Else Christensen

Christensen was born as Else Oscher in 1913 in Esbjerg, western Denmark.[2][3] She became a professional handweaver and in 1933 moved to Copenhagen. There, she embraced anarcho-syndicalism and became a follower of the anarcho-syndicalist ideologue Christian Christensen.[3] Exposed to the various competing radical groups on both the far right and far left, she came under the increasing influence of the Strasserite wing within the National Socialist Workers' Party of Denmark (DNSAP), a group which had embraced the Nazi ideology of Germany's Nazi Party.[3] In 1937 she married the woodcarver and unionist Aage Alex Christensen, who had served as the top lieutenant of the DNSAP leader Cay Lembcke.[3] The Christensens became associated with the Strasserite National Bolshevik faction of the party, but Aage was part of the faction ousted when Frits Clausen seized control.[4]

A rally of the DNSAP, with whom Christensen was involved

Following the German invasion of Denmark in 1940, both Else and Aage were arrested for the latter's involvement in National Bolshevist armed cells. Christensen was released after three days' interrogation, but Aage was convicted of illegal weapons' possession and detained for six months.[4] At that point, Christensen convinced her father's cousin, who was Minister of Justice, that Aage should be released.[4] Following the end of World War II, the couple left Denmark for England. In 1951 they migrated to Canada, where they settled in Toronto; here, Elsa worked in various hospitals, a vocation she retained throughout her life.[5]

Retaining an interest in class and race-based radicalism, she established contacts with various far right activists in the neighboring United States, including Willis Carto and James K. Warner, the latter being the New York organizer of the American Nazi Party. Warner had earlier attempted to establish Odinism as a religious wing of the American Nazi movement, but having believed this to be a failure he gave Christensen all of his leftover material on Odinism.[6] It was in this material that Christensen came across the Call of Our Ancient Nordic Religion, a pamphlet authored by the Australian Odinist Alexander Rud Mills.[5] Although Christensen believed that many of Mills' ideas were too heavily influenced by Freemasonry for her liking,[5] she was profoundly influenced by his ideas about reviving the worship of ancient Norse deities.[7] Her approach to the understanding of such deities would be heavily influenced by Jungian psychology, believing that the Norse deities were encoded in a collective unconscious of the white race.[8]

She was also influenced by the writing of the far right American theorist Francis Parker Yockey, in particular his 1962 work Imperium, in which he lamented the defeat of Nazi Germany and blamed it on the influence of Jews in Europe and the U.S.[9] Influenced by Yockey, Christensen came to believe that Aryan culture had reached its "senility phase", personified by the ideologies of Christianity, communism, and capitalism, the belief that all human beings are equal, and the internationalist erosion of the distinct cultures of different races.[10] She also read Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West;[11] however, she rejected Spengler's pessimistic view that this decline was terminal, instead opining that the Aryan civilization could be rejuvenated through its adoption of a new religion - Odinism.[10] She deemed Odinism to be a religion that had a natural and intrinsic relationship with what she perceived to be a Northern European race, stating that the "primary source" of the faith was "biological: its genesis is in our race, its principles encoded in our genes."[12] She also believed that this Odinism should use Norse names for the deities rather than Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic ones in order to avoid the post-war animosity between England and Germany.[13]

Christensen established the Odinist Fellowship in 1969, then based from her mobile home in Crystal River, Florida.[15] The academic specialist in the far right Jeffrey Kaplan termed it "the first organizational expression of racialist Odinism in the United States",[13] while the religious studies scholar Stefanie von Schnurbein noted that Christensen created her version of Odinism as "a discrete vehicle to establish her cultural pessimist, anti-Semitic, and radical racial agenda in a religious cloak".[16] In 1971, her husband died, after which she began to focus more fully on her Odinist activities.[12] She began touring North America to promote Odinism,[12] and in August 1971 released the first issue of her own magazine, The Odinist, which opened with the banner of "New Values from the Past".[17] The Odinist focused heavily on right-wing issues, with Kaplan noting that commentaries on right-wing ideas, contemporary news, and anti-semitic ideas were "regular fare" within its pages, while explicit discussions of Odinist theology or Old Norse texts were "few and far between".[18] The Pagan journalist Margot Adler deemed The Odinist to be "frankly racist, although they probably would have preferred the term 'racialist'."[19]

Christensen believed that Odinism was the ideal tool for the advancement of Aryan racial consciousness, expressing her opinion that the Jewish-controlled establishment would not permit her to do it a more explicit way, stating that "You cannot repeat the mistake that Hitler made [of explicitly attacking the Jews] ... Everybody knows that the Jews rule the whole damned world, so you cannot fight their combined power. You need to watch your step."[12] A number of The Odinist's readers wrote letters to the magazine expressing disapproval of what they perceived as the editors' support of Nazism, to which Christensen publicly responded that such accusations were "the cheapest of all shots that can be aimed against anyone who finds something positive to say about ... National Socialism ... or who merely desires some degree of objectivity in dealing with this grossly maligned movement."[20]

In the early 1970s, Christensen got in contact with Valgard Murray and Elton Hall, Heathens operating a kindred in Arizona, and in 1976 their group would be the first to be certified by the Odinist Fellowship.[21] During the early 1980s she established a prison-outreach program in the hope of attracting incarcerated individuals to Odinism, in doing so getting Odinism legal recognition as a religion from the state of Florida.[22] In the prisons, the Odinist Fellowship organised four seasonal festivals a year that were marked with sumbel as well as commemorating Hitler's birthday.[23]

Detail of Else Christensen's grave stone

In 1993 Christensen was arrested, tried, and sentenced to five years, four months imprisonment for trafficking marijuana and heroin.[24] She claimed that she had been driving a car from Texas to Florida as a favor to friends, and had no knowledge that she was being used as a drug mule by them.[25] Many Odinists and Asastruer decried the sentence, and claimed that it was a political frame-up; Murray established a Free Else Christensen Committee and with Stephen McNallen created a defense fund to aid her.[25] Christensen herself did not endorse the claim that the charges were politically motivated, instead blaming her own naivete at being exploited by drug dealers.[25] Before being imprisoned she gave the Odinist Fellowship's membership list to McNallen for the use of his own Heathen organisation, the Asatru Folk Assembly.[26]

After serving her sentence, she was deported to Canada, something which left her feeling bitter.[25] There, Max Hyatt, the gothi of the Asatru Alliance-affiliated group Wodan's Kindred, invited her to live at his home in Vancouver Island, British Columbia.[25] However, after personal and political differences surfaced, Christensen left Hyatt's home and moved into an RV park in Parksville, Vancouver Island, where she lived in a small trailer.[27] Despite being far less involved in Odinic activities than she had been previously,[28] she set about trying to revive the Odinist Fellowship.[25] In 1998 she began publication of Midgard Page, which was produced in both paper and electronic copies, the latter of which was housed on Hyatt's Wodansdaeg Press website.[25] During her later years, she became more moderate in her views, encouraging a cultural change among Aryans rather than political actions.[25] This contrasted with the more radical views of newer groups like Wotansvolk, who embraced militant action to bring about socio-political change.[25] She died on May 4, 2005.[29]