Who's Scandinavian

There was a nineteenth century political movement to unify Scandinavia. Popular with idealists in all of the Nordic countries, it paralleled the contemporary, and ultimately more successful, nationalistic movements in Germany and Italy. The projected Nordic Union was to be based on "a shared cultural heritage, a common Nordic mythology, and a common linguistic root in Old Norse." The movement was called "Scandinavianism." 

I. Shared cultural heritage

II. Common Nordic mythology

III. Common linguistic root in Old Norse

By these criteria, which seem reasonable, Danes, Icelanders, Norwegians, and Swedes are Scandinavian. I'm aware, of course, that Finland is often called a Scandinavian country. And obviously, Scandinavian and Finnish political and cultural history are immemorially intertwined (usually to the regret of the Finns). But so are Scandinavian and Irish, and English, and German, and Russian history. All of these countries share a much closer linguistic affinity to Old Norse. Some of them, particularly Germany, share closely-related mythologies. You have to draw the line somewhere. Therefore: no Finns.  

Except Linus Torvalds. The inventor of the Linux kernal, and was born and raised in Finland; I presume he remains a citizen. Why is he an exception? Because Linus Torvalds was born into Finland's Swedish-speaking minority; Swedish is his first language. It's a safe bet that there have always been close cultural contacts between Sweden and the Swedish-Finnish populace. Finland was a Swedish imperial possession for centuries. We can usefully call native Swedish-speaking Finns ethnic Swedes.   

And yet... and yet I excluded, on ethnic grounds, Thorstein Veblen, author of the famous and influential Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Veblen was born in these United States but, as the son of recent immigrants, his first language was Norwegian.  But he began learning English at an early age. He wrote in English. Norwegians in America, of necessity, quickly assimilated. They have been speaking native Swedish in Finland for centuries.

Does including Torvalds but excluding Veblen seem arbitrary? 

A further complication: The early modern monarchs of Denmark and Sweden. A strong case can be made that they were really, by my linguistic criteria, Germans. German was the language of the royal court at Copenhagen, and the language in the five year old princess Christina wrote letters to her father, King Gustav Adolf. Was Gustav Adolf's first language German? It might have been; his mother was.

It may be that Thorstein Veblen, born in Wisconsin, can be as usefully called a Scandinavian as Gustavus Adolphus, born in Stockholm.