I wonder what Norwegians think of this article.

[https://www.npr.org/2022/01/26/1075761231/peter-dinklage-disney](https://www.npr.org/2022/01/26/1075761231/peter-dinklage-disney)

Dwarfs of old fairytales have nothing to do with little people in everyday life. Dwarfs were in old Norse mythology, legends and folklore. They typically were ugly and mined underground. I remember reading somewhere that they mined underground because they descended from maggots in the flesh of a frost giant whose flesh became the earth. The Poetic Edda apparently does say that dwarfs came from the giant and that the giant’s flesh became the earth: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ymir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ymir)

This is consistent with the depiction of dwarfs as underground miners in the story of Snow White. Dinklage calls it a stereotype, but I don’t think anyone over the age of three would believe that modern-day little people live in caves.

I think the problem is that little people in English-speaking countries chose the term “dwarf” as their preferred term even though it came from old European folklore. I’m wondering if Norwegian depictions of Nisser will come under fire someday.

I’m noticing various cases where historically oppressed Americans impose their views on non-American cultures. For example, Americans condemned Japanese ganguro, yamanba and manba, which have nothing to do with minstrelsy or with people of African descent. Instead, these Japanese styles are based on the traditional mountain witch Yamanba, who is depicted in Noh theater.

It seems like there should be a better solution than censoring literature and arts from non-American cultures that existed long before America and its domestic problems. Otherwise, it would only be fair for other countries to censor American arts for reasons that are offensive to those countries but unknown to Americans. I don’t know the solution. But I am curious what Scandinavians think about this article.

41 comments

  1. Not specifically this issue, but occasionally there are some opinion articles in Aftenposten raising the issue of how it might not be appropriate to directly import American social justice concepts to the Norwegian context.

  2. Peter Dinklage has become, woke and out of touch.

    His recent comments about people not liking the GoT ending f.ex.

    > “They wanted the pretty white people to ride off into the sunset together,” he told The New York Times in a recent interview.

    > “But I think the reason there was some backlash about the ending is because they were angry at us for breaking up with them. We were going off the air and they didn’t know what to do with their Sunday nights anymore. They wanted more, so they backlashed about that.”

    What a clown

  3. I think Dinklage have as much to do with fairytale-dwarfs as the flying horse with eight legs have with my pony, and I don’t have a pony

  4. Peter Dinklage can get stuffed. He’s just fabricating outrage in this case. Mythological/folktale dwarves are not humans and they are not caricatures of humans either. ~~And where the fuck does he get a stereotype about mining from? Nobody thinks of mining when they see someone with a medical condition.~~

    For all I know, Disney’s version might be full of stereotypes about dwarves, but if so, they’re not stereotypes we share here in Norway.

    edit: If the dwarves in the new Snow White are nothing but comic relief characters, he’d have a point about stereotypes, e.g. court jesters and such, and I’d agree that the producers should reconsider.

  5. To my best memory, dwarves in Germanic mythology is never stated to be short, and since the original Snow White story is from Germany and probably loosely based the dwarves on oral history from their mythological past, he might have a point that it’s just a modern invention to make them shorter than ‘conventional’ height.

    In that case, I guess he isn’t really way off with his critisism, in my opinion. Not that I really care one way or the other.

  6. Well, right now there’s a culture war. At some point it will find a middle ground and things will call down, like they always do. And I think Nisser is such an integrated part of norwegian culture as is “norse” mythology in general, that I can’t really see ut coming to a point in my lifetime where it becomes inappropriate mainstream, but of course there will always be some radical fringe groups, just look at all weird mini-sects.

    Also, I think most people agree that importing everything from the US is a bad thing. So that will probably change as a new generation emerges, more european rather than western, and american economic, cinematic and cultural dominance shrinks.

  7. I think I understand where he’s coming from, but I’m little confused because he portrayed Eitri, a ‘dwarf’, in Infinity War.

  8. I love how Americans think Norse = Norway. After that Vikings tv show most Norwegians seem to believe it too now

  10. The truth is nobody cares and this has absolutely no relevance to Norway, Snow White is German and the Sagas wad written in Iceland a thousand years ago.

    Enough Viking Weeb crap already.

  11. Must be satire.

    Mythological dwarves have nothing to do with little people. They could just as easily have called little people ‘gnomes.’ It wouldn’t make gnomes any more real.

  12. >I’m wondering if Norwegian depictions of Nisser will come under fire someday.

    Well that would be fucking retarded.

  13. Fucking moronic. This is a traditional story, nobody’s obligated to be concerned about his fabricated sensitivity. ”More progressive spin” my ass.

    Next he’ll demand progressive version of LOTR or something

  14. Americans love taking other cultures, claiming them, twisting them around and commercialising them (Marvel, Disney etc.), so Americans telling the rest of the world our cultures offend them is not surprising. Americans are easily offended. What else is new? We can’t even show ads for our own winter sports team in our own country and language without being called racists on Twitter and Reddit, let alone show our flag lest it be mistaken for the Confederate flag.

    Americans live in a state of perpetual outrage, lashing out on Twitter about how certain letters in other languages (like Ø) are racist, and they seem to demand people in other countries change their languages (no gendered language allowed in Spanish, and no Spanish word for “black” allowed either).

    I find the notion that some millennia old myths would offend people today to be both childish and hysterical, and quite frankly I see the American attitude of wanting to dictate the sensibilities and expression of other cultures as cultural imperialism maquerading as wokeness. The world sees enough of American imperialism through bullets and bombs, we don’t need to have our language, history, culture and customs dictated to us as well.

  15. There was an article a while back about Norwegian short people not wanting to be called dwarf: [https://www.nrk.no/rogaland/xl/dverg_-handikappa-og-utviklingshemmet-er-vanskelige-ord-a-bli-kvitt-1.15474031](https://www.nrk.no/rogaland/xl/dverg_-handikappa-og-utviklingshemmet-er-vanskelige-ord-a-bli-kvitt-1.15474031)

    They want to be called “kortvokste”, not “dverg”, because “dverg” is associated with circus, mythology etc. They were able to change the medical term in Norwegian from “dvergvekst” to “kortvokst” (“kort” = “short”). But because the word “dwarf” is OK to use in English, more people are starting to use it in Norwegian as well. She even mentions Game of Thrones as one of the possible reasons the term is coming back.

    Edit: Changed “dwarves” to dwarf”.

  17. Self destructing society. That’s what the U.S is going through. One of these days, some group will just make it so that if you even talk to them, it will be seen as offensive.

  19. If something has historic value but isn’t applicable in today’s society then it should simply be stored and viewed as such, history to look back on. This whole movement of “we must erase everything that has ever been offensive” is absolutely dumb and historians in a few hundred years will call us out for it and name it another “dark age”

    But fuck me for not liking censorship right?

  21. I think it would be interesting to hear him out, as the text is really short. Explain the problem more and how he would solve it. But I think it’s fear that he is fed up with a lot of the stereotypes about dwarfs that originates from folk lore and fairy tales.

    But honestly, if old stories does not meet todays requirements and offended/hurt people due to ancient stereotypes. Just don’t fucking do them then. Just let this snow white story be history. This Disney adaptation will be bad anyways. It’s Marc Webb and Disney have a track record now of terrible live action remakes.

  22. I think that it’s good that Dinklage is using his position to advocate for short people’s concerns. My first thought is to take his concerns seriously, rather than question and dismiss them. Disney is a major source of the modern “dwarf” stereotype, only matched by Tolkien. These stereotypes are used by the world’s bullies and assholes to hurt and demean people. As Dinklage has first-hand experience of this, dismissing him seems pretty silly. When they choose to go back to this material, it’s not unreasonable to expect Disney to address that in some form or other.

    Some of the posts here jabbering about “woke” and parroting phrases from the american right while insisting we don’t need to import this to Norway seems to be conflating these important and legitimate concerns with the phenomenon where internet mobs fuelled by echo chambers and conflict-escalating social media algorithms work themselves up over single issues to a point where no one can get anything useful said or done. The activism behind this is actually important; if we’re going to be better as a global society, and include everyone, it seems people who experience this kind of bullying and marginalisation is going to have to scream loudly and often, at anything that can get people’s attention to the issue. American parochialism is probably part of the reason all sorts of things get caught in the net that don’t belong there. Some of it is just “shotgunning” – call out everything and see what sticks. Whether that serves the cause in the long run or not remains to be seen; it doesn’t seem like we have a choice in the matter, since the forms this takes are driven by random individuals and the affordances of social media, not any actual organisation or representative movement. No one decided to do it like this – it’s just how media and the online dopamine mills happened to shape it.

    As for the historical aspect, the modern nisse, dwarf, gnome and general “little people” images developed in the 18th and 19th century, as the old and the modern worldviews clashed. They are, in fact, heavily shaped by the kind of thinking that english speakers know as “victorian”. These people believed in crap like eugenics, in physiognomy, in inheritable degeneration and the natural superiority of and replacement of some people and races over others. They transformed old gods and spirits into physical races that they thought you might one day find the bones of in an archaeological dig, drawing on racial and nationalist caricatures, and the appearances of disabled or different people. At some point in this process, the folkloric dwarf as sickness-bringing underground spirit got conflated with their victims – the old folk religion’s dwarf and *dwarfed people* became the same thing.

    As this stuff filtered everything the victorians saw and wrote, it also got smeared all over their interpretation of our common cultural heritage. It’s not too hard to scrape that shit off – in fact, in some respects our old magical ways of thinking are still around – but what’s underneath is kind of complicated and deeply weird for modern people to take in, and probably doesn’t sell as well in a disney movie.

  23. Is it the maggots that he’s concerned with? Because that how all life started, not just dwarfs. The asir was licked out of stone by the cosmic cow. The jotnar crawled out from ymirs armpits and from between its toes. The only creatures who didn’t come directly from ymir as far as im aware is humans. How were carved from an ash tree and an alm tree. And i don’t think anyone Norwegians directly correlate little people with the norse depiction of dwarfs. Tolkien was heavily inspired by Norse mythology, but made alot of changes. He was the one who made them short, stout and Scottish.

  24. I think it’s important to look at these things on a case by case basis. Sometimes it will turn out to be a misunderstanding and other times we discover something truly unfortunate we can try to do something about. You have some good examples of the former, but we also have things like [Zwarte Piet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwarte_Piet) which could be argued to be unfortunate despite having nothing to do with minstrelsy or the American tradition of blackface.

    While there are non-issues that arise from applying ideas or local history out of context, it’s very important to be aware that historical battle has been dealing with things that truly represent racism and discrimination and this is by far still the main problem even if I do agree you have some very valid points here.

    The most important thing is that we continue discussing these things. We really need to be careful of our bedfellows here, however. There are a lot of people still pushing back on the positive changes and they love nothing better than to be “technically correct”. They tend to be more concerned with pointing out that Cleopatra wasn’t black than having an actual discussion about what’s harmless and out of context and what’s actually harmful.

  25. German here. The original title of the fairy tale is “Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwergen” and nobody is using the word “Zwerg” for people with dwarfism. Instead the word “Kleinwüchsig” (small grown) is chosen instead. Also the dwarfs are so diffrent from humans that it is almost impossible to think that they represent the dwarves. This is a problem of the english laguage and not of the fairy tale. So if the dwarfism community is offended by having the same name as a really old mythical creature, then why did they stick to the name dwarf in the first place

  26. Dwarves as in humans and nisser and troll as in norse mythology is different from each other. One is just av regular human that’s short, the others are humanoid creatures.

  28. Dwarves dont even exist in Norse Mythology, they’re dark elves. At some point people just started saying they were dwarves.

  29. The man is a buffoon and this whole situation clearly shows that you can NEVER be woke enough, there is always smt more to be putrsged about and try to erase/censor/problematize. Dwarves in fantasy or Norse mythology aren’t humans with dwarfism, but a race into themselves. This woke nonsense has to stop.

  33. Thanks for making German folklore something political and mixing it with norse mythology, Hollywood. Makes absolutely no sense.

    Classical German dwarves are comparable with Tolkiens idea of dwarves. They were not conceived to be a mockery of people who are born not as tall as others, they were conceived to show that you should not judge a book by its cover. They may be smaller, but they are just as smart, just as strong and very hard working whilst enjoying their companionship and a good beer; they were different, but the same. If they are anything, they are role models. Everything that separates us will never be as strong as the things that connect us.

    Also, I don‘t mind diverse casts in Hollywood at all, but the name ‚Snow White‘ (Schneewittchen) comes from her appearance; her hair as black as Ebony, her skin as white as snow and her lips as red as blood (originally, it was her cheeks as red as blood, later versions had her lips be red). As I said, I don‘t mind diverse casts, but here it makes little sense for me to completely change the characters identity.

    Thank you, Hollywood and Disney, for messing with my cultural heritage, with the stories I grew up with as a child. Thank you for making everything political and forgetting the actual message behind the fable.

    Edit:

    The original tale is about envy and the cruelty of live, and how that envy can destroy everything. Everyone is cruel to Snow White, even the Hunter who spares her live. Also the Prince, who in the original tale doesn‘t kiss her but rapes her in her sleep (just like in Sleeping Beauty, where she bears multiple children to the Prince whilst being asleep). The world is against Snow White, and she only finds comfort and love and care whilst being with the dwarves, who learn to cherish her and to let go of their mistrust of humans. It is a story about finding love and happiness in places where your prejudice might make you not even start looking for it. It is about overcoming prejudice, about companionship and kindness. It is about human values, and that live is not fair, that even heroes are tainted by their ultimate ambitions. That even the smallest among us can have the biggest hearts.

  34. I perfectly agree that having a Latina Snow White *and* actual dwarves makes no sense at all. They either have a pale white Snow White actress and dwarves for dwarf characters, or an arbitrary actress for show white and an arbitrary cast of actors for the dwarves.

  35. Just as an aside, Japan def does have cultural context for racism against black people. They’re a very xenophobic society and had a lot of cultural influence from the US.

  36. I agree that Japan has cultural context of racism against black people and influence from the US, and there are cases of Japanese media entertainers doing actual blackface in the American sense. But things like ganguro are different. Whether Japanese are xenophobic or not is a complex issue. Personally I wouldn’t put it that simply.

  37. I think Dinklage is rightfully frustrated about how the film industry treats little people (or anyone with any kind of disability for that matter), but on the other hand also doesn’t know much about dwarves within other cultures than American/British.

    I would be very interested in hearing the thoughts on this from a little person from one of the Nordic countries.

  38. There are several examples from many historically oppressed groups in the US that superimpose that oppression in the US to other cultures like Norway. Norway and other countries in Scandinavia will never fully understand oppression like slavery in the US or gender hierarchies from the UK or US. Similarly, using the lens from the US to judge questions such as the ones you pose in other cultures is overly simplistic. However it happens all the time, both ways.

    I will never think that I’m an expert on how BIPOC people feel in the US or elsewhere because I’ve read Stamped from the Beginning, James Baldwin or been a coach for Syrian and Afghan refugees. All it gives me is a small insight into how I can do my best to be more culturally competent and an ally.

    There are definitely still unhelpful stereotypes, also in Norway. But they are viewed much differently than in the US. And people will see what they want to see due different biases and heuristics. Censoring is never the answer. And yet, I don’t believe that purposefully putting religious or ethnic groups down and just chalk it up to free speech is the answer either. That’s just being vial.

    The world being so connected these days makes things super complex. And a bit more listening and humility goes a long way in my experience.

  39. I think it’s as silly as calling fat people “larger person”.

    If i had giantism, i feel i would have the right to that term, because obviously the word “giant” is equally offensive as dwarf. (/s). Fat people could have the words “hungry person”.

    After i head a heart failure, my abdomen swelled up and the meds also made me gain weight. I became FAT. My smart weight said obese, and i’m ok with both terms. They have helped me accept it and take steps to lose weight.

  41. Dwarves and nisser in literature and folklore is a fair bit different than people with dwarfism… But then again there are noone getting compared to goblins, trolls, elves, halflings and orcs in literature..

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