ABSTRACT
The iconic Nordic woman that emerged in Spanish political texts, novels, travelogues and press reports on women's sports during the decades before the Civil War, suddenly disappeared during the first two decades of the Franco regime. Even though the Swedish bikini girl as a female stereotype clearly belongs to the society of mass consumption developed after the Second World War it remained an emblem of modernity employed to mark Spain as Europe's unmodernized other. The Spanish press from the decades preceding the Franco era was aligned with the general European tendency to uphold the stereotypical Nordic body type and colouring as an aesthetic ideal, particularly in the shape of the legendary Valkyrie. This chapter shows that the idea of the Nordic woman appears as an imagological discursive formation that is notably older than the sexually adventurous Swedish cinema blond or the bikini girl of the tourist boom.
