Susan Filoche‑Rommé, FAn postdoctoral researcher, winner of the 2025 Ary Scheffer Dissertation Prize

The award ceremony will take place on Friday, 13 March 2026, at 4:30 p.m., at the Maison de Victor Hugo (6 place des Vosges, 75004 Paris).

Susan Filoche‑Rommé, who completed her doctorate at the École normale supérieure – PSL (UMR Pays Germaniques), has received a dissertation prize for her research on the reception and re‑invention of Norse mythology in nineteenth‑century Denmark. Her work was supervised by Claude Rétat (UMR Pays Germaniques, CNRS) and Thomas Mohnike (UR Mondes germaniques et nord‑européens, University of Strasbourg).

Her doctoral dissertation offers an analysis of the processes through which motifs from Norse mythology were adapted to the cultural context of nineteenth‑century Denmark, considering the construction of this mythology as a national‑romantic cultural object.

Norse mythology was first rediscovered on the European continent in the seventeenth century, then widely re‑invested in the second half of the eighteenth century. Scholars, artists, and playwrights took up the subject at the turn of the nineteenth century, but soon observed that some form of mediation was needed to make this mythology known: although the logic of romantic nationalism would suggest that it should be immediately familiar to Danes—since it is the mythology of their ancestors—it was in fact quite foreign to them. This gave rise to debates: for Danish arts and culture to become, or become once again, “Nordic,” they needed to draw inspiration from Norse mythology. But how could it be used when it was poorly understood and when so few visual traces of Nordic paganism survived? The mythology had to be adapted—thus transformed—so that the public could become familiar with it and so that it could be reborn within culture as an aesthetic object.

The study therefore offers a detailed analysis of the transfers and transformations of mythological motifs across cultural fields such as philology, poetry, ballet, and the fine arts. These variations on mythic motifs are examined to understand how cultural actors sought to familiarize Danish society with Norse mythology, with the aim of making it a component of Danish and Scandinavian heritage.