peasantry best preserved the original Swedish “folk spirit” through their physical labor and their close relationship to nature. They also argued that the aristocrats were the sensible and governing estate that were meant to be the educated and intellectual. They were strongly against the development of meritocracy in the lower estates, as it would mean a less clear distinction between the estates, but were open to splitting the aristocracy into an intellectual elite. The thesis concludes that the national identity presented in Iduna could potentially have functioned as a unifying imagined community designed to bridge class conflicts during Sweden’s meritocratic evolution.