Northern memories and the English Middle Ages 9781526145369

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N ORTHERN M E pornography MORIES AND sanctity and Tin H Emedieval   E N G L I S H culture MIDDLE AGES

Series editors: Anke Bernau, David Matthews and James Paz Series founded by: J. J. Anderson and Gail Ashton Advisory board: Ruth Evans, Patricia C. Ingham, Andrew James Johnston, Chris Jones, Catherine Karkov, Nicola McDonald, Sarah Salih, Larry Scanlon and Stephanie Trigg Founding series editors j. j. anderson, gail ashton

Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture publishes monographs and essay collections This series is broad in scope and receptive to innovation, bringing together a varie comprising new research informed by current critical methodologies ontothe approaches. It is intended includeliterary monographs, collections of commissioned es editions and/or translations of texts, with a focus on English and English-re cultures of the Middle Ages. We are interested in all periods,and from the early Middle Ages literature and culture. It embraces medieval writings of many different kinds (imagina through to the late, and we include post-medieval engagements with scientific, and representahistorical, political, religious) as well as post-medieval treatments of med An important aim of the series is that contributions to it should be written tions of the medieval period (or ‘medievalism’). ‘Literature’ material. is taken in a broad sense, to style which is accessible to a wide range of readers. include the many different medieval genres: imaginative, historical, political, scientific, already published religious. While we welcome contributions on the diverse cultures of medieval Britain and imagination in the Gawain-poems and are happy to receive submissions on Anglo-Norman, Language Anglo-Latin and Celtic writJ. J. Anderson ings, we are also open to work on the Middle Ages in Europe more beyond. Water and fire:widely, The myth ofand the Flood in Anglo-Saxon England Daniel Anlezark The Parlement of Foulys (by Geoffrey Chaucer) Titles available in the series D. S. Brewer (ed.) 17. The church as sacred space in Middle English literature andGreenery: culture Ecocritical readings of late medieval English literature Gillian Rudd Laura Varnam 18. Aspects of knowledge: Preserving and reinventing traditions of learning in the Middle Ages Marilina Cesario and Hugh Magennis (eds) 19. Visions and ruins: Cultural memory and the untimely Middle Ages Joshua Davies 20. Participatory reading in late-medieval England Heather Blatt 21. Affective medievalism: Love, abjection and discontent Thomas A. Prendergast and Stephanie Trigg 22. Performing women: Gender, self, and representation in late-medieval Metz Susannah Crowder 23. The politics of Middle English parables: Fiction, theology, and social practice Mary Raschko 24. Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry and Melissa Raine (eds) 25. Borrowed objects and the art of poetry: Spolia in Old English verse Denis Ferhatovic´ 26. Rebel angels: Space and sovereignty in Anglo-Saxon England Jill Fitzgerald 27. A landscape of words: Ireland, Britain and the poetics of space, 700–1250 Amy Mulligan 28. Household knowledges in late-medieval England and France Glenn D. Burger and Rory G. Critten (eds) 29. Practising shame: Female honour in later medieval England Mary C. Flannery 30. Dating Beowulf: Studies in intimacy Daniel C. Remein and Erica Weaver (eds) 31. Enacting the Bible in medieval and early modern drama Eva von Contzen and Chanita Goodblatt (eds) 32. Riddles at work in the early medieval tradition: Words, ideas, interactions Megan Cavell and Jennifer Neville (eds) 33. From Iceland to the Americas: Vinland and historical imagination Tim William Machan and Jón Karl Helgason (eds) 34. Northern memories and the English Middle Ages Tim William Machan

Northern memories and the English Middle Ages TIM WILLIAM MACHAN

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Tim William Machan 2020 The right of Tim William Machan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4535 2 hardback

First published 2020

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover Design: “Ragnarok” (detail), by Per Krohg, Nasjonalbibliotek (Oslo, Norway); photograph courtesy of Gjertrud F. Stenbrenden

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

For Christine

Contents

List of figuresviii Acknowledgementsix 1 The spectacle of history

1

2 Modern travel, medieval places

25

3 Ethnography and heritage

51

4 An open-air museum

87

5 Stories that make things real

115

6 Narrative, memory, meaning

145

Bibliography166 Index185

Figures

1 Runestone from Olaus Magnus’s Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalis (Wikipedia / public domain) 71 2 Frontispiece, Olaus Rudbeck’s Atlantica (reproduced with permission, Litteraturbanken) 73 3 Detail from Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina (reproduced with permission, National Library of Sweden, KoB 1 ab) 159

Acknowledgements

This book began on horseback, on a guided tour retracing the countryside in which the events of Njal’s Saga take place. To ride from locale to locale, listening to the saga and to explanations of why the terrain indicated that these places had to be the very places the saga describes, was to engage in the most literal kind of reception study imaginable. The proof of the medieval story lay in the modern landscape, which the critic-rider remade simply by traversing, naming, and explaining. On horseback, I began to think about very old but still challenging questions: how do we know and preserve the past – specifically, the medieval past; why should we have any interest in trying to do so; and what happens when we express our interests? If I was able first to think about the ideas of Northern memories and the English Middle Ages while I rode near Hlíðarendi, Þríhyrningur, and Bergþórshvoll, I was able to write the book because of the support of institutions and friends alike. A grant from the Fulbright Scholar Program made it possible for me to conduct research in Scandinavia; simply put, without the Fulbright, this book would not have been possible. Much of my research took place at Oslo’s Nasjonalbiblioteket, the Library of the University of Oslo, and the Royal Library in Copenhagen. I want to thank the helpful staffs of all three institutions, as well as Petter Næss of Oslo’s Fulbright office and Michael Benskin and Gjertrud Stenbrenden of the University of Oslo. I am grateful to the University itself, and specifically to the Institutt for Litteratur, Områdestudier og Europeiske Språk, for a welcoming environment conducive to research and study. I thank the University of Notre Dame for a leave that made it possible to accept the Fulbright, and the staff in the archives at Notre Dame’s Hesburgh library, who facilitated my research in many ways. Both the Society of Antiquaries and the British Library likewise allowed me invaluable access to crucial materials. Parts of this book were presented as talks

x

Acknowledgements

at the University of Oslo; Iceland’s Snorrastófa; the twenty-second Germanic Linguistics Conference; University College, London; and the University of Iceland’s Centre for Medieval Studies. I am grateful to all of the audiences for their interests and comments. In the spring of 2015 I taught a graduate seminar that touched on several of this book’s topics, and I am glad to be able to thank the students for their curiosity and insights, which led me to rethink many issues. Notre Dame in general and the Department of English and Medieval Institute in particular offer terrific environments for working on a project like this. For preparation of the Index, I thank the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame, as well as Zachary Melton. For stimulating conversations and their commitment to intellectual work, I especially want to thank Christopher Abram, Haraldur Bernharðsson, Thomas Burman, Richard Cole, Mimi Ensley, Johannes Göransson, Laura Knoppers, Jesse Lander, John McGreevy, John McKinnell, Valerie Sayers, John Sitter, Becky West, and Bergur Þorgeirsson. From the more distant past, I thank Richard N. Ringler, with whom I first studied Old Norse language and literature and who passed on a passion for Scandinavia. Rendering Old Norse names in English is always a challenge. Here I have used the most common English translations and transliterations; I initially cite all works by their original titles and provide a parenthetical translation at that time. Unless otherwise noted, translations from languages other than English are my own; any mistakes in them or infelicities in my style or argument are entirely my responsibility. Jón Karl Helgason has been friend, critic, and horse-riding ­companion; to me, the voice of the author of Njála always will be his. He also read the whole of this book in draft and improved its details and design in more ways than I can describe. At Manchester University Press, Meredith Carroll has been a terrific, encouraging editor. I am grateful to the Press’s anonymous readers as well, for their many helpful suggestions, which also have significantly changed and improved my arguments. I dedicate the book to Christine, who participated in that same horse-riding adventure and in many another adventure for a long time now. We met in Copenhagen in 1975, lived for an extended period in Oslo, and often have visited Iceland and Sweden for recreation as well as work. It is difficult for me to imagine Scandinavia or life without her. Tim William Machan South Bend, Indiana

1 The spectacle of history

Memory is a dynamic process. It connects something from the past (whether an object, event, text, or idea) with some later individuals or institutions. The subjects and forms of memories therefore vary not only by time and location but also by their origins; memories can arise from strictly personal interest, but they also can be rooted in politics, ideology, ethnicity, national identity, and other social impetuses. The one constant in this dynamic process is the fact that the result of memory is the creation of some kind of community across time. Performative rather than simply reproductive, Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney point out, memory ‘is as much a matter of acting out a relationship to the past from a particular point in the present as it is a matter of preserving and retrieving earlier stories’.1 This is a book about what I have called northern memories, a purposefully capacious expression in which ‘memories’ is meant to capture the multivalence of the kinds of things being remembered as well as of the ways in which these memories took shape. Equally capacious is ‘northern’, which all at once suggests something produced in the north, directed at it, or associated with it. Many of the works I discuss imply still another sense: ‘north’ as an imaginative construct that connotes a set of cultural values as well as a physical space. Inevitably, north is also a relational term, to the extent that what is north depends on where the observer – the one doing the remembering – literally and figuratively stands. ‘Middle Ages’ may denote a specific (if still relational) time period between the antique and early modern epochs, but the conjunction ‘and’ is likewise purposefully accommodating. For the memories I talk about are variously descended from the medieval period, inspired by it, and constitutive of the modern as well as the medieval. Even the adjective ‘English’ conveys some capaciousness, defining the Middle Ages as they took place in England, as they were imagined to have taken place there, and as they relate to England’s larger

2

Northern memories and the English Middle Ages

­ ost-medieval concerns. All this means that the northern ­memories p I discuss are less individual than collective – broadly shared cultural memories that, in their dynamics, fashion a present in the process of recalling a past. Of course, the dynamic conjunction of Scandinavia with Britain predates even the medieval period. Migrants from what is typically called the North-west branch of the Germanic people inhabited both regions – in Britain beginning with the implosion of the Roman Empire and in Scandinavia much earlier – and they brought with them at least some common beliefs and practices. In early medieval Britain, such commonality was enforced, if also transformed, when Danish and Norwegian Vikings first raided, then settled, and eventually conquered their very distant Anglo-Saxon kin. Word borrowings, place-names, and folk traditions, especially in the Midlands and north of England, attest to the extensiveness of such contact. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, following the Norman Conquest and the cessation of migration from Scandinavia, the nature of this contact had changed considerably. No longer raiders or colonisers, descendants of the original Vikings had become English-speaking farmers and traders, living alongside descendants of the Anglo-Saxons and like them subservient to England’s kings with increasing ambitions to assert the political integrity of England as a nation. It is no exaggeration to say, then, that the whole of the English Middle Ages cannot be understood apart from the Scandinavian influence on it. Studies of art, language, literature, kingship, and politics have explored this influence in compelling if sometimes narrow detail. Elaine Treharne, for instance, describes the eleventh and twelfth centuries as a period in which the native English worked to resist what she calls the trauma of the Norman Conquest by fashioning a continuation of narrowly Anglo-Scandinavian traditions.2 And focusing on the early modern period’s interest in the pre-Conquest era, John Niles and Rebecca Brackmann independently emphasise the specifically English motivations and means for crafting a sense of Anglo-Saxon England.3 Indeed, Allen Frantzen described a ‘desire for origins’ that animated the work of early modern critics like Matthew Parker and motivated an inwardly focused antiquarian project in which, for modern scholars, Scandinavia’s ­formative role is often only ancillary.4 While such approaches illuminate the role of English texts and ideas in the post-medieval re-creation of the Middle Ages, they also largely bypass the Nordic world’s

The spectacle of history

3

material and conceptual contributions to this re-creation. When medieval Scandinavia has figured in the memorialisation of the English Middle Ages, the emphasis typically has been on literary connections, especially on English writings composed since the late-eighteenth century.5 Within this familiar critical context, the present book seeks to do something much less familiar. It concerns how English writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries remembered Scandinavia, especially Iceland and Norway; how by remembering Scandinavia and its people they furthered contemporary sentiments not simply about that region but about the emerging global role of Great Britain; and how they often did so by selectively collapsing the contemporary world and the Middle Ages, providing memories of both in the process. More than simply a literary issue, I will argue, the construction of an AngloScandinavian memory served as an organising ­ principle for ­cultural politics, p ­ roviding ways to read past and present alike as testaments to British exceptionalism. Put another way, much of what English critics of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries remembered about medieval English geography, history, religion, and literature, they remembered by means of Iceland, Norway, and, to lesser extents, Denmark and Sweden. And these memories, in turn, figure in something even broader, for they play a ­foundational (if under-appreciated) role in the fashioning of the United Kingdom, which accounts for the h ­ istorical framework I follow: post-medieval and prior to what Reinhart Koselleck and others have characterised as the nineteenth-century emergence of a new kind of memory, one that turned away from understanding history as foremost an instructor of moral and political lessons.6 My topic, then, is essentially how Anglo-Scandinavian memories functioned between Robert Fabyan’s early-sixteenth-century Chronicles and the Victorian British Empire. With a timeframe as well as a topic as broad as these, I want to turn now to several specific contexts that underwrite my selectivity and thesis. Specifically, I want to develop some relevant historical medieval connections between Britain and Scandinavia; the ways in which medieval and modern commentators have represented these connections; and, within the frame of historical imagination and memory studies in general, my own approaches and objectives, as well as the scope and structure of this book.

4

Northern memories and the English Middle Ages

The medieval Middle Ages Some time around the year 1500 BCE, Indo-European peoples moved into what is now Germany and north-west Europe. Between the years 1000 and 500 BCE, during the Northern Bronze Age, subgroups of these peoples continued moving north and began to inhabit modern-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, where they evidently intermingled with indigenous peoples. According to the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon historian Bede, other large ­subgroups – the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes – began to arrive in Britain in the fifth century CE, coming specifically from areas that are now in north-west Germany and southern Denmark. All of which means that in a significantly qualified way the English and Nordic peoples were originally the same, although even an assertion as broad and vague as this can only be conjectural. Physical and documentary evidence may tell us with certainty some things about medieval Scandinavia and Britain, for instance, but such certainty is not possible for the prehistorical period, for which the material remains are far more limited. Since the earliest extant written accounts of the area are by first- and second-century Roman historians, in fact, we have very little first-hand information from any pre-medieval groups. While Continental emigrants to Britain initially maintained intermittent contact with their counterparts in both western and northern Europe,7 by the seventh century they largely had remade their new homeland, fashioning seven politically distinct kingdoms and driving away or assimilating with the indigenous Celtic peoples as well as the remnants of the Roman occupation that had begun in the first century. At this same time, following their long northern separation from the rest of what we know as the Germanic peoples, the Nordic groups had developed their own social, cultural, and technological organisations to such an extent that by the eighth century, shortly after Bede’s death in 735, they could organise trading missions and raiding activities that transformed the entire European political landscape. The British Isles, even though they had been settled by descendants of shared Germanic ancestors, were no exception. In 793, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, terrible portents came about over the land of Northumbria, and miserably frightened the people: these were immense flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine

The spectacle of history

5

immediately followed theses signs; and a little after that in the same year on 8 January the raiding of heathen men miserably devastated God’s church in Lindisfarne by looting and slaughter.8

In addition to raids like this, direct if none the less limited interactions among Britain and the Nordic regions continued throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, and there is evidence of mercantile activity between Britain and Iceland in particular. Within Britain itself, scattered Nordic place-names and the influence of the early Nordic language (Old Norse) on English suggest extensive contact between the Anglo-Saxon and Norse peoples that eventually went far beyond looting and slaughter. Towns like Thirsk and Whitby dot the landscape of central and northern England in particular, for instance, while common words like ‘sky’, ‘eggs’, and even ‘they’ – all borrowed from Old Norse – attest to the intimacy and stability of the relations between these two groups from the Germanic family. Around 886 King Alfred the Great and the Danish Viking Guthrum agreed to a treaty that defined a large part of the English Midlands as being subject not to English but to Danish law and thereby furthered developing AngloScandinavian social c­ onnections. This stability certainly did not last: first the Anglo-Saxons and then the Norse used military force to assert political supremacy. But the presence of various Nordic peoples in the Danelaw did influence Great Britain’s languages and social practices to such an extent that at times in the tenth and eleventh centuries distinctions among the Norse and English peoples are not easily drawn. According to the thirteenth-century Gunnlaugs saga Ormstungu (The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue), the tenth-century AngloSaxon king Ethelred understood Old Norse well enough to comprehend its use in skaldic poetry, a distinctively Norse and sometimes gratuitously obscure verse form.9 The continued presence of Norse colonies in Britain certainly makes this possible, but even more provocatively, despite the fact that the Norse and English long had been separated from their common Germanic roots, there is reason to believe that Old Norse and Old English may have been close enough in grammatical structure to allow for mutual intelligibility among speakers of both languages. Since at the very least the languages shared a great deal of lexicon, word-formation, and wordorder, some late medieval developments in English grammar could reflect the impact of non-native speakers attempting to approximate the grammar of a closely related language.10

6

Northern memories and the English Middle Ages

But even if this were the case, a distinct Scandinavian ­language persisted in England. Ascending to the English throne in 1016, the Danish Viking Cnut the Great ruled until 1035, during which time his court emerged as one of the leading centres for the production of skaldic verse. In a different vein, the earliest versions of some of the Eddic poems found in the Codex Regius (a late thirteenth-century manuscript containing mythological and heroic poems), which utilise an alliterative metre different from the one used in skaldic verse, may have been composed not in Norway or Iceland but in the Hebrides, Orkneys, and Shetlands.11 Even the Norman Conquest did not completely erase the presence of Scandinavian languages in Great Britain. One persisted in the old Danelaw into at least the twelfth century, and, in a form called Norn, several centuries longer in the Shetland and Orkney islands.12 Even so, following the Conquest English-Scandinavian interactions became increasingly attenuated. Later medieval English missionaries certainly brought English books to Iceland, where England was sometimes regarded as a centre of learning. Ælfric’s De Falsis Diis clearly underlies one Icelandic homily,13 and Kari Ellen Gade has cited Ælfric’s Grammar as a potential source for Olaf Thordarson’s mid-thirteenth-century Málskrúðsfrœði (or the Third Grammatical Treatise).14 Other traces of written Old English, such as the Anglo-Saxon graph , arrived in Iceland via Norway.15 But even these sporadic literary contacts seem to have declined as the Middle Ages advanced. Only four extant Icelandic manuscripts – all late and all deriving from a common source – contain translations of Middle English sources,16 and there are few indications of direct, late-medieval literary connections between Iceland and Britain beyond this. Thus, H. M. Smyser accepts at face-value a claim in the thirteenth-century Landres Þáttr (The Story of Landres) that when Bjarni Erlingsson was in Scotland he had the work translated from a Middle English original,17 while Rory McTurk has argued that Chaucer’s House of Fame is an analogue of Snorri’s Edda and his Wife of Bath’s Tale of Laxdæla saga (The Saga of the People from Laxdale).18 Paul Beekman Taylor links as analogues the old man of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale with Odin and his Wife of Bath with Skadi.19 As evidence of sustained English–Icelandic literary connections, however, none of these parallels is overwhelming or maybe even probable. Similarities between Ælfric’s works and Olaf’s are generic in medieval grammatical traditions and at least potentially

The spectacle of history

7

the result of similarities in linguistic structure between Old English and Old Icelandic. Simply from the point of view of textual transmission, indeed, it would be remarkable if by the late-thirteenth century, when very few people (if any) in England were reading Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, Old English language and literature could have much impact on Norse text production. In the absence of an extant Middle English romance Olive and Landres, it is impossible to demonstrate that the Norse tale in Landres Þáttr is a translation of it, and the presence of an English romance in a latethirteenth-century Scots court, in any case, is linguistically and politically improbable. For their part, the Chaucer parallels extend little beyond coincidence. Perhaps emblematic of these tenuous late medieval British–Nordic connections, the fifteenth-century Libelle of English Policy does mention Iceland in its account of England’s growing oceanic economy, but the poem shows as much interest in and knowledge of the compass that aided travel there as in the markets themselves: Of Yseland to wryte is lytill nede Save of stokfische; yit for sothe in dede Out of Bristow and costis many one Men have practiced by nedle and by stone Thiderwardes wythine a lytel whylle Wythine xij. yeres, and wythoute parille, Gone and comen, as men were wonte of olde Of Scarborowgh, unto the costes colde.20

Fifty years later, the Venetian John Cabot and (possibly) the Genoan Christopher Columbus would involve Icelandic ports in England’s westward expansion into the Americas. As with the exchange of books, however, throughout the later medieval period British economic and cultural interactions with Iceland never approached the breadth and consequentiality of those with (say) France, Holland, Italy, and Spain at this time. The very word ‘Iceland’ is a measure of this historical Atlantic disconnect. The earliest citation in the Middle English Dictionary is from Laʒamon’s Brut, written in about 1200, where the island is linked with Gotland, Ireland, and the Orkneys. A century after this Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle again mentions Iceland alongside Ireland, Scotland, and the Orkneys, rendering the island part of a formulaic expression for faraway places. As an English word, ‘Iceland’ cannot really be said to be common and specific until after the Middle Ages, with the first use of ‘Icelandic’ as a noun referring to

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the language appearing only in 1698. This was nearly two centuries after Icelanders themselves had used ‘Íslenzka’ (Icelandic) in reference to the language they spoke.21 The Middle Ages imagines itself My intention in the preceding pages has been only to sketch out the broadest contours of Anglo-Scandinavian contact during the Middle Ages. What interest me more are the responses to and the representations of this historical narrative. Already in the Middle Ages, in fact, what happened between Britain and Scandinavia became in part what some medieval writers believed, or simply wanted, to have happened. To the writers of the Icelandic sagas, for instance, England often signified less a geographical place or an economic zone than a literary device, a trope, that is crucial to developments in plot and character. For Icelanders like Gunnlaug Ormstunga and Egil Skallagrimsson, visits to Britain offered social opportunities to prove themselves and advance their standing at home. Indeed, going abroad to the British Isles or Continental Scandinavia for these purposes occurs so frequently in the family sagas that it takes on a kind of formulaic cast. As re-created by writers working three and four centuries after the fact, these opportunities imagine connections between the Norse and the English in ways that enforce, and therefore in part depend on, a work’s larger rhetorical objectives. And so the author of Gunnlaugs saga, composing at a time when Iceland was yielding its independence to Norway, describes a commonality with tenth-century England, itself on the eve of the Norman Conquest: ‘The language in England was then one and the same as that in Norway and Denmark, but when William the Bastard conquered England, there was a change of language; from then onwards, French was current in England, since he was of French extraction.’22 Britain and Iceland share a language, then, just as they share the status of lands destined to be taken over by others. Conversely, Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar (The Saga of Egil Bald-Grim’s Son) uses Britain as only one more European site where its eponymous hero can pursue his outsized but distinctly Norse ambitions. It is in England that Egil both fights on behalf of the English king Ethelstan against a force that includes a Norse contingent and also at York confronts his chief foe, the Norwegian king Erik Bloodaxe. An English town, then, serves as a venue for one of the Viking Age’s greatest warriors to save his head by composing one of the Age’s greatest artistic

The spectacle of history

9

works – a lengthy skaldic poem (in the form known as a ‘drápa’) entitled Hofuðlausn (Head-ransom). Ultimately, saga events like these reveal more about the Nordic region itself than about Britain, even if the latter is imagined as a distinctly different land inhabited by distinctly different people. A similar distinction is drawn between the two areas in the Prose Edda, the early thirteenth-century mythological handbook written by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson, who might also be the author of Egils saga. Towards the end of his preface, after explaining that the names of the Norse gods derive from those of a people who emigrated from Asia to Scandinavia, Snorri relates how these same people spread themselves and their language throughout northern Europe, though he recognises that Britain had at least one other language as well.23 While the author of Gunnlaugs saga stresses the convergence of Britain and Scandinavia, Snorri’s account, as an etiological myth of the northern peoples, expressly severs it. In either case, crucially, the Norse writers imagine Britain less as an actual historical place than as a trope to further their respective literary designs. For their parts, early medieval English writers say relatively little about Anglo-Saxons visiting Scandinavia, and the region certainly has less imaginative force in Anglo-Saxon literature than Britain has in its medieval Norse counterpart. Although the Old English poems The Battle of Maldon and The Battle of Brunanburh use encounters with the Norse as opportunities to foreground fortitude and heroism, such few moments do not constitute the kind of reputation-enhancing type-scene that Norse visits to Britain do in the sagas; and they of course show heroes fighting at home in Britain and not abroad in Iceland or Norway. Anglo-Saxon sources similarly say little about trade with Nordic countries, the one significant exception being an account of a Norwegian chieftain and merchant named Ohthere (Old Norse Óttarr) that is inserted into the ninth-century Old English translation of Orosius’s Historiae adversus Paganos. Nor do English accounts dwell from a specifically English point of view on the linguistic and cultural consequences of the Norse presence. If any trend runs through the Anglo-Saxon period, it is that English writers highlight the disruptions this presence caused. Already in the tenth century, indeed, the chronicle of ealdorman Ethelweard emphasised the Vikings’ immorality, thereby echoing accounts in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and presaging the memories of some post-Conquest historians.

10

Northern memories and the English Middle Ages

Beowulf, written in English and set entirely in Denmark and Sweden, has a peculiar though not incompatible significance in this sometimes pallid Anglo-Saxon response to contemporary Scandinavia. As much as the poem necessarily reflects something of the Anglo-Norse world from which the sole manuscript (from about the year 1000) survives – and the poem sometimes has been seen as the product of a Scandinavian community in England – the imaginative qualities that Beowulf associates with Scandinavia presume to evoke some equally imagined pre-migration moment rather than the Anglo-Saxon present. More importantly, by focusing on pre-Christian traditions and mythic events as well as historical kings, Beowulf renders Denmark a rhetorical device and perhaps mythic construct rather than a specific location and culture contemporaneous with the writing of the manuscript. It treats contemporary Denmark, that is, in metaphorical ways analogous to those the sagas use for Britain, and among extant Old English poetry it alone does so. The last and most ambitious Viking raid in England, led by Norway’s Harald Hardrada, took place shortly before William of Normandy’s Conquest. Harald’s attempt for his own conquest failed, however, and after 1066, once the Norse had ceased to represent a threat on the British political landscape, their influence on memory and literary imagining waned. English writers transferred these roles first to the Norman invaders and then to the Continental French, with the Hundred Years War replacing Viking raids as the defining political and narrative concern of the later Middle Ages. Within these changed cultural contexts, representations of the Norse presence in Britain inevitably changed as well. Rather than the violent and immoral threat they had been in Ethelweard’s Chronicle, the Vikings of Robert of Gloucester’s thirteenth-century chronicle sometimes come across as trustworthy allies. Meeting Edmund Ironside, for example, Cnut offers a kind of c­ ompanionate kingship of England and Norway: Ware uore ich desiri mest þin grace & þin loue Þat þou of alle min londes me be felawe & per & ich mot ek of engelond be þi parciner Vor ʒif we to gadere beþ & al clene of one rede Norþwey & ech oþer lond & ech prince vs wole drede Þeruore ich biseche þe haue half mi lond mid me. [For which I most seek, of your grace and your love, that you be a companion and equal with me in all my lands; and I may also be

The spectacle of history

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your associate over England. For if we together are pure and of one mind, Norway, other lands, and every ruler will fear us. Therefore I beseech you to have half my land with me.]

Certainly, there is historical justification for Cnut to appear as the consummate Christian ruler, who … louede englissemen & engelond þer to & muche louede holi chirche & susteinede al so & restorede abbeis þat destrued were biuore & chirchen let vp arere þat were arst as uorlore.24 [loved Englishmen and England, and much loved holy church, and also financed and restored abbeys that had been destroyed, and raised up churches that previously had been lost.]

At the same time, this emphasis represents a significant shift in medieval English historiographic sentiments about the Norse. This historical recuperation of the Norse as, quite literally, even Christians is stronger still in Havelok the Dane, composed about the same time as Robert’s Chronicle in England’s eastern Midlands, part of the Danelaw and so an area heavily settled by the descendants of Norwegians and Danes. Its very form and history are significant in this regard. As a romance in rhymed octosyllabic couplets, Havelok aligns itself not with the alliterative, heroic poetry of both the Anglo-Saxon and Nordic pasts but with French (and ­emergent English) traditions. Its story of a Danish champion, further, is fundamentally French, first appearing in Geoffrei Gaimar’s mid-twelfth-century L’Estoire des Engleis (History of the English), and told again in the anonymous Anglo-Norman Lai de Haveloc (Lay of Haveloc) of about 1200. The poem’s hero, of course, is Danish – in fact the son of the Danish king, Birkabeyn. But an early description of Brikabeyn’s court indicates how little the poem, like its metrical form, evokes anything specifically Nordic: He hauede mani knict and sueyn. He was fayr man and wicth: Of bodi he was þe beste knicth Þat euere micte leden uth here, Or stede on-ride or handlen spere.25 [He had many a knight and servant; he was a fair and brave man; in his body he was the best knight who ever could lead forth an army, or ride a steed or use a spear.]

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This is a court that could be located anywhere in western Europe but perhaps especially in the France or the England of romances like the thirteenth-century King Horn and fourteenth-century Sir Orfeo. Any notion of Denmark as a distinctively Scandinavian place is further erased by the poem’s plot. It tells of how Havelok, driven from Denmark by an unscrupulous regent, goes to England, where he prevails in English athletic contests and marries Goldeboru, the dead English king’s daughter who herself has been cheated by a dishonest adviser. When Havelok ascends to the thrones of both Denmark and England, he becomes a symbol of the immersion of historical Nordic identity in Britain. In this version, even the French sources’ one genuine trace of Nordic history – Havelok’s alias as Curant, derived (ultimately) from Olaf kvaran of York, the tenth-century son of Sigtrygg – is nowhere to be found.26 As Thorlac Turville-Petre has said, thirteenth- and fourteenth-­ century accounts may rehearse how the Vikings ‘killed, looted and pillaged’, but they do not offer a ‘more pedestrian account of how they settled a large area, farmed and traded, intermarried and became “us”, the English’.27 Instead, historical memory of the Norse seems to have become a kind of gradual forgetting. By the beginning of the early modern period, this immersion of Norse identity became even deeper; specifically Scandinavian legends well may have been cultivated in the East Midlands in particular, but if so they have left few traces.28 With Britain’s evolving interest in foreign enterprises and Denmark’s and Sweden’s increasing focus on internal and Continental concerns, British historical imagination no longer framed any Nordic region as the destructive force found in Anglo-Saxon England or even as the comparable chivalric land it is in Havelok. Instead, seeing Norway and Iceland in particular from the vantage of an emergent global power, British writers begin to distance contemporary Scandinavia from Britain by describing much of the region as one of candleeating, fish-drying, dirty, and crude people. To Andrew Boorde, writing in 1542, Icelanders are ‘beastly creatures vnmanered and vntaughte. They haue no houses but yet doth lye in caues altogether lyke swine.’ Norwegians are merely ‘rewde’.29 Historical imagination By no means do such skewed representations and memories invalidate the substantive connections between Britain and ­ Scandinavia throughout the medieval and pre-medieval periods,

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or the explanatory usefulness of these connections. The notion of a Continental Germanic period would indeed account for the presence of similar linguistic and cultural traditions in northern and north-western Europe as the consequences of migrations into those areas by people who originally shared those same traditions. Further, Britain and Scandinavia subsequently shared moments of potent cultural upheaval and transformation: not only the expansion of the Vikings but also the coming of Christianity and the growth of international trade in the early modern period. Moments like these brought Britain and much of Scandinavia into close economic and social contact with one another, forging a dynamic by which one region’s historical experience was to an extent dependent on the other’s. All of this could figure (and has figured) in any straightforward historical narrative about the Scandinavian or English Middle Ages and their aftermath. As the philosopher R. G. Collingwood long ago observed, however, ‘History is not a spectacle. The events of history do not “pass in review” before the historian … He has to re-create them in his own mind, re-enacting for himself so much of the experience of the men who took part in them as he wishes to understand.’30 Historiography is therefore an act of memory, and as such (according to Paul Ricœur, more recently) responsive to the simple yet crucial questions ‘who is remembering’ and ‘what is being remembered’.31 Historians of the Middle Ages, whether medieval or modern, have to decide both upon which persons, events, or ideas should figure in the stories they tell and also upon, in effect, the stories themselves. What constancies might run through medieval social practices and ideas? What causes and effects might transform disparate events into meaningful and memorable narratives? How might these constancies and narratives set the medieval period apart from its modern counterpart yet also provide continuities with it? Which medieval experiences had enough contemporary value that early modern historians and ethnographers would wish to understand them? Or, more plainly, why should the present – any present – care about the past? These are the questions that motivate the present study. A fundamental part of the book’s argument is that, from the seventeenth century on, British writers’ historical gaze included and even focused on Scandinavia, which as Protestant and monarchical constituted a politically kindred spirit that contrasted with France, Italy, and Spain. Further, in their gods, myths, and narratives, the Nordic lands provided cultural history of a kind and depth that the

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English record does not preserve. Along with the so-called Celtic fringe and overseas colonialisation, Scandinavia – medieval and modern alike – thereby became one of the external reference points for the forging of a contemporary British nation. Later writers like William Morris and J. R. R. Tolkien could re-create medieval England by retelling Norse stories, then, precisely because already in the seventeenth century the British historical memory, as fashioned by scholars such as Robert Sheringham, Daniel Langhorne, and Aylett Sammes, had come to encompass the Nordic region. British medieval mythology, customs, history, ethnicity, language, literature – the memories of all of these took shape, in the early modern period, by means of Nordic materials. At stake in these memories was not just the British past, however. British heritage was at issue as well. In Pierre Nora’s formulation, Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.32

Memory’s opposition to history may be a kind of epistemological necessity: if there is to be something known and testable, which the nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke established as the modern historiographic emphasis on showing the past ‘exactly as it happened’,33 there must also be some cultural or intellectual investment that renders the past worth knowing.34 Whether designated cultural memory or heritage, this approach to the past is avowedly invested, seeking the significance of that truth as well as the truth itself. If history is (conventionally) the putatively disinterested search for what happened, cultural memory and heritage are the impulses that provide a reason to search in the first place. They are the products of creatively working with and thinking about the past, and in this regard they can use places, ethnography, character, and language as malleable ways to construct not just a past but a meaningful one. History, simply put, might identify the details of a battle, while heritage would marshal a parade in its honour, and this dynamic means that the latter

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always relies on distinguishing historical periods: the past moment being remembered as distinct from whatever moment in which the remembering occurs. Kathleen Davis has argued that such chronological distinctions inevitably have social as well as cultural implications. Her interest is in how the category ‘“feudal” – despite its inaccuracies, contradictions, and anachronisms – persists today as a temporal marker and a lever of power’.35 Mine is in the equally powerful and politically fraught categories ‘the north’ and ‘the English Middle Ages’. My concentration on the conjunctions of northern memories and the English Middle Ages thus necessarily diverges in several ways from all early modern responses to the medieval period, as well as from the modern critical responses I discussed at the outset. This perspective positions literature less as the cause of modern AngloScandinavian interests than as the recurrence of the same cultural concerns that animated early modern politics, science, and natural history. Indeed, nineteenth-century interest in the Vikings and Nordic past, while expressed in increasingly popular formats, was not at all a new development but an extension of earlier multilingual, diverse, and sometimes ephemeral traditions (such as travel writing and ethnography) in the production of cultural memories. As British visitors and thinkers encountered the Scandinavian ‘present’ in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, I will argue, they similarly found evidence for the British past. Rather than a source study that traces the genealogy of cultural ideas, political contacts, or literary influences, then, this book is above all a theoretical inquiry into the persistence, independent imitation, and reproduction of Nordic tropes for the imagining of Britain and its medieval past. This last point, on my methods, requires additional comment. Discussing how cultural memories are formed and function, Jan Assmann has suggested that every ‘culture formulates something that might be called a connective structure. It has a binding effect that works on two levels – social and temporal. It binds people together by providing a “symbolic universe” … a common area of experience, expectation, and action whose connecting force provides them with trust and with orientation.’ Cultural memory, says Assmann, is ‘the handing down of meaning’, which can be located in all manner of social stories, traditions, and rituals.36 To a significant degree, then, the connective structure of a cultural memory like the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages (as it might be called) arises through repetition, which may or may not be at

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the conscious level. This is precisely the reason why, throughout the period I examine, disparate writers from disparate social ­circumstances – without necessarily any direct knowledge of one another’s works – can replicate and so circulate a persistent group of images, ideas, topics, words, and activities that relate at once to medieval Britain and the modern Scandinavian world. I mean in particular representations of customs, clothing, language, ­ethnicity, natural phenomena, and so forth. Easy to reproduce, enduring, and abundant, these tropes proved prolific as ways of framing English discussions of Scandinavia. And collectively, the replication of such references circulated a larger set of ideas about the past, Scandinavia, and Britain. According to these ideas, the English and Nordic peoples originally constituted the same group of people and therefore still shared fundamental personal traits of greater consequence than any historical interactions they may have had. Since the Middle Ages and despite a shared ethnicity and character, however, the peoples and their lands were understood to have diverged markedly, with Britain becoming an emergent global power and Scandinavia remaining an essentially premodern location. In modern-day Norway and Iceland in particular, by this reasoning, Britons could re-visit their own medieval past, and by so doing both affirm the superiority of the British present and (by implication) provide evidence for the integrity and transcendence of the United Kingdom. The cultural utility of this kind of memory, in turn, fostered a welcoming reception for the tropes I discuss and so also for their continued replication. These ideas, I emphasise, lurk in the background, behind the focus of much of my discussion, which is the circulation of often idle British comments on the Nordic landscape, its people, and their habits. I am not suggesting the presence of something subversive or even nefarious, such as the notion that a writer like Mary Wollstonecraft was actively engaged in empire-building. But neither do I view British commentary on Scandinavia as a reflection of simply random and inconsequential curiosity, nor even as an evolving appreciation of Scandinavia as a beautiful, regulated place in the collective European imagination.37 I see the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages as having greater import than the former view and less innocence than the latter. In effect, my argument focuses on a cultural meme of great consequence, one whose cumulative impact was to further the invention of the English Middle Ages as well as of Great Britain itself.38

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An approach like this confronts two overarching challenges. First, in working outside the prevailing source-study model, the argument by design moves back and forth across four centuries of texts, often juxtaposing works written in several different languages and separated by decades and even centuries. Hickes, Wollstonecraft, and Morris can all appear together. By doing this I certainly do not mean to imply absolute coherence and ­consistency within the works of any one writer, much less among everything that was written in either Britain or Scandinavia at this time; regional responses to and within Scandinavia could remain distinctive, for instance, even as they furthered more general, national attitudes towards Anglo-Nordic connections. Nor do I mean to suggest that whatever was written about history or language was produced as part of some broadly based and well-organised ­political plan – as if disparate writers from different regions and eras engaged in a concentrated, almost anthropomorphic exchange between Britain and the Nordic regions. Throughout the early modern era, in fact, neither Britain nor Scandinavian could be regarded as a monolithic region, the one divided from the other by a simplistic binary. Indeed, both regions formed cultural memories independently of one another; imperial ambitions, Anglo-Celtic relations, and industrialisation, for instance, all played their own significant roles in fashioning the United Kingdom. Further, some of what I trace in A ­ nglo-Scandinavian relations reproduces a larger pan-European retrospection that defined the present, the Middle Ages, and antiquity as part of nationalising projects.39 But I am primarily curious about how texts, with or without any direct connections to one another, reproduce shared tropes and outlooks and about how this reproduction could cumulatively further larger cultural ideas of the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages. It is partly to uncover these generative practices, in fact, that I concentrate on the actions and writings of individuals and not large social movements like Romanticism or nationalism. And it is to capture the diverse, disconnected, and yet coherent manifestations of what I have called a cultural meme that I purposely move back and forth across the centuries. If genealogy demonstrates the development of specific, connected issues, the methods I follow here offer a way to approach the collective impact of such issues. I certainly do not entirely abandon source criticism: I situate Hickes’s arguments in relation to those of early modern linguistics, for example, and Wollstonecraft’s concerns in relation to the Romantic emphasis on the sublime. But genealogy is only one, and not necessarily the

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best, way to capture how culture evolves. What I pursue here offers another, perhaps better sense of how ideas accumulate across time. The second challenge, theoretical as well as practical, is what to call the regions that interest the writers I consider. The distinctions we moderns make do not neatly coincide with those made by our early modern predecessors or, often, our predecessors in the nineteenth century. What they typically call ‘Scandinavian’ or ‘northern’ we might be inclined to specify as ‘Swedish’, ‘Finnish’, ‘Norwegian’, ‘Danish’, and ‘Icelandic’. As Chapter 2 suggests, in earlier eras ‘Scandinavia’ itself might embrace regions in central and eastern Europe. An additional complication is that Anglophone ethnographers and critics sometimes based their arguments about Scandinavia in general on evidence taken from a narrow range of landscapes and texts. They may have perceived all of Scandinavia, then, while seeing only Norwegian mountains or reading only Icelandic sagas. And Scandinavian writers could be just as non-discriminating as their Anglophone counterparts. Snorri was claimed (by various writers) to have passed on specifically Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish traditions; Olaus Rudbeck, we shall see, planted Yggdrasil in Uppsala. If ‘Scandinavian’ and ‘Nordic’ complicate modern perceptions, then they also capture historical ones. Sometimes I draw attention to these differences, and sometimes I talk specifically about individual national ideas, but often I retain ‘Scandinavia’ or ‘Nordic’ because of their ­historical force. Equally challenging is what to call the homeland of the Anglophones I consider. Most of them lived in England proper, but they wrote during the formation of Great Britain and the United Kingdom. While this formation may not have been foremost in their minds, their writings still contributed and responded to it. Here is an area, then, where genealogy certainly is at issue, since seventeenth-century views of Britain differ from and lead to nineteenth-century ones. ‘England’ evokes neither the historical political reality nor the developing cultural commitment to Great Britain with its colonial and eventually imperial aspirations. Yet ‘Britain’ and especially ‘British’ inevitably suggest native Britons and the Celtic areas of the United Kingdom. Much of the time I use ‘English’ to reflect the language and historical perceptions and ‘Britain’ to refer to a historical place, although I also sometimes address this issue head-on. Yet another terminological comment concerns ‘Anglo-Saxon’. Both the word and the concept have increasingly been criticised

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for nationalistic and racist undertones that prevent scholarship of the early Middle Ages from being truly inclusive. But replacing ‘Anglo-Saxon’ in a study like this presents challenges. For one thing, it is a term freely used by many of the critics I talk about, including Samuel Laing, Frederic Metcalfe, George Hickes, and the Dane Nikolaj Grundtvig (Hickes in Latin and Grundtvig in Danish). It is in fact during the period I consider that ‘AngloSaxon’ originates, with the earliest citation of the noun or adjective in the OED being to an English work of 1602; this development is in part the subject of Niles’s The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England. Here, as I noted earlier, I am concerned not (as is Niles) with English uses of the English past but with English uses of the Nordic past. As with ‘Scandinavian’, then, as much as ‘Anglo-Saxon’ may complicate modern perceptions, it captures historical ones. The other challenge to replacing the compound is that I never found a usable alternative: ‘early English’ is vague and, in some circumstances, flat-out wrong, and ‘Old English’ to me is a linguistic term that in any case could produce oddities like ‘Old English England’. So whenever I could not find a reasonable alternative, I have kept the term, and always so when it figures in a quotation or the title of a work. In pursuing these arguments, I follow four topics, which function (to a large extent) as variations on a theme: natural history, ethnography, moral assessments, and literature. As my discussion already has suggested, my focus is broadly historical and not rigidly chronological. I do consider the impact of specific publications and discoveries, and I do attend to nuances in how individuals of even the same era thought about the same topics. But much of my interest focuses on how ideas and tropes expressed by seventeenth-century writers like Sheringham and Langhorne persist among eighteenthcentury writers like Thomas Percy and nineteenth-century ones like Thomas Carlyle. I am interested, then, in how the often disconnected replication of such tropes advanced broader attitudes, whether popular or academic, towards history and culture, and to this end I identify the consequential commonalities of what is said and in what it contributes to memories of both the Middle Ages and the modern world. It is for this reason that I rely on works from several languages, representing a range of disciplines that we might now differentiate as science, history, mythology, fiction, linguistics, politics, and memoir. Partly to emphasise the book’s topical rather than strictly chronological shape, Northern Memories and the English Middle Ages

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begins with the nineteenth-century British travellers to Iceland and Norway who came to find – and who did find – a medieval landscape that they described for Britain at large. Discussion then turns back in time to the large cultural ideas that were furthered by these acts of geographic and political discovery. Specifically, I look at early modern ethnic studies (typically written in Latin) that developed presumed connections among the English and Nordic peoples. The next chapter extends these ethnographic arguments into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when English commentators denigrated modern Scandinavians and in so doing helped to affirm their cultural status and also to fashion ideas that helped sustain the United Kingdom. These are the arguments that promoted the influence of medieval Nordic literature on more recent British literature, which figures in Chapter 5. The final chapter situates Nordic inspiration for an English Middle Ages within the larger context of the contingencies of memory. In referring to ‘Nordic inspiration’ and ‘an English Middle Ages’, in general and without definite articles, I mean to emphasise the notion that other kinds of inspiration, including other kinds of Nordic inspiration, were and are possible, just as are other views of the English Middle Ages. Notes   1 Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, ‘Introduction: Cultural memory and its dynamics’, in Erll and Rigney (eds), Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), p. 2.  2 Elaine Treharne, Living through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020–1220 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).  3 John D. Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: Remembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015); Rebecca Brackmann, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Study of Old English (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012).  4 For accounts of the broad, cultural context, see Allen J. Frantzen, Desire for Origins: New Language, Old English, and Teaching the Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Timothy Graham (ed.), The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000); and Angus Edmund Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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  5 See Chapter 5 for the relevant criticism.   6 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), and The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner and Others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).  7 See, for example, Matthew Townend, Antiquity of Diction in Old English and Old Norse Poetry, E. J. Quiggin Memorial Lecture (Cambridge: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, 2015); and Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr, ‘Late medieval and early modern opinions on the affinity between English and Frisian: The growth of a commonplace’, Folia Linguistica Historica 9 (1989), 167–91.   8 Michael Swanton (ed. and trans.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 55/57.  9 Magnús Fjalldal, Anglo-Saxon England in Icelandic Medieval Texts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), pp. 3–4. 10 Sarah Grey Thomason and Terrence Kaufman, Language Contact, Creolization and Genetic Linguistics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 263–331; and Matthew Townend, Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic Relations between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). 11 See Guðbrandur Vigúfsson and F. York Powell (ed. and trans.), Corpus Poeticum Boreale: The Poetry of the Old Northern Tongue from the Earliest Times to the Thirteenth Century, 2 vols (1883; rpt New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), vol. 1, pp. lxxi–lxxiii. John McKinnell has suggested that both Vǫlundarkvíða (The Lay of Volund) and Þrymskvíða (The Lay of Thrym) show English influence and may have been composed in northern England. See ‘Myth as therapy: The usefulness of Þrymskviða’, Medium Ævum 69 (2000), 1–20; and ‘Eddic poetry in Anglo-Scandinavian northern England’, in James GrahamCampbell, Richard Hall, Judith Jesch, and David N. Parsons (eds), Vikings and the Danelaw: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress (Oxford: Oxbow, 2001), pp. 327–44. Also see Ursula Dronke (ed.), The Poetic Edda, Volume II, The Mythological Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 276–80. 12 Einar Haugen, The Scandinavian Languages: An Introduction to Their History, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. ­ 180–244; David N. Parsons, ‘How long did the Scandinavian language survive in England? Again’, in James Graham-Campbell, Richard Hall, Judith Jesch, and David N. Parsons (eds), Vikings and the Danelaw: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress (Oxford: Oxbow, 2001), pp. 299–312. On a postmedieval Norse language in the outer islands, see Michael Barnes, ‘The death of Norn’, in Heinrich Beck (ed.), Germanische Rest- and Trümmersprachen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1989), pp. 21–43; ‘Reflections on the structure and the demise of Orkney and Shetland Norn’, in

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P. Sture Ureland and George Broderick (eds), Language Contact in the British Isles: Proceedings of the Eighth International Symposium on Language Contact, Douglas, Isle of Man, 1988 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1991), pp. 429–60; and ‘Norse in the British Isles’, in Anthony Faulkes and Richard Perkins (eds), Viking Revaluations – Viking Society Centenary Symposium (14–15 May) 1992 (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1993), pp. 65–84. 13 On De Falsis Diis see John C. Pope (ed.), Homilies of Ælfric: A Supplementary Collection, 2 vols, EETS o.s. 259, 260 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967 and 1968), vol. 2, pp. 669–70; Eiríkur Jónsson and Finnur Jónsson (eds), Hauksbók, Udgiven efter de Arnamagnænske Håndskrifter no. 371, 544 og 675 4o, 3 vols (Copenhagen: Thieles Bogtrykkeri, 1892–96), vol. 1, pp. 156–64; Arnold Taylor, ‘Hauksbók and Ælfric’s De Falsis Diis’, Leeds Studies in English 3 (1969), 101–9; and John Frankis, From Old English to Old Norse: A Study of Old English Texts Translated into Old Norse with an Edition of the English and Norse Versions of Ælfric’s De Falsis Diis (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, 2016). On the introduction of books by Anglo-Saxon missionaries, see Fjalldal, Anglo-Saxon England in Icelandic Medieval Texts, pp. 9–10; and Geraldine Barnes, ‘The medieval anglophile: England and its rulers in Old Norse history and saga’, Parergon 10 (1992), 11–25. 14 Kari Ellen Gade, ‘Ælfric in Iceland’, in Judy Quinn, Tarrin Wills, and Kate Heslop (eds), Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World: Essays in Honour of Margaret Clunies Ross (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 321–39. 15 Haraldur Bernharðsson, ‘Scribal culture in thirteenth-century Iceland: The introduction of Anglo-Saxon “f” in Icelandic script’, JEGP 117 (2018), 279–314. 16 Peter A. Jorgensen, ‘The Icelandic translations from Middle English’, in Evelyn Scherabon Firchow, Kaaren Grimstad, Nils Hasselmo, and Wayne A. O’Neil (eds), Studies for Einar Haugen Presented by Friends and Colleagues (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), pp. 305–20. 17 H. M. Smyser, ‘The Middle English and Old Norse story of Olive’, PMLA 56 (1941), 69–84. 18 McTurk, Chaucer and the Norse and Celtic Worlds (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). 19 Paul Beekman Taylor, Sharing Story: Medieval Norse–English Literary Relationships (New York: AMS Press, 1998), pp. 233–44. 20 Sir George Warner (ed.), The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye: A Poem on the Use of Sea-power 1436 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), lines 798–805. 21 OED, s.v. Icelandic, adj. and n., and MED, s.v. Islond, n.; Allan Karker, ‘The disintegration of the Danish tongue’, in Einar G. Pétursson and Jónas Kristjánsson (eds), Sjötíu Ritgerðir Helgaðar Jacobi

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Beneditsynni 20 Júli 1977 (Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, 1977), pp. 481–90. 22 Peter Foote (ed.), Gunnlaugs saga Ormstungu, trans. Randolph Quirk (London: Thomas Nelson, 1957), p. 15. 23 Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans. Anthony Faulkes (London: Dent, 1987), p. 5. 24 Robert of Gloucester, The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, ed. William Aldis Wright, Rolls Series 86, 2 vols (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1887), lines 6307–12, 6506–9. 25 Havelok, ed. G.V. Smithers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), lines 343–7. 26 Havelok, ed. Smithers, pp. lv–lvi. 27 Thorlac Turville-Petre, ‘Representations of the Danelaw in Middle English literature’, in James Graham-Campbell, Richard Hall, Judith Jesch, and David N. Parsons (eds), Vikings and the Danelaw: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress (Oxford: Oxbow, 2001), p. 345. 28 Eleanor Parker, ‘Siward the Dragon-slayer: Mythmaking in AngloScandinavian England’, Neophilologus 98 (2014), 481–493; and Richard Cole, ‘British perspectives’, in J. Glauser, P. Hermann, and S. A. Mitchell (eds), Handbook of Pre-modern, Nordic Memory Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches, 2 vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018), vol. 1, pp. 891–8. 29 Andrew Boorde, The fyrst boke of the introduction of knowledge: The whych dothe teache a man to speake parte of all maner of languages, and to knowe the vsage and fashion of al maner of countreys (London: Copland, 1555 [1542]), sig. Div r. Also see Ethel Seaton, Literary Relations of England and Scandinavia in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935). 30 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), p. 97. 31 See Paul Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 32 Pierre Nora, ‘Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire’, Representations 26 (1989), 8. 33 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 316. 34 For additional discussion of this distinction, see Jan Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 58–62. 35 Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 23. 36 Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, pp. 2 and 6.

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37 For this latter argument, see Karen Oslund, Iceland Imagined: Nature, Culture, and Storytelling in the North Atlantic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011). 38 On memes see Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 39 Ian Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

2 Modern travel, medieval places

At the opening of his 1836 Adventures in the North of Europe, Edward Landor makes a perhaps surprising admission. ‘Quite aware that in the well-trampled field of literature I had no chance of making an impression as a sober, plodding traveller’, he says, ‘I imagined that by creating a more interesting wanderer … who should follow the path I myself had pursued, I might, perhaps, win over a few readers who would have taken no pleasure in a mere matter-of-fact, laborious narrative.’1 For Landor, his journey to Scandinavia and the experiences he had there were real enough: beginning in Denmark, he travelled thence to Sweden and then Norway. As much as a narrative licence informs much travel writing, then, Landor carried the pose to an extreme. He believed he could become a more interesting traveller and could write a more interesting book if he expressly fictionalised himself as the first-person narrator of what would in effect be a novel. The ­narrative would be true, precisely because the narrator was not. As a traveller and travel writer, Landor joined a large and wellestablished company of authors in European literature. Travel writing, indeed, describes some of the oldest narratives, including Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, and the Old Testament Exodus.2 Among specifically medieval English accounts of journeys across Europe and beyond, Mandeville’s Travels and the Book of Margery Kempe may be the most well-known today. Fascinating in their own ways, each also has the limitations of any premodern travel narrative. The former, an account of a fictional journey to the Middle East and Asia, has no truly authorial, definitive version, surviving as it does in several distinct redactions and translations. The latter, which relates Margery’s pilgrimages across Europe and to the Holy Land, is extant in just one medieval manuscript (which seems to have had limited circulation) and a significantly abridged early modern printing. If Mandeville’s Travels lacked a consistent

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form to invite a consistent response among potential travellers, Margery’s Book could have been read by only very small premodern and early modern audiences. Premodern travel accounts certainly survive, but, given the limitations of their textual stability and availability, travel writing as a genre first began to proliferate in the early modern period, and it did so primarily because of increasing mercantile and political ambitions as well as the technological advances that made these ambitions achievable. Following improvements of oceangoing ships in particular, which facilitated long-distance journeys, by just the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Anglophone travellers had produced numerous, extensive accounts of trips to North America, and, in the next two centuries, to Africa, Asia, and Polynesia. The Grand Tour of Europe resulted in still more narratives. To be sure, all these records appeared in limited press runs of varying size, but any one run still vastly exceeded the number of copies for a medieval work and provided a more consistent text than that of Mandeville’s Travels. Reprints made these disparities between medieval and modern travelogues even greater. Historically, Scandinavia never had elicited as much interest as other parts of Europe and Asia.3 Roman geographers would have enticed few travellers with their talk of ‘Ultima Thule’ (farthest Thule), a semi-mythological island in the distant north that was inhabited by primitive peoples, and medieval English encounters with the Vikings did little to improve a negative view of the region and its people. But at the end of the Middle Ages trade between Britain and all parts of Scandinavia steadily increased, when arrangements such as one made in 1674 with Sweden’s Queen Christina promising ‘firme peace’ between England and Sweden. The same pact advanced the countries’ common profit, removed hindrances in navigation, allowed free travel to citizens of both countries, and guaranteed merchants safe travel and harbour.4 The history of travel accounts of Sweden very much reflect these changes. Twenty-two date to before 1609, 85 from between then and 1700, and the greatest number – nearly one thousand – from the nineteenth century. Norwegian travel accounts tell much the same story. By 1900, at least 1278 visitors had written accounts of their trips there, whether as their sole destination or as part of a larger itinerary, and many of these accounts were reprinted multiple times. The majority of these visitors – about 650 of them – came during the nineteenth century and from Britain, which accounted for twice as many traveller narratives as did any of the next most common

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points of departure: Denmark, France, Sweden, and Germany. Other Scandinavian narratives were written by travellers from (to use modern-day country designations) Belgium, Finland, Greece, Holland, Ireland, Italy, Serbia, New Zealand, the United States, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, South Africa, South America, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Austria. For Iceland alone, 3500 travel works were composed prior to 1974.5 So many travellers visited Iceland, in fact, that in 1830 Lárus Sigurðsson wrote (in English) a poem entitled ‘The Dream’, which paid tribute to British visitors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.6 It was this almost feverish British interest that led the Victorian scholar-adventurer Richard Burton (1821–90) to claim his compatriots had ‘Iceland on the Brain’.7 And although many of these Scandinavian travelogues were casual, inexpensive productions, others, like William Henry Breton’s Scandinavian Sketches (1835) or Mary (Mrs Disney) Leith’s Peeps at Many Lands (1908), contain maps, water colours, portraits, city-scapes, landscapes, and other illustrations.8 John Coles’s Summer Traveling in Iceland (1882) is a large, handsomely produced quarto that includes illustrations and a fold-out map, while Burton’s similarly lavish Ultima Thule (1875) fills two volumes of about four hundred pages each. What all these publications suggest is that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in particular there was significant and distinctive British interest not simply in visiting and writing about Iceland, Norway, and Scandinavia in general but also in reading the accounts of others’ visits. The motivations behind this enthusiasm might be described as both practical and theoretical. On the practical side, developments in print technology led to larger and quicker press runs of less expensive books, which in turn fostered a significant post-1800 increase in literacy. Simply put, more people could, and could afford to, read. The proximity of Scandinavia to Britain offered another practical reason for travel there. When Landor wrote, the Grand Tour was losing momentum among wealthy English men and women, and many far-flung lands in the Pacific and North America already had been described in detail. Though perhaps less exotic, Scandinavia still offered relatively close opportunities to pursue many of the natural, scientific, and ethnographic interests of other regions, but without the dangers of lengthy trans-oceanic voyages or the hostility and inscrutability of the indigenous peoples elsewhere. For the most part, the Nordic peoples were a lot like the British: Caucasian, civilised (by European standards), and Protestant,

28

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and without any history of threatening and ambushing tourists. Travellers may have encountered glaciers, mountains, and even, in the Icelandic volcano Hekla, the mouth of Hell. But many of these hazards could be avoided; one did not have to enter Hekla, after all. And none of them compared to cannibals, which more than any other anxiety exercised the imaginations of European travellers to Polynesia and North America. Whatever other very real dangers they encountered crossing rivers or climbing mountains, travellers to Scandinavia could be certain that they would not be eaten. Landor’s emphasis on imagination points to a crucial theoretical motivation for British travel, one that reflects how deeply rooted identity can be in place. This motivation underwrites what Peter Davidson has labelled ‘the idea of north’ – a widely shared geographic and conceptual view of a directional place, situationally defined in relation to wherever one is, as a paradoxical area of extremes and contrasts. The very mindset, in other words, that produced the notion of Ultima Thule. In its mysteries, trials, and ambiguities, the north in general consistently has represented an opportunity for individuals to test themselves – and succeed – physically and spiritually.9 It is a place and direction that function, Davidson suggests, as almost a cross-cultural metonymy for selfdiscovery. Indeed, the fundamental cultural dynamic in Europe, from the antique to the centuries I consider, was not the east–west split of the Cold War but a north–south one. It is this dynamic, Peter Fjågesund has argued, that organised not only geography and natural history but also ‘ideas, perceptions and views of Self and Other’.10 Particularly since the late-eighteenth century, indeed, travel writing as a genre has emphasised an inward focus, by which the journey serves as a mode of self-realisation.11 From this perspective, encountering the north could be a way for British ­travellers in particular to encounter themselves. With this theoretical framework in mind, I want to turn now to three focuses of British travel writing from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries: natural history, science, and recreation. Throughout this period and often independently of one another, widely separated writers on these topics utilised a set of consistent yet contradictory images to represent their experiences. In explicit detail they described beauty but also filth, as well as dangers to which they responded with expressions of awe, uncertainty, and disgust. From these contradictions emerge coherent ways to look at the modern world – especially the contrasts between Britain and Scandinavia – as well as to remember the world from

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which it developed. The collective impact of replicated tropes, I will argue, rendered visits to the modern-day Nordic regions as rides on a time machine to the British medieval past. Finding Scandinavia In his Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) is the first to mention Scandinavia (which he calls ‘scatinavia’), describing it as ‘the most celebrated’ of the northern islands, though one indeterminate in size.12 The name and the notion that Scandinavia refers to an obscure and even threatening island (like Ultima Thule) persist throughout the late antique. In his sixth-century De Origine Actibusque Getarum, for example, the Roman historian Jordanes imagines Scandza (as he refers to it) as surrounded by water and its people as surging like insects: ‘The same mighty sea has also in its arctic region, that is, in the north, a great island named Scandza, from which my tale (by God’s grace) shall take its beginning. For the race whose origin you ask to know burst forth like a swarm of bees from the midst of this island and came into the land of Europe.’13 By the eighteenth century travellers certainly knew that the whole of Scandinavia was not an island, though they did not always agree on what the name designated. Whilst some accounts, like Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), restrict themselves to the Continental lands typically regarded today as Nordic – Norway, Denmark, and Sweden – others venture farther afield. Travelogues, for example, reproduce a common elision of the north with the arctic by treating Lapland and many lands e­ astwards to Poland and Russia as Scandinavian. Daniel Clarke’s 1838 Travels in Various Countries of Scandinavia dwells on Finland, as does Moses Pitt’s late seventeenth-century English Atlas, which devotes to Scandinavia one of its five massive quartos of nearly four hundred pages each that join cultural description to cosmography and natural history. Complicating matters is the fact that, throughout the period I consider in this book, both Norway and Iceland lacked political sovereignty. In Pitt’s words, ‘The truth is, Norway … is only via seu tractus septentrionalis, i.e. a country situated towards the North’.14 As essentially a direction, Norway had a reference that was, strangely at the same time, central and peripheral to notions of Scandinavia that began developing in the early modern period. It was far and away the most popular Continental Nordic destination for British travellers, even as they variously regarded it

30

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as a geographic route (like Pitt) or an appendage to Denmark. Perhaps even more strangely, Iceland, which truly is peripheral to Continental Europe, gradually became the fulcrum of British views of the Nordic regions. With increasing frequency after 1800 and especially so after the advent of steamships in the 1850s, tourists, naturalists, historians, and writers approached Iceland in particular as a window on Scandinavia and hence, I am arguing, the English past.15 Political or geographic ambiguity certainly did not prevent some critics from seeing a special relationship between Scandinavia and Britain. According to Clarke (1769–1822), ‘Of all the nations to whom the British character is known, the Norwegians are the most sincerely attached to the inhabitants of our island … [T]here was nothing which an Englishman, as a sincere lover of his country, might more earnestly have wished for, than to see Norway allied to Britain’.16 And R.G. Latham (1812–88) saw this sentiment as mutual: ‘England should think well of Norway, for Norway thinks well of England.’17 Nor, therefore, did such geographic ambiguity forestall visits to Scandinavia by scientists, tourists, and sports enthusiasts. Indeed, from this mixture of geographic inexactitude and personal identification emerged particularly intense and ­emotional responses. Attitudes towards urban and rural settings differed c­ onsiderably, expressed in contrasting, repeated references to filth and d ­ egradation or beauty and wonder. Having left London and ­travelled through Hamburg, Latham thought that the culture and civilisation of Copenhagen and Christiania (renamed Oslo in 1925) had much to commend them, but few other travellers shared his sentiments about Scandinavian villages and cities. ‘Copenhagen is altogether a dull town’, Arthur Dillon (1812–1892) noted; ‘its inhabitants are heavy, and its trade has departed.’18 Of Norway’s future capital, Landor observed, ‘There are no public buildings at Christiania worth looking at, nor indeed is there any thing in the town that need detain the traveller many hours.’19 Initially, Breton (1799–1889) offers only a tepid response to Christiania: ‘With the exception of the University, which contains an indifferent museum, there are few public institutions, and no handsome edifices, such as ­hospitals, etc.’ But the more he ponders the future, the harsher his assessment of the future Oslo becomes: The tourist will find no inducement to prolong his stay in the Norwegian capital beyond a day or two, for a place more dull or

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uninteresting I have rarely beheld; and when we consider the deserted state of the streets, the want of that animation so common to other sea-ports, and the entire absence, in summer, of public amusements, we are no longer surprised at visitors quitting it as soon as they have made their necessary arrangements.20

Perhaps the most severe descriptions were evoked by Reykjavík, which, truth be told, throughout the nineteenth century was less an urban capital than a village. Coles (1833–1910) said simply, ‘I do not remember having seen an uglier town than Reykjavik.’21 Other travellers are far more graphic about the limitations of Iceland’s largest settlement, then and now. Burton’s imagery frames his encounter with Reykjavík as a kind of revolt of the senses: ‘Throughout Reykjavik a smell of decayed fish prevails, making strangers wonder how it escapes pestilence and plague; and the basaltic dust raised by the least breath of wind causes hands and face to be grimy as at Manchester or Pittsburgh.’22 Even Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), one of Victorian Britain’s most knowledgeable and sympathetic visitors to Iceland, says of Reykjavík that ‘The moment that the main thoroughfares are quitted, the stench emitted from the smaller houses becomes insupportable. Decayed fish, offal, filth of every description, is tossed anywhere for the rain to wash away, or for the passer-by to trample into the ground.’23 At once emotional and tactile, descriptions like these evoke a visceral response to the objects, sights, smells, and sounds of Nordic cities. They turn an idea of Scandinavia into a disturbing sensory experience. Since Nordic towns like Reykjavík, or even Christiania or Stockholm, scarcely qualified as industrial capitals like Manchester or Birmingham, further, they could be grouped with Anglophone metropolises only at this sensory level: like all cities, Nordic ones soiled their own inhabitants. But unlike their British counterparts (especially London), Nordic cities also lacked culture, sophistication, and enterprise; even their museums are ‘indifferent’. Comparisons like Coles’s and Burton’s thus inevitably enhanced British urban life by way of denigrating the Scandinavian equivalent. Nordic landscapes elicited starkly different responses. Just as the achievements of British urban centres contrasted the limitations of Scandinavian ones, so sordid Nordic cities contrasted a natural, pristine countryside – a place that was sublime, to use what became a particularly evocative concept. By affirming the innate simplicity that British travellers imposed on the landscape, Nordic cities and

32

Northern memories and the English Middle Ages

countryside together functioned in a kind of cognitive dynamic, allowing each to be known in part by the other and Britain to be known through both. William Coxe (1748–1828), for example, adopts a relatively favourable view of Christiania, but the best part of the city, in his description, is the way it appears when seen as framed by and extending from its natural surrounding: As we approached Christiania, the country was more wild and hilly, but still very fertile and agreeable; and about two miles from the town we came to the top of a mountain, and burst upon as fine a view as I ever beheld. From the point on which we stood in raptures, the grounds, laid out in rich enclosures, gradually sloped to the sea; below us appeared Christiania, situated at the extremity of an extensive and fertile valley, forming a semi-circular bend along the shore of a most beautiful bay, which being enclosed by hills, uplands, and forests, had the appearance of a large lake. Behind, before, and around, the inland mountains of Norway rose on mountains covered with dark forests of pines and fir, the inexhaustible riches of the north. The most distant summits were capped with eternal snow. From the glow of the atmosphere, the warmth of the weather, the variety of the productions, and the mild beauties of the adjacent scenery, I could scarcely believe, that I was nearly in the 60th degree of northern latitude.24

The passage reproduces the emotive tropes often used to describe Scandinavian landscapes, and in so doing it renders Christiania and its environs nearly ethereal extensions of the nature that surrounds them. Coxe and his companions stand in ‘raptures’ as they view the fertility, beauty, riches, and – as if in a fairy tale – ‘eternal snow’ and ‘glow of the atmosphere’. Whatever aesthetic value Christiania has comes not from any urban achievement but from the sea on one side and from the city’s seamless connection to the landscape, which slopes to it, on the other. A continuity like this makes a moot point of the smells that overwhelm Burton and Baring-Gould in Reykjavík. What was repulsive about Scandinavia, then, were its unsuccessful imitations of the metropolises that affirmed Britain’s e­ conomic and cultural pre-eminence. But of necessity the debasement of Copenhagen, Christiania, and Reykjavík equally emphasised the inherent grandeur of their surrounding landscapes. Indeed, what were particularly charming and desirable in Scandinavia were natural attractions that were somehow familiar to but not locatable in Britain: grand waterfalls, towering mountains, glaciers, and so forth. In Iceland, Geysir, Hekla, waterfalls, and glaciers

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all consistently evoked awe among travellers. To an extent, British endorsement of the rustic, out-of-the-way countryside might be read as a manifestation of what is sometimes called the impulse of a traveller rather than that of a tourist – of a snobbish urge (evident even today) to get off the beaten track in pursuit of authentic and transformative cultural experiences rather than merely to visit the predictable and repetitive highlights for visitors. The dynamic between these impulses, it has been argued, animates much nineteenth-century British travel writing.25 But the challenges and grandeur of the Nordic landscape offered more than cultural capital, more than an affirmation of the preeminence of London and the British economy. By another set of tropes – of landscape and the emotions, often filtered through the senses – Scandinavia invited travellers to embrace a return to their imagined place of origin by an act of memory. If the cities measured what modern Scandinavia could not be, the countryside reflected what medieval Britain had been, characteristically described with expressions of spiritual, even religious, ecstasy. Archbishop Uno von Troil’s Letters from Iceland (1780), an immediately popular English translation from the German translation of the original Swedish (Bref rörande en resa til Island), thus references his intensely personal and devotional response to Iceland: ‘So much is certain, at least, nature never drew from any one a more cheerful homage to her great Creator than I here paid him.’26 But it was William Morris (1834–96) in particular who waxed rhapsodic over the sublimity of the austere Icelandic countryside and its associations: ‘Just think, though, what a mournful place this is – Iceland I mean – setting aside the pleasure of one’s animal life there: the fresh air, the riding and rough life, and feeling of adventure – how every place and name marks the death of its short-lived eagerness and glory; and withal so little is the life changed in some ways.’27 Frederick Metcalfe (1815–85) describes ‘the wonderful and wild scenery’ of Norway,28 and Landor says the land ‘possesses innumerable rich valleys, capable of the highest improvement, and the banks of the lakes are exceedingly fertile’. For Landor, even Christiania has beauty – not of Florence itself but, as for Clarke, of the countryside around it. Christiania exhibits, he says, ‘much the character of the vale of Tuscany, to the north of Florence, which, however, it greatly surpasses in beauty and variety’.29 Wollstonecraft travelled to Scandinavia for the most prosaic of reasons: to try to locate silver that Gilbert Imlay, the father of their

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Northern memories and the English Middle Ages

daughter, had shipped from Paris in June of 1795, despite a British blockade. But as pragmatic as this motivation might have been, she had another, far more personal one – and that was to recover the affections of Imlay, who earlier in the year had left her. Whatever the intensity of Wollstonecraft’s feelings on these matters, however, her letters from Scandinavia mention virtually nothing directly about any financial or personal issues. They focus instead on an emotive landscape populated by brutish people – although doing so, it might well be argued, amounted to the metaphoric expression of her own emotional turmoil. Upon arriving in Sweden, Wollstonecraft’s response in her 1796 Letters, like that of many other British travellers, is to contrast the natural landscape with the urban one she had left behind in Paris: How silent and peaceful was the scene. I gazed around with rapture, and felt more of that spontaneous pleasure which gives credibility to our expectation of happiness, than I had for a long, long time before. I forgot the horrors I had witnessed in France, which had cast a gloom over all nature, and suffering the enthusiasm of my character, too often, gracious God! damped by the tears of disappointed affection, to be lighted up afresh, care took wing while simple fellow feeling expanded my heart.30

The religious apostrophe here would not seem to be coincidental, for the Scandinavian scenery evokes in Wollstonecraft an individual rapture (to echo Coxe’s response to Christiania) that, in the then-emerging traditions of Romanticism, has a distinctly spiritual cast. Viewing the area around Tonsberg, Norway, she similarly expresses the instantaneous impact of the natural world upon her, with which she effectively conflates her being: ‘With what ineffable pleasure have I not gazed – and gazed again, losing my breath through my eyes – my very soul diffused itself in the scene – and, seeming to become all senses, glided in the scarcely-agitated waves, melted in the freshening breeze.’ It is her mystical connection with this landscape, expressed in sensory images of sight, sound, and touch, that leads Wollstonecraft to redirect her ‘humid eyes from the expanse below to the vault above’. Her sight, inner as well as physical, then ‘pierced the fleecy clouds that softened the azure brightness’. And so ‘recalling the reveries of childhood’ and paraphrasing Isaiah 66.1 (‘Thus saith the Lord, the Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool’), she ‘bowed before the awful throne of my Creator, whilst I rested on its footstool’.31

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In describing the Norwegian scenery as at once frightening and beautiful, Wollstonecraft engages in more than idle landscape description. Having already challenged Edmund Burke in her 1790 A Vindication of the Rights of Man, Wollstonecraft here directly subverts the distinction he had drawn (in his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful) between the masculine and feminine as eternal organising principles. For her, the sublime is beautiful, with the result that the landscape is personally transformative but also disrupts Burke’s gendered social categories. She again invokes these same disruptive sentiments when she encounters two equal if opposing transformative experiences in the landscape at Trollhättan in Sweden: Amidst the awful roaring of the impetuous torrents, the noise of human instruments, and the bustle of workmen, even the blowing up of the rocks, when grand masses trembled in the darkened air – only resembled the insignificant sport of children. One fall of water, partly made by art, when they were attempting to construct sluices, had an uncommonly grand effect; the water precipitated itself with immense velocity down a perpendicular, at least fifty or sixty yards, into a gulph, so concealed by the foam as to give full play to the fancy.32

Simultaneously masculine and feminine, the passage’s sensuous imagery renders at least Trollhättan as not simply fertile but selfreproducing. The torrents, in turn, stimulate Wollstonecraft’s fertile imagination, even as they regenerate themselves. In such an e­motionally and spiritually evocative place as Scandinavia, ­seemingly anything is possible, including, according to William Slingsby (1849–1929), a one-thousand-foot icicle. Pierre Martinière (1634–c.1676), whose 1671 Voyage des Pais Septentrionaux was translated almost immediately into English, reports seeing three suns.33 Even if the latter were the horizontal optical phenomenon known as a sun dog, it would be extraordinary, but Martinière further strains credibility by maintaining they appeared ‘one above another’. No snakes of any kind Some writers did express scepticism of the grandeur that others claimed to have seen in Scandinavia. In speaking of Britons’ ‘Vinland on the Brain’, Burton added, ‘The subject is, to some extent, like Greece and Palestine, of the sensational type: we have all read in childhood about those “Wonders of the World,” Hekla

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Northern memories and the English Middle Ages

and the Geysir … the travellers of the early century saw scenes of thrilling horror, of majestic grandeur, and of heavenly beauty, where our more critical, perhaps more cultivated, taste finds very humble features’.34 By no means, however, do expressions of such scepticism nullify the grandeur that Morris, Wollstonecraft, and others witnessed. Indeed, they reflect and further another major, earlier impulse for British travellers to visit Scandinavia, which was for the scientific exploration of natural resources and objects. Some of the same tropes used in accounts of the Nordic landscape sustain this impulse, joined by another set of replicated images of environmental wonders, scientific phenomena, and natural resources. Both published and unpublished accounts document that scientific inquiries were in effect a form of tourism, attracting travel in both directions.35 In 1663, for instance, the Danish physician Ole Borch wrote a letter describing his recent trip to England and the natural curiosities he saw there: snakes, urine, plants, teeth, and monstrosities, including a three-footed chicken.36 And it was a Swedish naturalist and ethnographer – Olaus Magnus – whose 1539 map the Carta Marina and 1555 book Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus laid the groundwork for many British perceptions of Scandinavia as an exotic, otherworldly place. The map is enormous, decorated with pictures of sea creatures, people, animals, and mountains, whilst the Historia, conceived in conjunction with the map, is a large quarto of 476 chapters in 22 books (replete with woodcuts and marginal glosses) that emphasises peculiarities of the countryside, legends, giants, warfare, and daily life. But my interest here is in how accounts composed by British naturalists in the Nordic regions juxtapose images that are variously emotive and scientific (or pseudo-scientific). Among these accounts, Martinière’s Voyage des Pais Septentrionaux provided English readers with some of the earliest information about the occasionally fantastic natural resources and mineralogy of the north. Martinière describes, for instance, penguins (presumably great auks), the attack of a group of white bears, and the capture of a seahorse ­(probably a narwhal). A century later Letters from Iceland by von Troil (1746–1803) extends this bifurcated approach by detailing Iceland’s general topography, geysers, and volcanoes, but also noting the wonders of Iceland, such as wool-eating sheep. Although the Letters describe the beauty of the rainbows that appear near geysers, they also emphasise botanical and zoological detail as well as mathematical exactitude in measuring the height, frequency,

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and temperatures of geysers.37 Further, von Troil explicitly rejects unscientific credulity, such as the notions that Icelandic and Italian volcanoes are connected or that, if bottled, hot spring water will explode.38 The 1783 eruptions of the volcano Laki might be seen as emblematic of how the fantastic and the scientific could blend with one another. Devastating in their impact and leading to famine in Iceland and destruction at home and abroad, the eruptions also might be credited as the inspiration for much of the subsequent scientific ­activity – as if scientists wanted to see with their own eyes something so extraordinary it seemed beyond belief.39 As much as later travellers came to focus on history, culture, and recreation, interest in science and natural history never really went away. George Mackenzie (1780–1848) talks about all manner of Scandinavian literature and mythology, for example, but he embeds his discussion in descriptions of Iceland’s zoology, mineralogy, weather, and flora. Henry Holland (1788–1873), who accompanied Mackenzie, circulated a similarly bifurcated set of tropes, sharing von Troil’s interests in geology and geysers, but also Morris’s in the sagas. For their part, Nordic natural historians often took a differing approach, resisting the treatment of Iceland in particular as an exotic locale peopled by primitive peoples and teeming with extraordinary creatures.40 For instance, The Natural History of Iceland (1758), a translation of Niels Horrebow’s Danish original, offered the English reading public a wealth of detail about Iceland’s geography, plants and animals, earthquakes, volcanoes, dairy farming, birds, fish, and climate. An explicitly empirical undertaking, The Natural History was intended to debunk prevailing fantastic accounts, especially one by Johann Anderson, who in fact had never been to Iceland. It was the seventy-second chapter of this book, ‘Concerning Snakes’, that, according to his biographer James Boswell, Dr Johnson boasted he knew by heart: ‘No snakes of any kind are to be met with throughout the whole island.’41 Within this context, British natural history during the period emerges as a methodical yet sometimes whimsical undertaking. It focused on things not present (or at least not widely present) in Britain, including mountains, waterfalls, specific minerals, glaciers, volcanoes, lava, gorges, geysers, and maelstroms. Norway and Iceland in particular were so fertile with wonders and so different from Britain that they challenged the imagination of visitors. Metcalfe even claimed to have spotted a sixty-foot kraken off the coast of Norway, though he later realised that in reality it was a

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school of porpoises moving in unison.42 Said Ebenezer Henderson (1784–1858), ‘It is impossible for a stranger to take a single step in Iceland, without having some uncommon object of this description [natural phenomena] presented to his view; and, in taking down notes of his progress, his principal difficulty lies in the selection of subjects where such a multiplicity claim his attention.’43 Henderson considers the Norse Greenlandic colonies in this same whimsically methodical vein. When the Dane Hans Egede visited the region in 1721, ‘the barrier of ice, as far as he explored it, did not connect with the shore, but left a space of open water, in which the inhabitants might catch a sufficient quantity of fish for their support’. Hence, by Henderson’s deduction, the colonies could well be still functioning (if not yet locatable). ‘It would certainly prove highly interesting’, he muses, ‘both to the friends of humanity and of literature, were the expedition now fitting out from this country for those seas, to discover this ancient colony; and give us an account of the state of religion and science among them.’44 Certainly, the earliest exuberance for Scandinavian marvels had been tempered by Henderson’s day. Martinière had offered confused accounts of some natural phenomena, and other phenomena he simply seems to have made up. This kind of credulity became increasingly less viable as the study of the past and natural history in general became increasingly more complex and s­ophisticated during the course of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the ­eventual differentiation of antiquarianism, history, and archaeology as ­ three disciplines accompanied the growing professionalisation of ­ scientific inquiry. Government involvement in curricula and funding, academic departments, professional societies, and journals all reflected and furthered this growth of institutional memory. But all this means, ultimately, that the recycling of the tropes I have been describing fostered more than a narrow sense of the Scandinavian present and the British past. It also provided a medium for the development of historical critical inquiry in general – for ­disciplines, in the sense associated with Michel Foucault.45 Tourism and sport By the end of the eighteenth century, Great Britain’s political relations with the Nordic lands, particularly Denmark and so Norway, had become fraught. Pressed initially by Denmark and the Hanseatic league for access to northern trading ­opportunities, notably in Iceland, and despite the success of Whitelocke’s

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­ id-seventeenth-century efforts to secure a treaty with Sweden, m Britain found its access to Scandinavian ports considerably diminished. Conflict with Napoleon further aggravated the situation, leading to the 1807 British bombardment of Copenhagen and seizure of the Danish fleet. In the aftermath, once Denmark subsequently declared war on England, Britain seized both Danish and Icelandic merchant vessels and established a trade embargo on Denmark. The Battle of Waterloo in 1815 provided some relief of these political tensions, since it led to Napoleon’s exile to St Helena and the normalisation of relations between Britain and the various Nordic countries. Napoleon’s defeat and exile also opened up the whole of Scandinavia (and of course Europe as well) to British travellers and adventurers. Already in the 1820s, tourism began to pick up, and by the 1850s Scandinavia qualified as a popular tourist destination, even if still less so than France and Italy. Indeed, by mid-century, there existed an array of travellers’ handbooks, many with a kind of Lonely Planet detail and sensibility. Baring-Gould’s 1863 book on Iceland, for instance, concludes with very practical advice for English travellers, such as that they should carry small change, take as little luggage as possible, and be prepared to pay a good price for horses. Language guides like Bennett’s English– Norwegian Phrasebook (1899), which contained a vocabulary as well as quasi-phonetic renderings of ‘A Selection of Phrases for Tourists Travelling in Norway’, were popular enough to appear in multiple editions. Collectively, the travelogues that appeared in this context define Nordic lands through a set of tropes emphasising the regions’ trials, innocence, and opportunities for adventure. Compared to France and Italy, Scandinavia did indeed present different challenges for tourists. As writers depicted their travel, simply getting to Scandinavia could be, all at once, time-­consuming, dangerous, and boring. Wollstonecraft’s sea voyage from Hull to the south-west coast of Sweden took 11 days in 1795, whilst Von Troil’s 1772 expedition to Iceland left London on 12 July and did not arrive until 28 August. Likewise wanting to go from Britain to Iceland early in 1834, Dillon could not sail directly but had to travel by way of Copenhagen. He arrived too late for the ship he had targeted and had to spend time wandering around Scandinavia as he waited for two other ships that were to set sail in July. By that time, however, one of those had been wrecked, ‘and the other was not yet returned’, and so eventually Dillon got a ride on a ‘Danish man-of-war’, which sailed from Copenhagen on 10 August. But

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‘owing to the wind being unfavourable, we anchored the same afternoon at Helsingore’, where the ship was held up three more days waiting for a change in wind direction. Eventually it sailed again, not arriving in Iceland until 22 August and only after encountering gales along the way.46 Challenges like these may have paled in comparison to those endured by contemporary travellers to North America, Asia, and Polynesia, but they still made arrival an uncertain proposition.47 Epitomised by the establishment of the Thomas Cook agency in 1845, group tours became increasingly popular in the nineteenth century, although British travellers, even if they often followed effectively prescribed Scandinavian routes, tended to travel alone and so needed to make their own arrangements. Upon arrival in Scandinavia, in any case, travellers faced the additional challenges of limited intra-Nordic transportation opportunities, necessitating long walks on bad roads. Lodging options were equally limited, so that, overall, the travel infrastructure present in Britain and on parts of the Continent had few parallels in Scandinavia.48 Outside of Christiania, Bergen, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, there were few public hotels as such. Travellers to more remote areas generally had to make arrangements with private citizens, with parsonages known as particularly reliable places for good meals and a place to sleep. For this reason, Slingsby, perhaps the most avid Victorian mountaineer in Norway, argued for improvements in trails, housing, and travel facilities in general, seeing these as ways to open up more of the landscape to British visitors.49 Yet as much as British travellers complained about these conditions, it was partly their own acts of travel and representation that defined the Nordic landscape, for it was in effect the travellers who identified which regions were places worth visiting, populating, and remembering. In a metaphorical but still very real sense, travellers put places on maps, just as guides like Bennett’s Phrasebook put words and phrases in language use. Further, collectively if still as individuals, travellers defined the Scandinavian landscape not simply for tourists but for the Nordic people themselves whose livelihoods depended on them. These definitions partially replicate images common to accounts of science and landscape, such as natural vistas and wonders, but also rely on tropes of simple meals, outdoor recreation, and literary imagination. Perhaps counter-intuitively, it was the primitiveness of Iceland and Norway that made the regions particularly attractive to some British travellers, since visiting presented an opportunity to enter

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a landscape untrammelled by industrialisation, urban growth, and social complexity. Indeed, Slingsby’s wistful, even nostalgic, description of the simplicity and value of the Norwegian lifestyle reads almost as an antidote for the world he left in Britain: ‘I have often sat down at the long table and shared in the simple family meal where we all ate out of one bowl of porridge … Then we had “speget kjöd” – smoked and salted mutton or kid, nearly a year old … Fladbröd, butter and cheese, completed the repast. Could we not have seen the same in England had we lived a few centuries ago?’50 In a vein of the Romantic sentimentality well expressed by Wollstonecraft and encapsulated in Davidson’s notion of ‘the idea of north’, Scandinavia was often characterised as a place of physical challenge, isolation, and individualism. The forbidding character of travel in fact enforced the sense of a visit to a place that, all at once, entertained, offered a sense of what Britain had been, and assured British travellers of the preferability of their own present. Such sentiments meant that tourists characteristically sought out some of the most hard-to-reach landscape features, such as mountains, fjords, and waterfalls. These were the most primitive features and also the ones most likely to solicit the kind of sublime response that Wollstonecraft depicts. Natural phenomena are what led William Hooker, inspired by von Troil’s account, to tour Iceland in 1809, and, thirty years later, Clarke to tour all of Scandinavia. It was this desire not simply to see nature but to recreate legendary travel experiences that caused Breton to voyage from England to Christiania and northwards thence to the Maelstrom and the North Cape. Having already published a book on touring Australia, indeed, Breton opens his volume on Scandinavia with a travel fantasy: ‘I designed, after my voyage to Australia, to spend my days, not as was Sinbad’s intention, at Bagdad, but in England; a truant disposition, however, induced me once more to ramble; and a wish to see Nature, in a clime very different from any other, led me to visit the fjords and snow-capt mountains of Norway.’51 Recalling Landor, which whom this chapter began, Breton in effect made himself a fictional character in his own life. Such enthusiasm for nature became so commonplace that Burton lamented Iceland had ‘become a touring-field to Europe’.52 The recirculation of such tropes produces a sometimes startling confluence of memory, travel, fiction, sublimity, and Scandinavia, as in Wollstonecraft’s characterisation of the cascades at Trollhättan. There she saw a ‘rushing from different falls, struggling with the huge masses of rock, and rebounding from the profound cavities’,

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as well as a little island ‘one half appearing to issue from a dark cavern, that fancy might easily imagine a vast foundation, throwing up its waters from the very centre of the earth’.53 Although Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’, one of the Romantic period’s most emblematic compositions, had not yet even been composed, it shares with Wollstonecraft’s account the same projection of sublimity onto the landscape. Even some of the same imagery appears in the poem’s account of Xanadu, with its sacred river Alph running through ‘caverns measureless to man’, and its chasm, ‘with ceaseless turmoil seething’ and throwing up ‘dancing rocks’ like ‘rebounding hail’.54 The object of such thinking, whether by poet or traveller, was something dramatically different from that of much modern eco-criticism: Wollstonecraft, Landor, and Breton (as well as Coleridge) went back to the countryside to learn not about nature’s external workings or human impact on them but about their own internal sensibilities. For the more adventurous, Scandinavia presented opportunities for recreation and personal challenge that contemporary Britain, with its railroads and shops, no longer could. Metcalfe wrote two books about his trips to Norway, the second, on Telemark in particular (1858), because the first had been so successful. He describes journeying along, ‘fishing-rod in hand, or gun on shoulder, now chatting with the people, now plucking flowers in the woods, now musing over the wonderful and wild scenery’.55 In each enormous, two-volume book, Metcalfe lingers over topics like drinking, legends, story-telling, fly-fishing, roads, horses, folk legends, hunts, farms, natural history, food, and customs. While more casual and less systematic than a book like Burton’s Ultima Thule, Metcalfe’s volumes render Norway ‘a primitive country’ but also, as in Slingsby’s menu of Norwegian bread and brown cheese, an affirmation of Britain’s remembered past: ‘Much of the simplicity that characterized our forefathers is still existing there. We are Aladdined to the England of three centuries ago.’56 In fact, Slingsby – he of the thousand-foot icicle – is even more aggressive in his embrace of the physically daunting and symbolically pristine Scandinavian landscape. He went to Norway, which he identifies as a ‘playground’, specifically for mountaineering, and his 1904 book is largely arranged by ascents and includes advice on what climbers need to bring and where they can find guides. But within this practical framework Slingsby describes emotional encounters with bears and other natural challenges no longer present in Britain. His section on a climb in west central Norway is

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grandiosely entitled ‘The First Human ascent of the Miendalstind’. Slingsby sees the brute primitivism around him as a reflection of Norwegian character, indelibly marked in the language as well as the landscape: ‘The words Norse and Norseman are used throughout the book, though personally I prefer Norsk and Norskman, as I think they are more in harmony with the rugged nature of the country.’57 By recycling tropes of hiking, fishing, and mountaineering, however, Slingsby and his companions do more than mirror the arduous and uncompromising landscape and its people. They necessarily eclipse them, since the representations show the British travellers going beyond what even the Norwegians might attempt and in the process demonstrating their potential to surpass the natives not simply in modernism but even in primitivism. Having described one particular ascent, Slingsby observes, ‘Some few years later I was told that when we were seen emerging from the dark portals of the Riingsbræ [sic], where no human being had ever been known to enter or emerge from before, we were supposed to be “Huldre folk” or elves, who live in the heart of the mountains, are enormously rich, and amongst other possessions are blessed with tails.’58 Like Metcalfe (and Landor and Breton), by visiting Norway Slingsby has been ‘Aladdined’ by the sublimity he encounters. He has become a legendary character from the Norwegian past – an Anglo-Scandinavian Sinbad – even as the Norwegians themselves fail to comprehend the significance of what they see. Tropes emphasising imaginative, primitive, and historical qualities made the Icelandic landscape particularly potent for British travellers. For their realism and attention to the details of the countryside, the sagas thus became both a reason to visit Iceland and a roadmap of where to go there. Morris, along with W. G. Collingwood (1854–1932), may be the best-known of these sagainspired tourists, and he certainly embeds his sense of the grandeur of the landscape within his sense of the austerity of the sagas: Yet it [Iceland] is an awful place: set aside the hope that the unseen sea gives you here, and the strange threatening change of the blue spiky mountains beyond the firth, and the rest seems emptiness and nothing else; a piece of turf under your feet, and the sky overhead, that’s all; whatever solace your life is to have here must come out of yourself or these old stories, not over hopeful themselves.59

Saga-inspired journeys well predate Morris, however. Already in 1810 Holland had visited Hlíðarendi, the site of Gunnar’s farm in

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Brennu-Njáls saga (The Saga of Burnt Njal). This same ­narrativising persisted well after Morris as well, as in W. G. Collingwood and Jón Stefánsson’s ‘pilgrimage’ recounted in their 1899 volume. The sagas, then, effectively invited British travellers to Iceland, while the Icelandic landscape invited them to reflect on their primitive past and sophisticated present. Both countryside and medieval narrative are texts that tell not only each other’s stories but also a story from British history. If travellers to Sweden and Norway gave the landscape depth by identifying which places were worth visiting, many of those going to Iceland furthered Icelandic traditions by affirming that landscape as a projection of the sagas written there. Necessary travel In 1694 Robert Molesworth (1656–1725) published An Account of Denmark, which describes his efforts as William of Orange’s ambassador to the court of Christian V. Championing comparative politics, Molesworth invokes a long tradition of likening a country’s civic status to the health of an individual: Want of Liberty is a Disease in any Society or Body Politick, like want of Health in a particular Person; and as the best way to understand the nature of any Distemper aright, is to consider it in several Patients, since the same Disease may proceed from different causes, so the disorders in Society are best perceived by observing the Nature and Effects of them in our several Neighbours: wherefore Travel seems as necessary to one who desires to be useful to his Country, as practicing upon other Mens Distempers is to make an able Physician.60

Through travel, Molesworth suggests, it is possible to contemplate the sicknesses of other countries – specifically, their failures in civil liberty – and in so doing to attend to the health of one’s own body politic. And by achieving that, travellers likewise can serve as social physicians for the world at large. Because of their affluence and influence, the British thus have a particular responsibility to meet the necessity of travel: ‘we have more foreign Alliances, are become the Head of more than a Protestant League, and have a right to intermeddle in the Affairs of Europe, beyond what we ever pretended to in any of the preceding Reigns’.61 Travelling to Scandinavia means monitoring the health of the British political state and, in turn, serving as a model to the world.

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If this was ­literally the case for a diplomat like Molesworth, it was ­metaphorically so for writers like Wollstonecraft and Morris, even if they themselves sometimes took a jaundiced view of politics. In this sense, what might be called the discovery of Nordic lands was, like all acts of discovery, a political enterprise as much as a geographic one. What was discovered in the process was Britain as much as Scandinavia. The tropes that circulated in British travel writing about the Nordic regions – whether in accounts of natural history, science, or recreation – frame at once an innovation and a recovery. Travelling to Scandinavia, or reading about others who did so, offered experiences unavailable in Britain itself. There were mountains to be hiked, geysers to be seen, and waterfalls to overwhelm the weary traveller. But these same experiences ultimately testified to something great in Britain. Most of the travellers journeyed from Britain to Scandinavia, after all, bringing with them wealth and imagination enough to transform the world they entered. The inadequacies of Nordic museums, cities, and infrastructure were clearest only in comparison with their British counterparts; the deficiencies of Christiania were clearest to those who had come from London. Furthering this sense of British exceptionalism is the fact the natural wonder, scientific exploration, and recreation in northern Europe were opportunities that were available, for the most part, only to a wealthy and even aristocratic portion of the British population. Author-travellers thus constituted an elite group: well-educated individuals who were conversant with current intellectual and political issues and often graduates of a military academy. Judged by the limited press runs and relatively high prices, many of their books were published for and read either by individuals from this same group or by those aspiring to join it.62 What was remembered in this innovation was a beneficial if conflicted sense of British history. With a landscape of zoologically, hydrologically, and mineralogically rich marvels, Scandinavia offered natural resources from a time past. In effect, modern science identified a new (and closer) set of wonders to the east, even as it provided additional evidence for industrial Britain’s growth since the Middle Ages. For one thing, some of these new wonders (bears, for instance) might once have been found in Britain; and, if this was no longer the case, the wonders’ absence, by a kind of circular reasoning, confirmed memories that they had been f­eatures of a primitive era. For another, the industrial know-how to exploit

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these new wonders was very much a feature of modern Britain and not modern Scandinavia. Populating that starkly beautiful and historically evocative landscape were squalid villages and simple, sometimes primitive, people. These, too, affirmed British exceptionalism. Together, innovation and recovery framed a place and an experience more valuable for what it recollected about what had been than what it promised about what would be. The circulation of Icelandic and Norwegian tropes that represented a Nordic landscape of mountains, fjords, and waterfalls kept Britain, in turn, a cultured land of industries and cities. ‘Rituals’, Assmann has observed, ‘are part of cultural memory because they are the form though which cultural memory is handed down and brought to present life.’63 And that is exactly what British travel to Scandinavia was: a ritual that handed down cultural memory. To that end, and perhaps ironically, at nearly the same moment that many British travellers were embracing Scandinavia with such enthusiasm, many Scandinavians themselves were looking westward, emigrating to North America at (as the nineteenth century advanced) steadily increasing rates. At least one million individuals left Norway and another one million Sweden for the United States or Canada during this period, while perhaps half that many departed Denmark. Between 1870 and 1914 alone, fifteen to twenty thousand Icelanders, amounting to a quarter of the island’s population, emigrated to North America.64 These travellers reflected a distinctly different group from that of the British tourists to Scandinavia, however, and they came for distinctly different reasons. The financially strapped Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic emigrants sought new lives for themselves and their children in places like Wisconsin and, however reluctantly, ­generally did not intend to return to Scandinavia. Driven by e­conomic downturns and political upheaval, they journeyed towards the future, even as British travellers journeyed towards the past. Notes   1 Edward Wilson Landor, Adventures in the North of Europe: Illustrative of the Poetry and Philosophy of Travel, 2 vols (London: Saunders and Otley, 1836), vol. 1, p. v.  2 For accounts of the history of travel writing, see Carl Thompson, Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 34–61; Tim Youngs, The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press, 2013), pp. 19–67; and Nandini Das and Tim Youngs (eds), The Cambridge History of Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 17–140.   3 Accounts of Scandinavia figure negligibly in Das and Youngs (eds), The Cambridge History of Travel Writing.  4 Bulstrode Whitelocke, A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, ed. C. Morton and rev. Henry Reeve, 2 vols. (1653–54; rpt London: T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt, 1772), vol. 2, p. 484.  5 See Arvid Julius, Sverige med Främlingsögon: Utdrag ur Utlänska Resenärers Skildringar före 1800 (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 1930); Samuel E. Bring, Itineraria Svecana: Bibliografisk Förteckning över Resor i Sverige fram till 1950 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1954); Carl Huitfeldt, Norge i Andres Øine: Utdrag av Utenlandske Reisebeskrivelser gjennem 2000 År (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1932); Eiler H. Schiötz, Itineraria Norvegica: A Bibliograpy on Foreigners’ Travels in Norway until 1900, 2 vols (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1970, 1986); and Haraldur Sigurðsson, Ísland í Skrifum Erlendra Manna um Þjóðlíf og Náttúru Landsins: Ritaskrá (Reykjavík: Landsbókasafn Íslands, 1991). For a survey of Icelandic travel books from the late e­ ighteenth century on, see Marion Lerner, Von der Ödsten und Traurigsten Gegend zur Insel der Traüme: Islandreisebücher in Touristischen Kontext (Munich: Herbert Utz, 2015), pp. 122–41. For an account of the many ­nineteenth-century British scientists and travellers who visited Iceland and wrote about their experiences, see Gary Aho, ‘“Með Ísland á heilanum”: Íslandsbækur breskra ferðalanga 1772 til 1897’, Skírnir 167 (1993), 205–58.  6 Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-century Britain (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 35–40.  7 Richard F. Burton, Ultima Thule; or, A Summer in Iceland, 2 vols (London: William P. Nimmo, 1875), vol. 1, p. x.   8 See further Lennart Pettersson, ‘Some aspects on the pictures of the North’, Arctic Discourses 23 (2008), 251–72.   9 Peter Davidson, The Idea of North (London: Reaktion Books 2005). 10 Peter Fjågesund, The Dream of the North: A Cultural History to 1920 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), p. 17. 11 Thompson, Travel Writing, p. 115. 12 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, ed. and trans. H. Rackham, 10 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938–62), vol. 2, pp. 192/194 (2.IV.xiii). 13 Jordanes, The Gothic History of Jordanes, trans. Charles Christopher Mierow (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1915), p. 53. 14 Moses Pitt, The English Atlas, 4 vols (Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1680–82), vol. 1, sec. 3, p. 66.

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15 See further Henriette Kliemann-Geisinger, ‘Mapping the North – spatial dimensions and geographical concepts of northern Europe’, in Karen Klitgaard Povlsen (ed.), Northbound: Travels, Encounters and Constructions 1700–1830 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2007), pp. 69–88; H. Arnold Barton, Scandinavia in the Revolutionary Era, 1760–1815 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986) and Northern Arcadia: Foreign Travelers in Scandinavia, 1765–1815 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998); and Peter Fjågesund and Ruth A. Symes, The Northern Utopia: British Perceptions of Norway in the Nineteenth Century (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003). 16 E. Daniel Clarke, Scandinavia, vol. 10 of Travels in Various Countries of Europe Asia and Africa (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1824), pp. 264–5. 17 Robert Gordon Latham, Norway and the Norwegians, 2 vols (London; Richard Bentley, 1840), vol. 1, p. 54. 18 Arthur Dillon, A Winter in Iceland and Lapland, 2 vols (London: Henry Colbourn, 1840), vol. 2, p. 8. 19 Landor, Adventures in the North of Europe, vol. 2, p. 74. 20 William Henry Breton, Scandinavian Sketches, or A Tour in Norway (London: J. Bohn, 1835), pp. 43 and 49. 21 John Coles, Summer Travelling in Iceland; Being the Narrative of Two Journeys across the Island by Unfrequented Routes (London: John Murray, 1882), p. 7. 22 Burton, Ultima Thule, vol. 1, p. 332. 23 Sabine Baring-Gould, Iceland: Its Scenes and Sagas (London: Smith & Elder, 1863), p. 27. See further Andrew Wawn, ‘Sabine Baring-Gould and Iceland: A re-evaluation’, in Marie Wells (ed.), The Discovery of Nineteenth-century Scandinavia (Norwich: Norvik Press, 2008), p. 40. 24 William Coxe, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, 3 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1790), vol. 3, pp. 153–4. 25 On the traveller–tourist dynamic in general, see James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); and Youngs, The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, pp. 58–60. 26 Uno von Troil, Letters on Iceland: Containing Observations Made during a Voyage Undertaken in the year 1772 by Joseph Banks, Esq. (1780; rpt Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 11. 27 William Morris, Journals of Travel in Iceland: 1871–1873, vol. 8 of The Collected Works of William Morris (Boston: Adamant, 2005), p. 108. It was around 1800, Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson argues, that conceptions of Iceland shifted from the barbaric and dystopic to the romanticised and utopic. See ‘Barbarians of the north become the Hellenians of the north’, in Karen Klitgaard Povlsen (ed.), Northbound: Travels, Encounters and Constructions 1700–1830 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2007), pp. 111–28.

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28 Metcalfe, The Oxonian in Norway; or Notes of Excursions in That Country in 1854–1855, 2 vols (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1856), vol. 1, p. iv. 29 Landor, Adventures in the North of Europe, pp. 165 and 63. 30 Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, edited by Tone Brekke and John Mee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 10. 31 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, p. 50. 32 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, p. 96. 33 William Cecil Slingsby, Norway: The Northern Playground. Sketches of Climbing and Mountain Exploration in Norway between 1872 and 1903 (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1904), p. 197; and Pierre Martin de la Martinière, A New Voyage into the Northern Countries (London: John Starkey, 1674), p.130. 34 Burton, Ultima Thule, vol. 1, pp. ix–x. 35 See Seaton, Literary Relations of England and Scandinavia, pp. 25–56 and 149–202. 36 Ole Borch, ‘Observationes Variae Curiosae in Itinere Anglico’, in Thomas Bartholinus, Epistolarum Medicinalium Centuriae, 4 vols (Copenhagen: Matthias Godicchenius, 1667), vol. 4, pp. 516–40. 37 Compare pp. 77, 263, and 270 with pp. 40, 136, 144, 146, 240, and 300: Von Troil, Letters on Iceland. 38 Von Troil, Letters on Iceland, pp. 228 and 251. 39 See Oslund, Iceland Imagined, pp. 35–48; pp. 30–60 discuss responses to Icelandic natural phenomena in general. 40 Oslund, Iceland Imagined, p. 77. 41 Niels Horrebrow, The Natural History of Iceland (London: A. Linde, 1758), p. 91. 42 Metcalfe, Oxonian in Norway, vol. 1, pp. 103–6. 43 Ebenezer Henderson, Iceland; or the Journal of a Residence in that Island, during the Years 1814 and 1815, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Waugh, and Innes, 1818), vol. 1, p. x. 44 Henderson, Iceland; or the Journal of a Residence in that Island, vol. 1, pp. xxxi and xxx. 45 See further Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians, and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 46 Dillon, A Winter in Iceland and Lapland, vol. 1, pp. 3–10. 47 On the difficulties of travel in the period, see further Peter C. Mancall (ed.), Travel Narratives from the Age of Discovery: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 3–48. 48 On this infrastructure, see Buzard, The Beaten Track, pp. 18–79. 49 Paul Readman, ‘William Cecil Slingsby, Norway, and British mountaineering, 1872–1914’, Review of English Studies 129 (2014), 1124–6.

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50 Slingsby, Norway: The Northern Playground, p. 15. Paul Readman has argued that a similar nostalgia characterises Slingsby’s approach to mountaineering: ‘British alpinists climbed for a range of reasons. Ideas of conquest, domination and assertive machismo may have motivated some individuals, but for others, such as Slingsby, mountaineering had more to do with, inter alia, a very personal reverence for nature and a persisting appreciation of the mountain sublime’: ‘William Cecil Slingsby, Norway, and British mountaineering, 1872–1914’, 1100. 51 Breton, Scandinavian Sketches, p. 1. 52 Burton, Ultima Thule, vol. 1, p. xii. 53 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, pp. 95–6. 54 J. L. Lowes suggested that Coleridge may have known the passage from the Letters. See The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927), p. 545. Coleridge certainly knew of the Letters, and recent critics have echoed Lowes about their specific influence on ‘Kubla Khan’. See Richard Holmes (ed.), A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’ (London: Penguin Books, 1987), pp. 39–41. 55 Metcalfe, The Oxonian in Norway, vol. 1, p. iv. 56 Metcalfe, The Oxonian in Thelemarken; or, Notes of Travel in SouthWestern Norway in the Summers of 1856 and 1857, 2 vols (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1858), vol. 1, p. vii. 57 Slingsby, Norway: The Northern Playground, p. ix. 58 Slingsby, Norway: The Northern Playground, p. 61. Readman notes that Norwegians themselves considered Slingsby the ‘father of Norwegian mountaineering’: ‘William Cecil Slingsby, Norway, and British mountaineering, 1872–1914’, 1102. 59 Morris, Journals of Travel in Iceland, p. 108. 60 Robert Molesworth, An Account of Denmark as It Was in the Year 1692 (London Goodwin, 1694), sigs A3v–A4r. 61 Molesworth, An Account of Denmark, no sig. 62 On the middle- and upper-class identity of British travellers in general throughout the nineteenth century, see Buzard, The Beaten Track. On Swedish travellers in particular see Mark Davies, A Perambulating Paradox: British Travel Literature and the Image of Sweden c.1770–1865 (Lund: University of Lund Press, 2000). 63 Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, p. 6. 64 Ryan Eyford, White Settler Reserve: New Iceland and the Colonization of the Canadian West (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2016), p. 7. Also see Jonas Thor, Icelanders in North America: The First Settlers (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2002).

3 Ethnography and heritage

If British travellers had had merely passing interest in Scandinavia, a kind of idle curiosity would have characterised their responses. An occasional remark about a waterfall, for instance, followed by one about an inn or a steamship. But the consistency and intensity of the experiences described in Chapter 2 bespeak much more than idle curiosity. As in Polynesia, North America, and Asia, travellers necessarily encountered more than the landscape when they journeyed to Scandinavia. They also experienced the people who lived there, their history, and their cultural practices. And as in these other regions, the dynamics of these experiences took shape not simply in relation to immediate circumstances but also in relation to Britain and its cultural expectations. An encounter with a primitive North American Indian who could not speak English could (and did) become an affirmation of the superiority of Britain’s culture as well as language; as in Scandinavia, after all, it was the British who came to North America (and established colonies there), and not Native Americans who colonised Britain. An encounter with an idol-worshipping Polynesian could (and did) affirm the truth and pre-eminence of Christianity.1 If travel encouraged self-realisation, it also produced cultural memory. In the Anglo-Scandinavian context in particular, ethnography offered another venue for thinking about these matters. At issue, most broadly, was what the early modern period often designated race – an amalgamation of qualities and categories today distinguished by ethnicity, language, and nationality as well as racial type. Even the Victorians, Peter Mandell has suggested, ‘used a language of race that was frustratingly, sometimes deliberately, ambiguous: a “race” could be a physical stock, it could be something like a “tribe” or a “clan”, or it could be both at once’.2 Through such formulations, race, rather than being a social construction, is at once determinative and largely non-transmutable. Embedded in a

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nation and its people, race defined in this way also accounts for a people’s cultural achievement. In this sense, the British of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries had been destined to be great, while the indigenes they encountered in their global expansion had not been. Within this theoretical context, early modern discussions of what we today would call British ethnographic history turn on a recurring set of references to Asia, migration, tribal unity, ancestral peoples, pagan practices, genealogies, violence, language, Christianity, mythology, and the Norman Conquest. Produced across the centuries I consider and circulated by writers who often had no direct influence on or even knowledge of one another, these tropes enable memories of a past that supports a specific socio-political present. They offer ways to think about the Nordic regions, Britain, and the historiographic connections among them that sustained national identity by means of historical division. At issue in such cultural memories, that is, is the establishment of some kind of continuity between past and present, which depends, of course, on distinctions between the two historical moments. Or as Judith Pollmann has said, ‘Modernity is not about doing objectively modern things, but a form of self-awareness that makes people think of themselves or others as modern and as different from the people in the past.’3 Emerging from many early modern discussions of England’s political history was the belief – or perhaps argument – that the Nordic and English peoples were of the same race and that as such they were categorically distinct from other races, especially from the French and sometimes even from the German ones. Evidence for this unity could be found in population movements and the attendant historical interactions, religious practices, and social characteristics – all of them approached with an awareness of Scandinavia’s and Britain’s divergent political ­concerns and statuses in the modern world. A Gothic migration At their closest points in eastern Scotland or Northumbria and western Norway and Denmark, nearly 1000 kilometres of open water separate Great Britain from Scandinavia. As of the early modern period, perhaps two millennia separated the common ancestors of their peoples. The representations of the AngloScandinavian Middle Ages that I am tracing here depended on the bridging of these gaps.

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The foundation for this bridge was laid by the imperial Roman historian Tacitus. Writing in the late first and early second century of the Common Era, Tacitus extensively documented the Roman Empire, and in one work, De Origine et Situ Germanorum, turned his attention to the barbarian region north of present-day Italy. In the Germania, as the work is commonly called, he described in detail lands he almost certainly had never visited – their geography, government, people, customs, and ethics. Although a Roman writer and never entirely free of the suspicion – even xenophobia – with which many Roman historians surveyed the world around them, Tacitus none the less found much to admire in what he recounted, and even considered the Germanic peoples more accomplished in bravery and morality than his fellow Romans. The direct influence of the Germania on British or Nordic views of history, at least until the modern period, was at best minimal. Only one manuscript (the tenth-century Codex Hersfeldensis) survived the Middle Ages, and, having been copied in the fifteenth century, it subsequently was lost. What is significant about Tacitus’s efforts is that they illustrate what became a pervasive way of looking at the regions of central, northern, and western Europe that imagines a shared ethnicity among some of their peoples. This is an ethnicity distinct from that found in Rome or Gaul or lands to the east and south-west, and for Tacitus its origins preceded what he describes. From this vantage Germanic identity functions (perhaps circularly) as the material cause of peoples, lands, and languages identified as Germanic; it is the means for establishing a genealogy and group identity that transcends the influences of other groups. Imagined in this way, a people could be stamped with indelible characteristics that thereby persist even centuries after its separation and isolation. Specifically, early modern British people could be understood to remain fundamentally Nordic, despite the millennium that separated them from the Continent, despite the sustained presence of several neighbouring Brythonic groups, and despite the influx of Romance (specifically French) individuals, their language, and their customs. At an extreme, this kind of identity provides a rationale for the reactionary exclusion of anyone and anything perceived to be separate from, and a potential threat to, the ethnic core. It is thus not by accident that the Germania became a favoured work of the Nazis, with its ideas and expressions helping to underwrite their rhetoric. Tacitus, of course, is scarcely responsible for what others made of his ideas. Throughout the medieval and early modern periods,

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indeed, the Germania itself sat somewhere on a shelf, unread by British historians or nearly anyone else. To Anglo-Saxon commentators, further, the Norwegians and Danes were less kindred spirits than challenges to physical safety and spiritual well-being. Abbot Ælfric’s tenth-century sermon De Falsis Diis describes the Scandinavian gods as demons, while Archbishop Wulfstan’s slightly later Sermo Lupi ad Anglos understands the Vikings’ appearance in England as an act of vengeance by God on a lapsed people. Even as Cnut the Great was establishing a Danish-speaking court, fostering the production of skaldic poetry, and promoting Christianity, English historians continued a tradition of identifying Nordic peoples as pre-eminently unlike the English in faith, temperament, and virtue. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as many critics have argued, English historiography had developed into a patriotic exercise in national self-identification.4 Drawing on Tacitus’s other works (such as the Annales), writers like William Camden (1551–1623) reproduced this ethnic model for understanding the Germanic people (including the English) as a group with shared common traditions and characteristics. More particularly, their shared language contributed to the framing of a distinctly AngloNordic shared history and ethnicity. A genealogy like this enabled commentators to address some of the historiographic challenges of early modern England, such as accounting for the undeniable but problematic impact of the French language on English. As the language of invaders – who, by the sixteenth century, were of another faith – French (and its speakers) could have undermined beliefs in the continuity of cultural traditions in England. A broadly Germanic ethnography made it possible instead to see French, and more generally the Conquest, as weakening but not severing linguistic and cultural continuities between early modern England and its Anglo-Saxon past. Although Alexander Gil, in his 1621 Logonomia Anglica, did represent the introduction of French as a rupture in English linguistic history,5 his contemporary Camden expressed the prevalent view that the virtue and character of the present-day English had been permanently set in the pre-Conquest period: ‘Great, verily, was the glory of our tongue, before the Norman Conquest, in this – that the old English could express most aptly all the conceits of the mind in their own tongue without borrowing from any.’6 From this viewpoint, Anglo-Saxon glory and the ethos that went with it endured unaffected by the arrival of William of Normandy.

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Ethnic and cultural continuities that began not just before the Conquest but also before the migration of Continental tribes amplified this way of understanding British history and the identity of the British people. For a great many critics from across sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, the Bible still explained the origins of human speech, and with it the development of nations (or races). The one language that Adam and Eve had spoken in Eden scattered with their descendants when God struck down the Tower of Babel, following which those whose lineage could be traced to Noah’s son Japhet spread to the north and west. From them, the argument went, arose the European peoples and languages in general. Reflecting emergent nationalistic impulses, critics variously identified the language of Eden as Spanish, Hungarian, German, and Swedish, but Hebrew was far and away the most popular choice. With Nimrod still speaking Hebrew, it was after Babel that other languages and races emerged.7 Richard Verstegan (c.1550–1640) argued that at Babel each ‘troop’, as he called them, ‘having a natural desyre to remain by it self, seperated from the others whose language it understood not, caused that they all resolved to departe divers wayes to seek themselves new and severall habitacions … [they] were now become neer strangers the one unto the other, & thence-forward dayly grew unto more & more alienation’. Since each ‘troop’ is represented as naturally separating and defining itself by language, ethnic identities, as in Tacitus’s Germania, seem almost primeval, predating the languages by which they later were known. German – with which Verstegan linked English and the Nordic languages – has remained among the ‘moste noble’ of these languages precisely because the Germans, whose language dated to the big bang of Babel, ‘have ever kept themselves unmixed with forrain people, and their language without mixing it with any forrain toung’. Verstegan images this distinctly Germanic ethnicity in the way he resolves the difficulties posed by the Norman Conquest. He emphasises that prior to their arrival in northern France, the Normans had spoken another Germanic language and that by shifting to English they in effect returned ‘again unto themselves’ – ‘Some do call us a mixed nation by reason of these Danes and Normannes coming in among us’, he concludes – but Danes, Normans, and the English all ‘were once one same people with the Germans, as were also the Saxons’.8 Robert Sheringham, a fellow of Caius College, Cambridge, and a scholar of Arabic and Hebrew, epitomises the extension of this broadly Germanic view. His 1670 De Anglorum Gentis Origine

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Disceptatio is one of several early modern e­thnographies (and perhaps the most eloquent) to identify the essence of Britain’s connections with Scandinavia as dating to Continental recorded history rather than to the mists of Eden and Babel. In fact, Sheringham never mentions the Vikings as he traces both the English and Nordic peoples back through the Goths to Scythia and the Middle East. By exploring language, history, and mannerisms, and specifically through the testimonies of ancient authors, place-names, and etymology, he says that he has investigated the origin of the English people and has shown that ‘the same Gothic language has thrived throughout Scandinavia, Scythia, Thrace, Dacia, and Mysia’. The English, so named because of the angle (‘angulus’) of land they inhabited near modern Denmark, descend from three specific Gothic tribes: Bede’s Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. As for the Goths in general, ‘their fame has been made sufficiently famous among all nations’. They were ‘more clever’ than the Greeks and had migrated into Thrace before the time of the Argonauts, so that even Orpheus, in effect, is Nordic. Known for their accomplishments in justice, civility, medicine, and law, the Goths (and Norse) were thus the founders of democracy – an idea that proved particularly strong in Britain throughout the early modern period. As for the arts, ‘No one’, Sheringham observes, ‘adorned the Greek language more than did Menander the Goth.’ If Sheringham has little to say about the ‘bravery, potency, and victories of the Goths’, it is only because throughout the world the Goths and their descendants are already ‘known among all educated people as conquerors’.9 Anglo-Nordic ethnicity also figures prominently in Langhorne’s 1673 Elenchus Antiquitatum Albionensium Britannorum, Scotorum, Danorum, Anglosaxonum and its appendix, published the next year. By locating Asgard as a place in Asia – in itself another prominent image in ethnographic discussions – Langhorne traces the Goths to Noah and connects them in particular to the Cimmerians and Suevi whom Caesar names in his Commentarii de Bello Gallico. The Cimmerians, in turn, moved ‘from Germany into Gaul and thence established colonies in Britain’.10 As for the very word ‘English’, Langhorne begins by identifying Ing (Old Norse Yngvi, Old English Ingwine) as a pan-Germanic fertility god and one of the Suevi. ‘It is from Ing’, he explains, ‘that his descendants in the vernacular have been called Inglings, the most celebrated group of the Suevi, and the Inglings seem to have been renamed the English, from which the Romans derived the Latin ­appellation Anglorum.’

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With this genealogy in mind, Langhorne provides a table of the Saxon and Suevi kings ‘prior to their arrival in Britain’.11 In a large quarto with three hundred pages of closely set type, Aylett Sammes (1636?–1679?) offers the most ambitious and detailed account of Nordic history and mythology as the underpinning of England and the English. He acknowledges that Snorri is ‘the chief Mythologist of the Northern Writers’ and the Prose Edda ‘the most venerable Monument of Antiquity amongst us, or rather the setter forth of it’. But the origins of all these people is Phoenicia rather than Scythia: ‘I have plainly made out, that not only the Name of Britain it self, but of most places therein of Ancient denomination are purely derived from the Phoenician Tongue, and that the Language it self for the most part, as well as the Customes, Religions, Idols, Offices, Dignities, of the Ancient Britains are all clearly Phoenician.’ He assembles masses of detail to support this claim, including etymology, poetry, weapons, and references to Bede and other historians. The Goths, who gave rise to the English as well as the Nordic peoples, were a branch of the Cimmerians of Phoenicia, who in turn descended from Tuisco, said to be ‘the Leader of a distinct Colony from Babel, and taking his way North-west, to have Peopled all that tract of Land called Germany’. Acknowledging that some believe the Germanic god Tuisco was the son or grandson of Noah, Sammes is able to construct a genealogy that extends from Noah, through Tuisco and Odin, to Henry II of England.12 Of course, all these arguments about genealogy and etymology are fantastic, not to mention the arguments about a Nordic Orpheus, a Swedish-speaking Adam, or an early modern English populace that, despite the Norman Conquest and long-time proximity of Celtic peoples, is purely Germanic. But, in their frequency and recurrence, they reflect the usefulness of the tropes that constructed a shared Anglo-Nordic ethnicity in Britain. As I am tracing it here, this ethnicity depends on the replication of disparate references to Babel, the Conquest, Scythia, and migration. Individually, these all served as demonstrations of the historical continuity of the English people; collectively, the references fashioned a memory of national identity at the very moment when Great Britain was forged and began to assume a dominant role in world politics. The crucial link between Britain, the Nordic lands, and the Middle East was the figure of Odin, who himself became a p ­ owerful and much circulated trope of English ethnicity. Depicted in both the Prose and Poetic Edda as the powerful if capricious god of

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battle and poetry, Odin, in Vǫluspá (The Sybil’s Prophecy), is the god who, on behalf of one group of gods (the Æsir), begins the first war by hurling a spear over another group of gods (the Vanir); in Hávamál (Sayings of the High One) the god who hangs himself on the world-tree Yggdrasil in order to acquire the runes; and in Vafþrúðnismál (The Lay of Vafthrudnir) the one who wagers his head with a giant in a riddle contest. A frightening and mysterious mythological figure that may have originated in IndoEuropean culture, Odin became reimagined as not simply a mortal king but one who travelled from Asia, bringing the origins of the Norse and English with him into north-west Europe. The story took many forms over the course of several centuries, sometimes with a h ­ istorical Odin aspiring to be a god, and sometimes with others treating him that way; sometimes there is one Odin, and sometimes several individuals who go by that name. And sometimes, as in the earliest and latest versions of the story, Odin is treated simply as a mythological figure, and other times, as by early modern British historians, as a real human being.13 The earliest telling of the Odin story may be that of Saxo Grammaticus, the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Danish historian whose Gesta Danorum combines history and myth in a lengthy account that stretches from the centuries before Christ to the Denmark of his day. Saxo mentions ‘one Odin, who was credited over all Europe with the honour, which was false, of godhead, but used more continually to sojourn at Uppsala; and in this spot, either from the sloth of the inhabitants or from his own pleasantness, he vouchased to dwell with somewhat especial constancy’. Treated as a god – a status he enjoys – this Odin is exiled, and a certain ‘Mit-othin’ assumes his role, feigning ‘to be a god’.14 All the elements key to later British ethnography are here: apparent movement into Scandinavia as well as widespread recognition, deification, and replacement by a substitute. Saxo says nothing of an origin in Scythia, but, a short time after he wrote, Snorri’s Prose Edda provided this link.15 Variously described as a mythography, a poetic handbook, a plea for patronage, and an act of antiquarianism, the thirteenth-century Edda offers a composite view of Norse mythology and poetics.16 In this way, the Prose Edda both relates what have become some of the most familiar stories about the Scandinavian pantheon, such as Odin’s theft of the mead of poetry, and explains the metre and allusions of skaldic verse. It begins with a Prologue that describes the movement of the Æsir people from Asia (specifically Troy) to

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northern Europe and that, in the present context, is worth examining in detail. According to Snorri, Odin, foreseeing that he would be exalted in Scandinavia, leaves Asia and took with him a very great following, young people and old, men and women, and they took with them many precious things. And whatever countries they passed through, great glory was spoken of them, so that they seemed more like gods than men. And they did not halt their journey until they came north to the country that is now called Saxony. Odin stayed there for a long while and gained possession of large parts of that land.

From this Odin’s lineage, according to Snorri, arise figures with the names of the other Norse deities (including another Odin). Eventually Odin and the Æsir arrive in Sweden, where, having established his son as ruler of Norway, he is accepted as a king. ‘These Æsir found themselves marriages within the country there’, Snorri continues, and some of them for their sons too, and these families became extensive, so that throughout Saxony and from there all over the northern regions it spread so that their language, that of the men of Asia, became the mother tongue over all these lands. And people think they can deduce from the records of the names of their ­ancestors that those names belonged to this language, and that the Æsir brought the language north to this part of the world, to Norway and to Sweden, to Denmark and to Saxony; and in England there are ancient names for regions and places which one can tell come from a different language from this one.17

Snorri’s version of the migration story does more than originate the Nordic peoples in the Middle East. It attributes ­ them, through their movements and intermarrying, with providing the ­foundation for western and northern Europe – essentially, the story reinscribes the sentiments of the Germania and then some. Establishing the ethnic and linguistic unity of all these peoples, the Prose Edda lays the foundation for the self-evident virtue and valour that attract other peoples to them. Further, given the fact that according to premodern ethnography – indeed, ethnography through the nineteenth century – culture, language, and ethnicity follow from one another, Snorri’s account linguistically separates the inhabitants of Great Britain from those of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Bede’s History, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and other early English sources simply include Woden, the Old English cognate

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and counterpart to Odin, in genealogies of kingship. Taking Snorri at his word, Sheringham and other early modern British ethnographers thus go far beyond this Anglo-Saxon practice. By disregarding the way Snorri bracketed off Britain from Scandinavia and by writing in detail about the Asiatic origins of a people broadly termed Goths and narrowly understood to be Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and English, these accounts rendered Odin a figure who at once connected Britain to Scandinavia and helped define British ethnic identity. Christian historians certainly recognised that Odin was not a genuine god. But if he were to serve as a link between the English and Nordic peoples, they could not represent Odin as a devil or even as just the willing object of heathen worship – which was how Abbot Ælfric and Snorri had depicted him. Instead, in early modern English accounts Odin appears as an illustrious and historical figure who became treated as a god, something over which he had no control. According to Sammes, indeed, Woden/ Odin seldom was mentioned ‘without some excessive Encomium of his Person’.18 To Francis Wise (writing in 1758), Odin besides his great skill in war, wrought many astonishing feats by Magick; and a thousand fabulous stories are recorded of him. He was after death reverenced as the chief deity of the Goths: his inferiour captains were likewise deified the name of Asæ or Asiatics, to distinguish them from the Europeans; and their language, or at least their Poetry, was called Asa-Mal, or Asiatic Speech.19

Information about Odin thus may be compromised by heathen practices and his posthumous reception, which blurs any easy line between fact and falsehood. Like the stories told by Homer and Hesiod, those about Odin may not relay events in clear chronological order. None the less, as with these antique models, the ­historical truths in accounts of Odin were not to be discarded along with the credulity of medieval historiography. It is just about the time when Odin approached the north of Europe, Sheringham points out, that ‘all of history was tied up in story-telling [fabulis]’.20 Just what Snorri meant by ‘ancient names … from a different language from this one’ is difficult to say. He could be referring to Old English, Brythonic, or even French. As linguistically astute as Snorri was, in fact, without the tools of comparative philology he was not in a position to make precise judgements about linguistic genealogy. Early modern historians, in any case, give no sign that Snorri’s bracketing of Britain’s language produced any doubts about the intrinsic connections between Britain and the Nordic

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regions. While the story of Odin’s journey to Scandinavia became widely known only with the publication of Peder Resen’s 1665 Edda Islandorum (Edda of the Islanders), once this Latin translation did appear, Snorri’s Scandinavian account offered the best proof of the identity of the English.21 Ultimately, by taking Snorri at his word, early modern historians provided the English with a Nordic ethnicity that kept them fundamentally separate from and unaffected not only by the influx of Normans but also by contact with the indigenous peoples increasingly encountered in colonial expansion. To be sure, writers like Sheringham, Langhorne, and Sammes were aware of the potentially questionable value of Snorri’s testimony. Some parts are exaggerated, Sheringham believes, and he discounts anything to do with magic. But that leaves a lot of areas in which the Edda could be treated as true, and, since the Edda is such an ancient authority, ‘it can show us about the theology, religion, and many old customs of the Goths and of our ancestors’. If there were no Edda, Sheringham continues, ‘the deeds of our ancestors would have been cast in obscurity and buried in dark oblivion’.22 Here, the personal possessive pronoun ‘our’ (which I have highlighted and which reflects Latin ‘noster’) suggests just how strongly this tradition collapses the ethnicity and history of the English into that of the Scandinavians. Indeed, phrases like ‘the travels of our ancestors’ run throughout Sheringham’s n ­ arrative of Scandinavian migrations. Whatever mythology later was to make of him, because a historical Odin was understood to be a brave, virtuous, and what we today might call democratic ruler, historians could present him as embodying admirable contemporary political values. These values, in turn, acquired historical validation by being traceable to Nordic forebears. Odin’s leadership sustained the creation of a just, inclusive state that Goths and Norse shared, and these are the very qualities that were perceived to reach maturity in early modern England, making ‘liberty’ a virtual Scandinavian creation.23 Says Sheringham, ‘This Othin was a magnanimous leader, strong in hand, open to counsel, famous for prophesy, and, as the story goes, king of Asgard and the greatest chief [Pontifex maximus] of the heathen gods.’24 To Langhorne, Odin’s name ‘is celebrated the most before all the kings in the North’.25 Sammes allows that Odin’s achievements well may have been exaggerated, perhaps because credulous people of the time needed to believe in ‘supernatural assistances’, and that he actually was ‘no more than

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an ordinary Leader, and his Actions made miraculous after his death’. Even so, ‘certain it is, none of all the Saxon Nation ever attained to so great Reputation, being worshipped in all places, and by all Sexes, and saluted with the highest title of Divinity’.26 Odin’s commitment to the same kind of democratic rule understood to govern early modern Britain appears with particular force in Wise’s account, which situates the Asiatic migrations at a much later date than that imagined by other British ethnographers: Odin or Woden with his people came from the Asiatic side of the lake Mæotis; driven out, as it is thought, by the terror of the Roman arms, after the conquest of Mithridates by Pompey. He retired perhaps for the same reason to the northern parts of Europe, not subject to the Roman government, and settled in Scandinavia, and the coasts about the Baltic sea.27

By resisting the tyranny of imperial Rome, this Odin provides a model for Britain’s historical resistance to Catholic Rome, as well as its commitment to democratic rule. When Odin led the Goths from Scythia or Phoenicia or lake Mæotis or wherever he led them from, he in effect brought the English to England as much as the Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes to Scandinavia. From Odin, Sammes avers, ‘the Saxon Princes in general claimed their Original, and from whom … HÆNGIST and HORSUS, who first arrived in BRITAIN, are said to descend in the fourth degree’.28 And it was ‘with the leadership and direction of Odin’, according to Sheringham, again using the first person possessive pronoun, that ‘our ancestors, the Saxons, Geats, and Angles came into Germany from Scythia to the ancient homelands of the Geats’.29 The implications of these historical truths, in a kind of free associational way, include another truth of significant importance to post-Reformation Britain, which is the truth of its religion in opposition to Catholicism. Edward Stillingfleet (1635–99) thus cited the fact that Snorri’s gods really were only men in support of his efforts to ‘make good the Charge of Idolatry against the Roman Church’.30 Since the pre-Reformation Snorri was necessarily Catholic, that is, Snorri’s stories about the Nordic peoples’ deification of the Æsir amount to stories of Romanist worship of false gods. Historiographic tropes thereby enabled one Christian group to use medieval accounts of heathen practices in order to expose another group’s spiritual errors. Whilst these arguments may seem as convoluted as the etymologies of ‘English’ that I noted

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above, like them they testify to the cultural importance of Nordic materials in imagining early modern British ethnicity. Such connections among the Middle East, Scandinavia, Britain, and Odin persisted past the early modern period. If they were reproduced less frequently, it may have been partly because as the political circumstances of both Britain and Scandinavia changed (to which I turn in the next section), the need to demonstrate, rather than simply accept, ethnic kinship and through it national and individual integrity diminished. But throughout the nineteenth century Odin, having been transformed from a god into one or more deified earthly individuals, retained his early modern status as a trope of Britain’s Nordic past and ethnicity. A Scythian or Phoenician homeland and the guidance of Odin, or even his deification, could become matters of fact without any particular significance for the investment of Britain’s current identity in them. Mackenzie thus considers a detailed account of the descent of the Icelanders from the Norwegians to be unnecessary, since this is well-known and established beyond doubt: Forming one branch of the great Gothic or Teutonic family, which occupied at this period the northern kingdoms of Europe, it cannot be doubted that they were derived from one common source; and we look to their origin in the Scythian emigration, which, nine centuries before, under the banners of the victorious Odin, carried conquest and usurpation throughout all the vast regions of the north.31

In 1818 Henderson follows suit by stating that the ‘principal nations of Scandinavia’ were ‘descended from the Goths or Getæ, who had their seat in the vicinity of the Black Sea’.32 According to the dispassionate analysis of Laing (1812–97), ‘The Asiatic origin of the Scandinavian race, and of that religion of Odin or AsaOdin, which prevailed among them until the eleventh century, is placed beyond a doubt, although the causes and exact period of their migration are matters of conjecture only.’33 With all the precision of Victorian historiography, Grenville Pigott’s 1839 ‘manual’ of Scandinavian mythology notes that it is ‘generally agreed that there must have been more than one individual who bore the name Odin’. Pigott suspects three such individuals, the first living in Scythia, and the second (a descendant) emigrating around 520 BCE and ‘making himself master of a great part of Scandinavia, introducing a new worship, of which he and his principal companions were the chief divinities’. The third was a claimant to this latter’s status.34

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In circulating such references to migration, Odin, and resistance to foreign influence, English accounts of Scandinavia foregrounded a link to the past that, like contemporary visits to Scandinavia, testified to ancient British roots and measured modern British achievement. The developing Victorian interest in the Vikings, where many modern critical discussions of Anglo-Scandinavian interactions and sentiments begin, essentially reproduced this well-established historical distancing by treating shared Scythian ethnicity as a given that the arrival and influence of the Vikings only reinforced. For Slingsby, Nordic contact appears transformative but also ancient, something of modern value only to the extent that the present preserves fundamental traces of the past: From our Viking ancestry we have also derived the most interesting portion of the rich dialect of our Northern Counties. Especially is this the case in Cumberland, which has probably more Norse blood and general Norse characteristics than any other portion of the British Isles with the exception of Orkney and Shetland.35

Conjoined British-Nordic ethnicity thus itself became a kind of master trope, overriding historical niceties (such as ‘general Norse characteristics’ or the definition of a dialect’s ‘most interesting portion’) and sustaining other related tropes. In a similar way, the Vikings’ legendary and much-romanticised fondness for violence could be reimagined as a mark of both courage and animosity directed at Romanism, an animus that many of their British descendants shared. In introducing his 1844 translation of Heimskringla (‘The Circle of the Earth’, a history of Norwegian and Swedish kings), for instance, Laing notes, ‘The moral power of this people – the Anglo-Saxons and Northmen being essentially the same people – has left deeper impressions on society, and of a nobler character, than the despotic material power of the Romans.’36 By this heuristic, conjoint ethnicity and shared religious sentiment even could recuperate Viking depredations in Britain as signs of British ascendance. If sagas might serve as history and so accounts of what putatively real Norse (and so British) ancestors did, stories of Odin, Thor, and the rest of the Norse pantheon could offer abstractions of what might be called the bellicose AngloNordic spirit that underlay British exceptionalism. According to Pigott (1796–1865), the religion of Odin must have exercised a great and lasting influence on the character and institutions of the inhabitants of Great

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Britain. The Jutes, Anglians and Saxons, who in the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, effected the conquest of the greatest part of this island, were worshippers, and their principal leaders reputed descendants of Odin. In process of time these heathen invaders were converted to Christianity, but the old worship died away by degrees and slowly, and not without leaving permanent traces on the manners and habits of their descendants.37

To Laing, the fact that the Anglo-Saxons were conquered by Vikings was essentially proof that ‘The spirit, character, and national vigour of the old Anglo-Saxon branch of this people, had evidently become extinct under the influence and pressure of the church of Rome upon the energies of the human mind’.38 In effect, by succumbing to the Norse, the English recovered themselves and thereby continued a steady progress to the present. Put another way, it was because of their conflicts with the Vikings that the defeated English ultimately prevailed. William (1792–1879) and Mary Howitt (1799–1888), in some ways the most fastidious of Victorian translators, invoke these same long-standing tropes of ethnicity and ethos. Seeing religious and moral superiority in combative exploits, they regard violence and battles as crucial links between the British and Norse. Of the latter they observe, War and plunder, therefore, in their eyes, so far from being in any degree criminal, were acts of glory and of merit. When we read of the bloody Danes, who were, in fact, just as often Swedes and Norwegians, we should remember this, and moreover that they cherished a particular hatred to Rome and to the Christian religion, because it came to them from Rome with all its monks, and what appeared to them effeminate doctrines.39

For as long as the English have been Christian, say the Howitts, the ‘old Norse fire in their veins’ has not been quenched, and it is this Nordic fire that accounts for why Great Britain had become the United Kingdom and emerged as a global power: The same love of martial daring and fame; the same indomitable sea-faring spirit, the same passion for discovery of new seas and new lands, the same irresistible longing, when discovered, to seize and colonise them, the same victorious strength in subduing the vastest, the most populous or the most savage nations to their yoke, still ­distinguish them, and distinguish them above all other people. America, Australia, the Indies East and West, South Africa, Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Isles, and the isles of many a distant

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sea bear testimony to the survival of the spirit of the Vikings in the bosoms of the British.40

If this ‘same indomitable sea-faring spirit’ and ‘same passion for discovery’ did not have the same impact among the Nordic peoples who enkindled it, the difference could be explained by acknowledging that, despite their shared genealogy, the presentday British and Nordic peoples have fundamentally different moral characters. Indeed, after this shared beginning and through common conversion to Christianity and the persistence of their own indomitable nature, differences arose because of the distinctive way in which the British peoples supplemented their original spirit: But while we are compounded of British, Roman, Saxon and Scandinavian blood, had that of Germany predominated we should have been now as Germany is, a country without colonies, without conquests, without a fleet, and without political liberty. We might have displayed a good share of German intellectuality, but had we not possessed the crowning advantages of Scandinavian prowess, enterprise, and invincible fortitude and independence, we should indeed have been a Deutsche Insel, but not a Great Britain.41

Rooted just as securely in politics as in the landscape, this spirit could affirm a history of a joint Norse and British people who developed in two very different ways, the one retaining the primitive innocence of their noble beginnings, the other demonstrating the global and cultural supremacy latent in them. Stripped of any associations with belief or religion, heathenism thus could serve as a trope affirming and symbolising the will, courage, and ambition that caused Anglophones to eclipse the rest of the world (including their Scandinavian kindred) and Great Britain to be more than a German island. Sharing a pagan past and a non-Catholic present, the histories of Britain and the Nordic lands thus could be seen (at least in Britain) as emblematic of the evolution of Europe in general from pagan, to Christian, to Protestant. That history made it possible to endorse the best qualities of the heathen beginnings and to see these qualities as still alive and still distinguishing the Anglo-Scandinavian people from everyone else: shared barbaric origins could evoke a kind of bemused, even patronising, reminiscence without by themselves suggesting anything like nostalgia. Surveying the historical passage from these pagan origins to Christian heritage, Burton thus manages to sound resigned but wistful: ‘The transition from the

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turbulent and sanguinary Odinic system, with its Paradise of war and wassail, to a religion based upon mildness and mercy could not fail to bear notable fruit. The blithe gods who built Miðgarð vanished in the glooms of the sad “school of Galilee.” Of the extreme craft and cruelty, the racial characteristics of the old Scandinavian, only the craft remained.’42 As laudable as the ‘mildness and mercy’ of the ‘sad “school of Galilee”’ may be, it is the ‘craft’ of the Nordic race that Burton seems to value the most, and in this, however unconsciously, he echoes Sheringham, Sammes, and other earlier ethnographers. One northern spirit A measure of just how earnestly English writers employed tropes that wrote them into Nordic history and ethnicity is the much different way many Nordic writers approached many of these same historical matters. Whereas critics like Sheringham and Sammes seized on a historical Odin to connect Britain, Scandinavia, and the Middle East, their Scandinavian counterparts characteristically treated Snorri’s account and the Poetic Edda the way modern scholars now often regard them, which is largely as records of myths. Approaching the matter from a strictly philological perspective, Jacob Grimm even understood the sense of the Norse form ‘Óðinn’ to be rooted in the word’s morphology as a participle; his Odin is more a semantic quality than a heathen deity, much less a deified human.43 In this perspective, a primary concern becomes to what extent these myths might reflect some kind of cultic p ­ ractice, not whether the figures they describe came about because of the deification of actual personages. Early modern Scandinavian critics thus expressed little interest in the historical accuracy of the narrative that Odin had led the Nordic peoples out of Asia, much less in any prehistoric ethnic connections between the English and the Norse. And to this end, they produced a wholly different set of tropes and images in talking about their past, emphasising runes, mythology, poetry, and individual Scandinavian groups, as well as what might be called a pan-Nordic sensibility. The very title of the Dane Hans Wille’s 1787 Udtog af den Nordiske Mythologie, eller Othins Gude-Lære (‘Precis of Northern Mythology, or Odin’s Doctrine’) demonstrates this very different approach to Scandinavian prehistory. Drawing on both Resen and Saxo, Wille is primarily interested in the pagan era, and to this end he retells the Edda as a coherent, sequential narrative,

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­ eginning with his first chapter, which relates the creation of the b world and explains metaphors for Odin and his sons. Weaving together stories and quotations about Frigg, Frey, Loki, Njord, and others, Wille treats what he reads as mythological rather than as historical. He does so, simply, because it is ‘useful and ­enjoyable’ for modern readers to know the beliefs of their preChristian ancestors.44 Peter Suhm, another Dane, provides similar testimony in his 1771 Om Odin og den Hedniske Gudelære. A nicely produced quarto of nearly four hundred pages, Om Odin embodies significant philological learning and repeatedly cites Snorri’s Edda, whose authority once more lies as a witness to mythology and belief, not to historical events or ethnicity. ‘The Edda’, Suhm observes, ‘is a mixture of our ancestors’ theology or mythology and the oldest origins and history.’45 ‘Our heathen ancestors’, as he refers to them throughout the book, did indeed follow a man named Odin, whom Suhm describes as both a god and a man, possibly linked to Priam or Ulysses. To account for all these disparate roles for Odin, including his influence on Continental Saxons, Suhm (like others) in fact posits a series of individuals who went by that name. His interest always is not some shared prehistory, but a specifically Nordic past. Even if early northern peoples had a fully evolved mythological system that bore striking parallels to Roman mythology, Suhm argues, their beliefs were still fundamentally Norse. Not narrowly focused on specific historical individuals, such beliefs were diverse (and sometimes contradictory) and emerged from and were embodied in the stories found in the Poetic and Prose Edda: ‘Those who believed that nature was a god, or that it produced everything through its own power, necessarily had little regard for Othin, and thought of him as a cheat.’46 Two works by the Dane Nikolaj Grundtvig (1783–1872), Nordens Mytologi eller Udsigt and Nordens Mythologi eller Sindbilled-Sprog, crystallise this way of approaching Norse mythology. Drawing exclusively on Scandinavian materials, Nordens Mythologi eller Udsigt (1808) presents chapter-by-chapter summaries of each of the gods, as well as of the giants and the Ragnarok, all of them pieced together into cohesive accounts from various sources in a way that calls to mind H.R. Ellis Davidson’s now classic Gods and Myths of Northern Europe. Throughout, Grundtvig, like Suhm, emphasises the uniquely northern origin and traits of the myths, offering few comparisons with other Germanic or classical systems. Myths, says Grundtvig, need in general to be seen in relation to the

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specifics of daily life, and in the Nordic lands these included the use of myth for religious practices. Grundtvig’s Nordens Mythologi eller Sindbilled-Sprog (1832) does draw parallels between Norse and Greek mythology, but like his early work it also foregrounds the specifically Nordic character of the Eddas. While the English and French have spoken admiringly about Scandinavia, Grundtvig claims, to find the true northern spirit it is necessary to focus not on shared or parallel developments in other cultures but on the Nordic regions alone: ‘we just need to exclude the Anglo-Saxons and Normans from our history’.47 For Grundtvig Nordic mythology does more than simply exclude the English and other non-Nordic people, however. It also reflects a specific culture and character that have persisted from Snorri’s era to his own: displaying a ‘northern fighting-spirit’, indeed, the stories have clear cultural and symbolic applications in modern Danish life of Grundtvig’s day. All this distinguishes the Nordic lands from the rest of Europe, including, of course, Britain. The northern world, Grundtvig says, has three kingdoms and three languages, but ‘there is only one spiritual trait among them, for there is clearly only one northern spirit, just as our ancient ash [Yggdrasil] had just one top but was imagined to have three roots, and this was clear at the Reformation’.48 One Nordic work that does emphasise the broad Indo-European associations of Norse mythology is the four-volume 1824 Eddalæren og dens Oprindelse, written by Finn Magnusen (to use Finnur Magnússon’s Danishised version of his Icelandic name, under which he published), which appeared one year after his four-volume edition, Den Ældre Edda. Book One offers a s­ ynoptic account of Norse cosmogony and cosmology, comparing them with their Greek, Egyptian, Roman, Persian, Etruscan, Asiatic, and Germanic counterparts. Hence, Magnusen shows some interest in individual Germanic traditions. He notes, for example, that compared to the other Germanic groups the Saxons and Frisians retained more cosmographic and cosmological material of the kind found in the Edda, and suggests that since the Anglo-Saxons converted to Christianity before the other Germanic peoples, it is reasonable to expect among them fewer cosmogonical poems from heathen times.49 But, foreshadowing the direction anthropology and mythological studies would take later in the century under the influence of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Magnusen’s real interest is in the myths that point not only to archetypal human experiences but to the one great culture (in the distant

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past) that gave rise to the world’s civilisations. For him, myth is the outgrowth of primitive attempts to understand the physical world: the Valkyries originally were shimmering meteors or visions in the sky, like fireballs, the burning Northern Lights, and so forth, that were sent from Valhalla, or the vault of heaven, by Odin, the ­principal deity.50

In this same vein, Magnusen includes Persian, Egyptian, Japanese, and Chinese myths. And he offers Polish, Kurdish, Lithuanian, German, Sanskrit, German, and Latin cognates for the name Odin, and Greek, Roman, Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew equivalents to Utgard (a mythic barrier surrounding the land of the giants) as a ring of mountains by the sea.51 Within this panoptic view, the traditions of Anglo-Saxon England – or of any other nonScandinavian region – have no special significance. The ancient Norse are ‘our ancestors’, meaning the ancestors of Swedes, Danes, Icelanders, and Norwegians and not including among them, as Sheringham did, the British. Any other group, including the British, is simply another piece in a comparative mythographic puzzle. Given the differing ethnological presumptions and mythological interests of British and Scandinavian writers, it comes as no surprise that the latter (unlike British travellers) often represented the north as both culturally self-determined and illustrious in world history. The point of comparisons with Egypt, Rome, and Greece, in fact, was to affirm the equality and even pre-eminence of the Nordic regions. This kind of thinking could frame Scandinavia as a whole, but it also, even in the days before the complete emergence of the modern political states, could focus in a sometimes jingoistic fashion on individual locales. Of the three modern-day Continental Nordic nations, Norway, which was politically dependent on Denmark throughout the early modern period, cultivated writers interested primarily in the region’s own history. Rather than the ideas, romantic imagery, and wildness that animated British and even some Nordic commentators, Norwegian comments on the past during this period focus on what can be known historically, such as through Snorri’s Heimskringla.52 The Swede Olaus Magnus (1497–1555) used recurring images of his homeland to depict Sweden as the Scandinavian prototype. Highlighting Swedish legends, the Swedish landscape, and ­everyday experience in Sweden, Magnus presents the h ­ ardiness of

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­ rdinary life, and even of the climate and daily diet, as the origins o not simply of Swedish clothing, games, and customs but of the people’s strength of character. Magnus displays abiding ­interest in military fortifications and activities, particularly in those that show Sweden prevailing over Denmark. Given the relative paucity of written Swedish legendary material, however, he has to rely on Snorri, Saxo, and works like Þiðreks saga (Thidrek’s Saga), with the result that despite his Swedish political leanings his Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus becomes a testament to pan-Nordic values as well. Since to Magnus, as well as to contemporary British historians, present-day culture reflected history and tradition, ­antiquarian pursuits, as dynamic ways to remember the past, effectively functioned as nationalistic gestures. Even pursuit of the fantastic and mythical past, which Magnus actively embraces, is ultimately pursuit of the here and now. As an object of veneration, further, northern history incorporates but transcends southern traditions – something Magnus emblemises in a woodcut preceding the chapter ‘De bellicis Gothorum obeliseis, & erectis saxis’ (On the Goths’ war monuments and raised stones). Mixing Sweden with Rome, this image shows a stylised runestone with graphs that transliterate as ‘antiqua serua’, or ‘preserve the past’ – Nordic runes expressing a Latin utterance in veneration of Swedish history. (See Figure 1.) By itself, the woodcut might stand as a trope of Scandinavian ethnography in the period. Magnus’s countryman Olaus Rudbeck (1630–1702) carries the emotional import of this argument a step further. In his ­four-volume,

Figure 1  Runestone from Olaus Magnus’s Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalis

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three-thousand-page Atlantica, he argues that Swedish was the language of Eden (and so the parent language of all other languages) and that Sweden was Atlantis (and so the homeland and parent of all other cultures). Depicting the lineage of Noah’s sons in trees that tower over the known world, the frontispiece of the first volume provides a powerful and memorable image of these views. (See Figure 2.) Ham’s lineage dissolves in an African desert, while Shem’s grows into a tree watered with Christ’s blood. And Japhet’s line, the line understood to lead to northern and western Europe, comes to fruition in an apple tree in Sweden (specifically, it would seem, in Uppsala or Stockholm), where its apples, named the Trojans, the Greeks, and so forth, fall to the ground. Inevitably recalling Yggdrasil, Rudbeck’s Swedish tree unites heathen and Christian traditions – the tree at the centre of the Judaeo-Christian world with that at the centre of the pagan Norse one – even as it images the whole of Europe as an outgrowth of Sweden.53 Johann Peringskiöld’s 1697 edition of Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla: eller Snorre Sturlusons Nordlänske Konunga Sagor ultimately advances the same pro-Swedish sentiments. A large and ambitious quarto totalling nearly a thousand pages, the book begins with a preface describing the work and Snorri’s life. The text itself contains three versions of the history: in the a-column of each facing page appears a modernised, black-letter Icelandic text, and in the b-column a black-letter Swedish translation; a Latin translation, in roman, extends across the gutter of the facing pages. In a preface to King Charles XI of Sweden, printed in both Swedish and Latin, Peringskiöld says that Heimskringla speaks ‘about the matters and events of the Northern Peoples’. He sees the work’s ultimate value, however, to lie in its didactic moral instruction: ‘Here, just as in a mirror, others’ manners, whether virtuous or vicious, can be seen – whatever is to be emulated or avoided in life.’ This didacticism is repeatedly tied to the work’s specifically northern focus, in which Sweden always takes pride of place: ‘Here can be seen not only the kings and mightiest dukes and ministers of the Swedes, Goths, and Norway who lived in the early time, but also the lords of other peoples, characterised in their own, authentic manners, attitude, culture, and weapons.’54 A preface to the reader likewise states that the volume concerns the north in general: ‘it contains the history of the northern regions and an array of the deeds and stories of northern kings’.55 But foreshadowing his countryman Johannes Göransson (1712–69), whose Latin translation refers to the Edda as a work of ‘Sivogötars

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Figure 2  Frontispiece, Olaus Rudbeck’s Atlantica

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ok Nordmänners’ (Swedes and Norwegians),56 Peringskiöld repeatedly uses expressions like ‘Swedish-Gothic monuments’ that foreground the priority of Sweden. Even Peringskiöld’s account of how Snorri came to write the stories of Heimskringla spotlights Continental Scandinavia: ‘Snorri, about to put together his work and just twenty years old, undertook a plan for collecting and departed Iceland for Sweden and Norway, from where the original inhabitants and first Icelanders initially came.’ Peringskiöld goes so far as to chastise Ole Worm’s 1633 Antiquitates Danicæ for devoting insufficient attention to the poetic monuments ‘which chiefly testify for the glory of our people’.57 And here ‘our people’ (Latin ‘nostræ gentis’) certainly excludes the English but possibly the Danes, Norwegians, and Icelanders as well. The same Nordic-centric outlook underlies the work of a later countryman, Per Henrik Ling (1776–1839). A physical educator, proponent of gymnastics, and fencing instructor, Ling, almost improbably, was also a lecturer on Norse mythology at the University of Lund. His Eddornas Sinnesbildslära för Olårde Framstålld has chapters on individual gods (‘Allfader’, All-father), events (‘Weraldsämnet’, World-creation; ‘Naturens utweckling’, Development of Nature), and phenomena (‘Natt och Dag’, Night and Day), and stresses the universality of myths as responses to specific cultural needs. But while for Magnusen Norse myths can be compared to Hindu or Greek ones in order to identity the world’s ur-myth, for Ling they and their poetic value relate primarily to the Nordic lands, projecting northern cultural identity and growing out of the northern peoples, their history, and their land. Although Ling sees the Eddas as originating in Sweden, whence the stories were carried elsewhere (including to Iceland), he obscures distinctions among Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Ultimately, Lind, too, produces what might be called pan-Nordic patriotic values. In Denmark, Ole Worm (1588–1654) was the pre-eminent champion of sentiments comparable to the ones Rudbeck and Peringskiöld express for Sweden. A massive composite volume, over 1100 pages long, his 1651 Antiquitates Danicæ brings together individual works on language, runes, runestones, calendars, and other monuments of antiquity. Uninterested in any Nordic connections with Asia or Britain, Worm concentrates on those areas in which he understands Denmark to surpass even the rest of the Nordic lands. Thus, deriving ‘runer’ (runes) from Danish ‘rynner’ (furrows) and ‘renner’ (canals), Worm asserts that runes are a

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specifically Danish invention: ‘Therefore, Danish ancestors, who invented literature and left it for their descendants, initially called their letters RUNIR [written in runes], as they are commonly best known, which are found in the innumerable songs of noble deeds; by this word they indicate letters, which is how they record them.’58 Whilst Worm recognises similarities between Danish runes and those found in Norway or Sweden, he maintains that all runic alphabets originated in Denmark, even going so far as to use ‘runer’ and ‘Danicas literas’ (Danish letters) interchangeably. Further, while ‘Danicas literas’ may show similarities to Latin and Greek graphs, runic writing, he asserts, is decidedly the oldest of the three. When Worm cites Roman historians, as he frequently does, it is to bolster Nordic authorities. But for Worm, a pan-Nordic attitude essentially amounts to an assertion of Danish superiority: ‘When I refer to Danes, by no means do I intend to exclude Cimbrians, Goths, or Geats. Antiquity, indeed, because it was already known as the Danish empire, was a three-part kingdom of the northern people.’59 Like Sheringham, the English e­thnographer who was his rough contemporary, Worm is fond of referring to ‘our ancestors’ (‘noster majores’). The crucial difference is that, unlike Sheringham (and even Peringskiöld), Worm uses the possessive pronoun to refer to Danes, or at most Nordic people in general, not to putative Anglo-Nordic progenitors. Divided by the present In the Anglo-Saxon period, when the political fortunes of Scandinavia and Britain had been closely connected, it was Nordic interest in Britain that primarily initiated contact – specifically through the Danish and Norwegian raiding missions that began in the eighth century. These missions continued, on and off, for several centuries, though their character changed over time. The earliest raids involved small groups mostly interested in plundering wealthy sites like monasteries and then returning to Scandinavia. By the mid-ninth century, however, what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes as a ‘great army’ began wintering in Britain, which inevitably led to colonisation in the north and Midlands. The establishment of the Danelaw in 886 further stabilised (perhaps still uneasily) relations between Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians, although by the end of the following century Continental Danes had renewed their interest in Britain, first through additional raids and tribute demands and then, under Svein Forkbeard, with territorial

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ambition for the land itself, an ambition that was fully realised only by Svein’s son Cnut. These transformations, in turn, perhaps led to Nordic rationalisations of the Danish and Norwegian presence in England. The thirteenth-century Ragnars saga Loðbrókar (The Saga of Ragnar Shaggy-breeches), for example, appropriated London and by extension England as a part of a northern region when it described how Ragnar’s son Ivar the Boneless made a thread from ox skin, using it to surround an entire field that he then claimed as his own: ‘And then he fashions many instruments for himself and has many houses built in that valley, and so makes a great city, which is called London. It is the largest and most excellent of all the cities in the north land.’60 By this logic, a Nordic presence in Britain could be viewed as simply a presence in another Nordic region. After the Middle Ages Britain certainly retained commercial and political interests in Scandinavia. In the fifteenth century, for instance, the stockfish trade annually brought perhaps as many as one hundred English merchant ships to Iceland, leading eventually to the war between England and the joint efforts of Denmark and the Hanseatic league. It was Iceland, too, that served as a hub of ­fifteenth-century North Sea British merchant activity and may have been where explorers like Columbus and Cabot learned of North America, all of which earned the period the sobriquet ‘the English century’.61 British ambassadors, scholars, and travellers – as well as merchants – regularly visited Denmark and Sweden as well. By the early modern period, however, Britain’s pre-eminent political concerns had little directly to do with the Nordic peoples in either Britain or Scandinavia. Already in the fourteenth century, indeed, the political fortunes of the two regions had begun to diverge, as British politics came to focus on two other, related issues: the construction of a united kingdom, and the global expansion of British power and influence. The former, which might be said to have begun with the 1535 and 1542 Acts of Union between England and Wales, involved far more than the political unification of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Its crucial (and increasingly contested) feature was the fashioning of a national character, both individually and collectively, through shared traditions, rituals, activities, spectacles, and so forth.62 Global expansion ultimately furthered this political and ethnic entity. By becoming a world power with colonies across the Pacific, Asia, North America, and Africa, all of them maintained by a collection of missionaries and merchants and sustained by the world’s most developed navy, Great Britain provided both

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evidence for and the justification of its claims for exceptionalism. Only a united kingdom could be entitled to – or even attempt – expansion around the world. All of this, I am arguing throughout this book, ultimately did involve Scandinavia. What I want to emphasise here, though, is that at the very moment that writers like Stillingfleet and Sammes used tropes that remembered a shared Anglo-Scandinavian ­ethnicity, their country’s primary political objectives lay far outside of Scandinavia. And as British interests increasingly diverged from Nordic ones, the relevance of the various Nordic nations increasingly became not what they were doing to Britain, as had been the case in the Anglo-Saxon period, but what they could do for Britain. Already in 1402, for example, Henry IV of England pursued negotiations with Margret I of Denmark over marriage alliances that would have made Denmark an ally with England against France during the end of the Hundred Years War. Two centuries later Sweden’s Gustav II (Gustavus Adolphus, 1594–1632) elicited the strongest political interest. A champion of Protestantism who fought wars against Denmark, Russia, and Poland, Gustav helped make Sweden the foremost Protestant power in the seventeenth century and thus a potential bulwark to British opposition to southern, Catholic Europe. Still another two centuries on, Denmark’s resistance to helping Britain contain Napoleon’s activities enabled Britain to reshape European politics by shelling Copenhagen and, following Napoleon’s 1815 exile to St Helena, by presuming to undertake the partially punitive transference of Norway from Danish to Swedish control. For their part, early modern Danish and Swedish political concerns largely concentrated not on Britain but on the Germanspeaking territories and on the formation of local political states. Indeed, if the creation of a united kingdom served as a kind of master narrative for British history of the period, its Scandinavian counterpart was the dissolution of unity and the emergence of individual nations. The 1397 Union of Kalmar had brought together Denmark, Sweden, and Norway (and so Iceland) under the rule of one monarch, but the unification was perhaps always a bit shaky, and Gustav Eriksson’s selection to be Gustav I of Sweden effectively ended the Union already in 1523. Sentiment for Norwegian independence quickened in the eighteenth century and flourished during the tumultuous era of Napoleon.63 And though Norway did not achieve complete sovereignty from Sweden until 1905, the movement towards it defines nineteenth-century Norwegian

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political history, just as a similar movement defined nineteenthand twentieth-century Icelandic political history, leading to sovereignty in 1918 and complete independence from Denmark in 1944. Following the breakup of the Union of Kalmar, even at a time when the entire Nordic region shared the Protestant faith, the dynamics among individual Nordic states reflect this same narrative of contentious state formation.64 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Sweden and Denmark in particular almost continually opposed one other’s political and territorial ambitions, with almost continually changing results. The attack of the Danish king Christian II and the subsequent so-called Swedish bloodbath of 1520 precipitated Sweden’s break from Denmark. But the Danish invasion of 1611 led Sweden to concede the right of the three crowns to King Christian IV. And in 1657, during the Danish reign of Frederick III, a Danish–Swedish war broke out that resulted in Denmark ceding Skåne to Sweden. Sweden emerged from all this not only as Europe’s pre-eminent Protestant nation but as one of the Continent’s leading military powers, a status it could maintain only through lengthy and costly struggles with the German kingdoms, Poland, Russia, and Finland as well as Denmark. The kind of legislative manoeuvring, territorial seizures, and commercial enterprises that helped forge the United Kingdom certainly were present in early modern Scandinavia, then, but they worked towards dissolution rather than unification and toward cultivating military activity on several, specifically European fronts.65 Germany – or rather the German states, since the modern nation did not exist throughout most of the period I consider here – was perhaps the most prominent of these fronts. Already in the tenth century the initially Iron Age Danevirke was expanded by Harald Bluetooth in part to fortify Denmark against the military advances of Germanic tribes from the south. But economics also played a significant part in shaping the German-Scandinavian dynamic. In the late medieval and early modern periods, Copenhagen emerged as a mercantile power, largely though competition with the Hanseatic cities. Even though Bergen, Stockholm, and a handful of other northern cities were at one time or another members of the Hanse, the league essentially divided Scandinavia from Germany and German-influenced territories. One of the motivations of the Union of Kalmar, in fact, was to block German expansion, although Scandinavian–German hostilities scarcely disappeared at its creation or demise. This same early modern period witnessed

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the beginning of a centuries-long struggle over the borderlands of Schleswig and Holstein, which culminated with their final separation from Denmark and unification with Germany in 1864.66 It was specifically through conflict with Germany in the Thirty Years’ War as well that Gustavus Adolphus helped transform Sweden into a political power. Beasts and heretics The memory of a pan-Germanic people, united by custom and belief, may go back all the way to the Roman historian Tacitus, but it gained momentum precisely because it resonated with nationalising trends, whether in Britain or Scandinavia. Eighteenth- and nineteenth writers like Johann Gottfried von Herder or Wilhelm von Humboldt saw a people as the necessary outgrowth of their speech and experience.67 Language, land, and culture coalesced, they argued, to produce any one people who were unlike any other. While in theory such arguments applied to any ethnicity, in practice they justified defining the Germanic people in particular as a persistently distinct group that could claim the inheritance of valued personal qualities and traditions. In this way, it was possible in theory to draw a kind of paint-by-number picture of Anglo-Scandinavian culture by connecting the dot of Tacitus to that of the Codex Regius to those of the emergent Nordic countries to that of the United Kingdom. The proliferation of tropes for customs, religion, and ethnicity made the connections possible in practice. What was at stake in the British appropriation of Scandinavian history and ethnicity – indeed, what is at stake in all cultural ­memories – was the present perhaps even more so than the past. Despite historical records that ill-justified a claim for shared British–Norse ethnicity, and despite the increasing divergence of British and Nordic political interests, Scandinavia offered ideas and things that made it possible to remember a past that was conducive to a preferred vision of the present. By being framed as descendants of Nordic peoples, even the Normans could be accommodated in this historiography: however consequential their cultural interruption at the Conquest, it still could be read as part of a narrative of British continuity and triumph. Verstegan’s early seventeenth-century dispassionate linguistic analysis might have been more difficult to maintain against the backdrop of nineteenth-century historiography, but the force of

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the British-Norman-Nordic connection retained its explanatory power. In the middle of that century, in fact, the Howitts took the effort to anglicise and personalise Rollo, the Nordic progenitor of the Normans who was nicknamed Göngu-Hrólf (walker-Hrolf) because his size required that he walk rather than ride. His name ‘in plain English’, they blandly observe, is ‘Ralph Walker’.68 At the most popular levels, the interest in Scandinavia and the Vikings that ethnographic tropes fostered eventually became a marketable opportunity for exploiting a sense of what the British character was and could be. By appealing to this sense, Viking nostalgia, as it might be called, functions as both a means for self-identification and a money-maker for those recalling what did not happen. The result is what Andrew Wawn labels a ‘kind of spray-on old northern atmospherics’ that is ‘still favoured today by Scandinavian lottery operators, Icelandic saga publishers, French manufacturers of baby clothes, American vodka distillers, film producers and golf course designers’.69 At a more socially imaginative level, philology and the recovery of a Nordic past could be applied to overtly political purposes. In his 1843 Past and Present, for example, Thomas Carlyle wistfully praises the Middle Ages as a period of authentic belief (rather than mere religious practice), from which effective government and leadership emerged. The year before Carlyle had waxed rhapsodic over what he understood to be the intrinsic connections between early Scandinavian mythology, the divinity of nature, and social and moral order: ‘Man first puts himself in relation with Nature and her Powers, wonders and worships over those; not till a later epoch does he discern that all Power is Moral, that the grand point is the distinction for him of Good and Evil, of Thou shalt and Thou shalt not.’70 In such dynamics of cultural memory, Davis points out, a ‘medieval/modern periodisation’ functions ‘as a regulating principle’.71 The differences between what British and Nordic commentators remembered and replicated are striking. By using tropes that evoked historical connections and a shared ethnicity, British writers produced memories conducive to political unification and global expansion. Their Nordic counterparts, conversely, characteristically foregrounded indigenous myths, games, and customs, and in so doing they emphasised an internal focus in their writings. For both groups, the sheer size of their ethnographic output – both in number of publications and in the publications’ lengths – ­demonstrates their subject’s significance for them.

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Just as British and Nordic writers expressed asymmetrical views of each other and their histories, so they differed in how they used the past to define their present. From the early modern period, British writers focused on finding medieval similarities, while their Nordic contemporaries, when they considered Britain at all, generally saw only differences. With its emergence as a global power, however, Britain became a place of opportunity, a place from which Scandinavian people might benefit economically and culturally. It was a place worth visiting not for the wonders and experiences British travellers sought in Norway and Iceland but for ­educational and political opportunities. And so during the nineteenth century, the Icelander Eiríkur Magnússon, coming to Britain to study and teach, helped popularise Iceland as a means to enforcing connections with Britain against Denmark. In a letter from 1865 he wrote, ‘we are much more like the English and they us, than are the Danes’, and for that reason he wanted the British ‘to interest themselves a little more in us than they do at present – in us as their linguistic kith and kin, blood-brothers, saga-masters’.72 The danger of friends like nineteenth-century Britain and its many travellers, of course, is that modern friendship can overtake historical identity. What was remembered about the medieval Nordic and English pasts, as Ricœur would point out, inevitably turned on who was doing the remembering and how they put together their memories. To a large extent, the British writers discussed here remembered others’ past as their own, and they changed the nature of that memory as Britain itself changed from nascent country to the United Kingdom and a global empire. Nordic critics were never as interested in Britain as British critics were in Scandinavia, if for no other reason than that Scandinavia had all the cultural and ethnic history it needed. And so when Nordic writers remembered the past, they did so in ways that animated a much different present. Like Aylett Sammes in the seventeenth century, then, Olaus Magnus in the sixteenth recollected the fantastic figures of the Middle Ages. But while to Sammes giants testify for the antiquity of the English people and their beliefs, to Magnus they reflect the endurance of Swedish morality in the face of contemporary threats to the people’s ethical and religious well-being. Having identified Lutheranism as apostasy, Magnus observes that the next book of his Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus would talk about antiquities, including the giants, ‘who, if they were alive today, would not refuse to contend and fight forcefully with beasts, that is, with impure heretics’.73

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Notes   1 Tim William Machan, What Is English? And Why Should We Care? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 183–211.   2 Peter Mandell, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 73.  3 Judith Pollmann, Memory in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 47.  4 See the classic study, F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1967).   5 Alexander Gil, Logonomia Anglica (1621; rpt York: Menston, 1968), sig. B1v.  6 Camden, Remains concerning Britain (1605; rpt Yorkshire: EP Publishing Limited, 1974), p. 29. For overviews of Camden, Verstegan, and the early modern English historiographic treatment the Anglo-Saxon period, see Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901, pp. 77–108; and Brackmann, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England.  7 See further Tim William Machan, Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 81–95.  8 Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605; rpt Ilkley: Scolar Press, 1976), pp. 6, 188, 43, 170–1, 182–3, and 187.  9 Robert Sheringham, De Anglorum Gentis Origine Disceptatio (Cambridge: John Hayes, 1670), sig. A8v, pp. 25–6, 35, 452–69, and 450–1. Sheringham peculiarly traces this lineage not to Japhet, as was typical, but to Shem (p. 468). 10 Daniel Langhorne, Elenchus Antiquitatum Albionensium Britannorum, Scotorum, Danorum, Anglosaxonum, &c. Origines & Gesta usque ad Annum 449 quo Angli in Britanniam Immgrȃrunt Explicans (London: Benjamin Took, 1673), p. 18. 11 Daniel Langhorne, Appendix ad Elenchum, Antiquitatum Albionensum (London: Benjamin Took, 1674), pp. 20 and 73–4. 12 Aylett Sammes, Britannia Antiqua Illustrata: or The Antiquities of Ancient Britain Derived from the Phoenicians (London: Thomas Roycroft, 1676), p. 431, sig. A3v, and pp. 424–7. This is designated ‘The First Volume’, but a volume two never appeared. 13 For a detailed account of the various permutations and uses of Odin in Scandinavia, see Annette Lassen, Odin på Kristent Pergament: En Teksthistorisk Studie (Copenhagen: Museums Tusculanums Forlag, 2011). 14 Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, trans. Oliver Elton, 2 vols (New York: Norroena Society, 1905), vol. 1, pp. 110–11.

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15 In Skáldskaparmál Snorri relates various Norse myths to specific events in the Trojan War (Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans. Faulkes, pp. 64–6). But no English writer seems to have used this material, or the material from the version of this story in Ynglinga Saga (the Saga of the Ynglings), at the beginning of Heimskringla. The first printed edition of the latter, which included a Latin translation, was Peringskjöld’s in 1697, but the first English translation (by Laing) was not published until 1844. 16 For recent arguments about Snorri’s purpose, see Kevin J. Wanner, Snorri Sturluson and the Edda: The Conversion of Cultural Capital in Medieval Scandinavia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). 17 Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans. Faulkes, pp. 3–4 and 5. 18 Sammes, Britannia Antiqua Illustrata, p. 435. 19 Francis Wise, Some Enquiries concerning the First Inhabitants Language Religion Learning and Letters of Europe (London: J. Fletcher, 1758), p. 85. 20 Sheringham, De Anglorum Gentis Origine Disceptatio, p. 265. 21 Christine Fell, ‘The first publication of Old Norse literature in England and its relation to its sources’, in Else Roesdahl and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen (eds), The Waking of Angantyr: The Scandinavian Past in European Culture (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1996), pp. 27–57. 22 Sheringham, De Anglorum Gentis Origine Disceptatio, pp. 263 and 265. 23 Heather O’Donoghue makes this point particularly well throughout Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Short Introduction (Malden: Blackwell, 2004). 24 Sheringham, De Anglorum Gentis Origine Disceptatio, p. 233. 25 Langhorne, Appendix ad Elenchum, p. 13. 26 Sammes, Britannia Antiqua Illustrata, p. 435. 27 Wise, Some Enquiries, p. 84. 28 Sammes, Britannia Antiqua Illustrata, p. 411. 29 Sheringham, De Anglorum Gentis Origine Disceptatio, pp. 468–9. 30 Edward Stillingfleet, A Defence of the Discourse concerning the Idolatry Practised in the Church of Rome, in Answer to a Book Entitled Catholicks No Idolaters (London: Robert White, 1676), p. 1. Also see pp. 157–60. 31 George Steuart Mackenzie, Travels in the Island of Iceland during the Summer of the Year MDCCCX (Edinburgh: A. Constable, 1811), p. 7. 32 Oddly enough, Henderson takes an additional step in undermining the historicity of Snorri’s account of Odin, which since its appearance in Resen’s translation had formed the basis of the very arguments he was making. The Edda begins, Henderson says, ‘with a most absurd and ridiculous preface, which has evidently been prefixed to the work by some transcriber, tracing the connection of the northern nations with those of antiquity, and carrying back their genealogical

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relations to the original families enumerated in the book of Genesis’: Iceland; or the Journal of a Residence in that Island, vol. 2, pp. 326 and 361. 33 Samuel Laing, Journal of a Residence in Norway during the Years 1834, 1835, and 1836; Made with a View to Inquire into the Moral and Political Economy of that Country and the Condition of Its Inhabitants (London: Longman, 1836), p. 313. He makes a similar comment in his translation The Heimskringla; or Chronicle of the Kings of Norway, 3 vols (London: Longman, 1844), vol. 1, pp. 37–8. 34 Grenville Pigott, A Manual of Scandinavian Mythology, Containing a Popular Account of the Two Eddas and the Religion of Odin (London: William Pickering, 1839), pp. 47–50. 35 Slingsby, Norway: The Northern Playground, p. 14. 36 Laing, The Heimskringla, vol. 1, p. 7. 37 Pigott, A Manual of Scandinavian Mythology, p. viii. 38 Laing, The Heimskringla, vol. 1, pp. 7 and 8. 39 William Howitt and Mary Howitt, The Literature and Romance of Northern Europe: Constituting a Complete History of the Literature of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland, 2 vols. (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), vol. 1, p. 11. 40 Howitt and Howitt, The Literature and Romance of Northern Europe, vol. 1, pp. 12–13. 41 Howitt and Howitt, The Literature and Romance of Northern Europe, vol. 1, p. 13. 42 Burton, Ultima Thule, vol. 1, pp. 94–5. 43 Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, 3rd edn, 3 vols (Göttingen: Dieterichsche Buchhandlung, 1854), pp. 120–1. 44 Hans Wille, Udtog af den Nordiske Mythologie, eller Othins Gude-Lære (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1787), sig. a3r. 45 Peter Friderich Suhm, Om Odin og den Hedniske Gudelære og Gudstienste udi Norden (Copenhagen: Mummens Boglade, 1771), pp. 7–8. 46 Suhm, Om Odin og den Hedniske Gudelære, p. 27. 47 N. F. S. Grundtvig, Nordens Mythologi eller Sindbilled-Sprog (Copenhagen: J.H. Schubothes, 1832), p. 104. On Grundtvig’s approach to mythology in general, see Flemming Lundgreen-Nielsen, ‘Grundtvig’s Norse mythological imagery – an experiment that failed’, in Andrew Wawn (ed.), Northern Antiquity: The Post-medieval Reception of Edda and Saga, Enfield Lock: Hislarik Press, 1994), pp. 41–67. 48 Grundtvig, Nordens Mythologi eller Sindbilled-Sprog, p. 116. Grundtvig seems to treat Norwegian and Icelandic (‘Norsk eller Islandsk’) as one. 49 Finn Magnusen (ed.), Eddalæren og dens Oprindelse: Nöjagtig Fremstilling af de Gamle Nordboers Digtninger og Meninger om Verdens, Gudernes, Aandernes og Menneskenes Tilblivelse, Natur og Skjæbne, 4 vols (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1824–1826), vol. 1, pp. 61–2.

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50 Finn Magnusen, Den Ældre Edda: En Samling af de Nordiske Folks Ældste Sagn og Sange, 4 vols (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1819–23), vol. 1, p. 62. 51 Magnusen, Eddalæren og dens Oprindelse, vol. 1, pp. 334–6, and vol. 3, p. 155–7. 52 Jan Ragnar Hagland, ‘The reception of Old Norse literature in late eighteenth-century Norway’, in Andrew Wawn (ed.), Northern Antiquity: The Post-medieval Reception of Edda and Saga (Enfield Lock: Hislarik Press, 1994), pp. 27–40. 53 See Pierre Vidal-Naquet, trans. Janet Lloyd, ‘Atlantis and the nations’, Critical Inquiry 18 (1992), 300–26. More generally, see Mats Malm, ‘Olaus Rudbeck’s Atlantica and Old Norse poetics’, in Andrew Wawn (ed.), Northern Antiquity: The Post-medieval Reception of Edda and Saga (Enfield Lock: Hislarik Press, 1994), pp. 1–25. 54 Johan Peringskiöld, Heimskringla eller Snorre Sturlusons Nordlänske Konunga Sagor, sive Historiæ Regum Septentrionalium, â Snorrone Sturlonide (Stockholm: Literis Wankiwianis, 1697), vol. 1, sigs A4r–A4v. My translations from the volume are based on the Latin versions of the prefaces. 55 Peringskiöld, Heimskringla, vol. 1, sig. B4r. 56 By ‘Nordmänner’ here, Göransson might intend the Danes. 57 Peringskiöld, Heimskringla, vol. 1, sigs B3v, B4v. 58 Ole Worm, Literatura Runica, p. 1, in Antiquitates Danicæ. Each section of the Antiquitates Danicæ is numbered individually: Antiquitates Danicæ, Literatura Runica. Lexicon Runicum. Monumenta Runica. Additamenta. Fasti Danici (Copenhagen: Holst, 1651). 59 Worm, Fasti Danici, p. 6, in Antiquitates Danicæ. 60 Guðni Jónsson and Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, eds, Ragnars saga Loðbrókar, in Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, 3 vols (Reykjavík: Íslendingasagnaútgáfan, 1950), vol. 1, p. 41. See further Rory McTurk, Studies in Ragnars Saga Loðbrókar and Its Major Scandinavian Analogues (Oxford: Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literatures, 1991). 61 Gunnar Karlsson, The History of Iceland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 118–22. 62 See further, Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1701–1837, 3rd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 63 See Andreas Elviken, ‘The genesis of Norwegian nationalism’, The Journal of Modern History 3 (1931), 365–91. 64 For accounts of the complex forces propelling, sustaining, and ultimately dissolving the Union of Kalmar, see Herman Schück, ‘The political system’, in Knut Helle (ed.), The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, vol. 1, Prehistory to 1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 679–709; and Sverre Bagge, Cross and Scepter: The Rise of the Scandinavian Kingdoms from the Vikings to the Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 248–68.

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65 See, for example, see Fjågesund, The Dream of the North, 117–74. 66 Inge Adriansen, ‘“Jyllands formodede tyskhed i oldtiden”: Den ­dansk-tyske strid on Sønderjyllands urbefolkning’, in Else Roesdahl and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen (ed.), The Waking of Angantyr: The Scandinavian Past in European Culture (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1996), pp. 120–46; and Tom Buk-Swienty, 1864: The Forgotten War that Shaped Modern Europe, trans. Annette BukSwienty (London: Profile Books, 2015). 67 On German Romanticism and the definition of Scandinavian i­ dentity, see Bernd Henningsen, ‘Johann Gottfried Herder and the north: Elements of a process of construction’, in Karen Klitgaard Povlsen (ed.), Northbound: Travels, Encounters and Constructions 1700–1830 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2007), pp. 89–109. 68 Howitt and Howitt, The Literature and Romance of Northern Europe, vol. 1, p. 11. 69 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, p. 5. 70 Thomas Carlyle, ‘The hero as divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian mythology’, in David R. Sorensen and Brent E. Kinser (eds), On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 42. See Alice Chandler, A Dream of Order: The Medieval Ideal in Nineteenth-century English Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), pp. 220–33 and 144–50. 71 Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, p. 4. 72 Quoted and translated in Andrew Wawn, ‘Fast er drukkið og fátt lært’: Eirkur Magnússon, Old Northern Philology, and Victorian Cambridge, H.M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture 11 (Cambridge: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, 2001), p. 14. 73 Olaus Magnus, Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus, intro. John Granlund (Rome, 1555; rpt Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1972), p. 154.

4 An open-air museum

Sammes’s and Magnus’s differing approaches to antiquity reproduce a larger historiographic tension that runs throughout the issues and representations I have been considering. On one hand, landscape and ethnographic tropes made it possible for critics to remember (or imagine) the origins of contemporary Britain in literal connections to ancestral homelands and their populations’ personal characteristics, beliefs, and social practices. On the other, this historiographic paradigm took shape in a historical epoch when the British and Scandinavian regions themselves had come to diverge in significant ways. During this period, indeed, Britain had emerged as one of the pre-eminent global powers, an increasingly united bulwark of Protestantism, an industrial titan, and a colonial enterprise with imperial ambitions. At this same time the Nordic region, even Denmark, remained mostly rural, not global: its politics mostly internal, not expansionist; its society more agrarian than industrialising; and its people, particularly those encountered in the countrysides of Iceland or Norway, more likely to be l­ abourers than cultivated travellers. Whilst the Scandinavian landscape simply might be depicted as a place of beauty and wonders, its people, if they were to be accommodated in the developing AngloScandinavian memory, required more explanatory finesse. In fact, like the images used to represent tensions in ethnography and landscape, tropes of food, religion, morality, and innocence allowed for two opposing views of the Scandinavian peoples. Looked at from the perspective of shared ethnicity and history, the putative simplicity and primitivism of Norwegians and Icelanders in p ­ articular could affirm the naturalness and decency that were thought to form the fundamental character of the British people. Yet from the perspective of the emergent modern world, Scandinavia and its peoples had – and could have – little in common with Great Britain.

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In social organisation and presumed personal and moral character, Nordic populations certainly were not comparable to the indigenes as they were described by missionaries and merchants elsewhere around the globe. But as with the people of those lands, the alleged deficiencies of the Nordic peoples still could be understood as sufficient justification for the incursions of scientists and tourists alike, whose presence offered various social and economic benefits to both the travellers and those they encountered. However contradictory these views of Nordic primitivism were, both of them thus testified on behalf of history and personal character: Scandinavians illustrated the earnest peasants of Britain’s past, and they measured Britain’s progress from that past. The resolution of this paradox again depended, then, on the framing of visits to Scandinavia. France, Italy, and Germany may have offered galleries, monuments, and stunning natural vistas that could not be found in Britain, enthralling travellers and transforming their sentiments and ideas. But by the Anglo-Scandinavian heuristic, only Scandinavia could serve as a virtual trip through time. As such, the region was necessary, familiar, and even, at times, charming. Yet it was the past: what Britain had been and, in an increasingly evolutionary outlook on human experience, what Britain had moved far beyond. Almost like a folk museum, then, the Nordic region was a place where travellers could talk with people in period costumes, eat period foods, watch period handicrafts being made, buy souvenirs, and walk through a carefully preserved period landscape. Travellers could actually experience the past in the way a modern living history museum describes its experience, where visitors are told that as you travel around 10th century York aboard our state-of-the-art time capsules you will experience what it was like living in the city, visiting the houses, workshops and backyards, re-created on the very site where they were discovered, and meeting the many different people who once called Jorvik home. From Old Norse speakers descended from the Vikings of Scandinavia to Anglo-Saxons, traders from the East and new settlers from Ireland. The sights, sounds and even the smells of the Viking Age are brought vividly back to life as you journey back 1,000 years.1

Reconstructable and knowable through the senses of sight, sound, touch, and smell, such a past perforce has both physical and conceptual integrity that allow it, in turn, to sustain ideological outlooks on the past, the present, and the relations between them. As

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such, it can sustain whatever ideological implications arise from the severing of historical epochs. Both today and in the early modern period, in popular as well as academic ways, ‘political order’, Davis notes, is grounded ‘upon periodisation’.2 Unlike at Jorvik in York, the Norsk Folkmuseum in Oslo, Árbær in Reykjavík, Frilandsmuseet in Copenhagen, or Skansen in Stockholm, however, none of the people encountered in early modern Scandinavia were costumed actors. They were real, and, at the end of the day, they did not change clothes and go home; they were home. Clothing, religion, lifestyle, occupations, buildings, personal habits, food – all of these therefore had authentic and immediate interest as what might be called tropes of tactile historiography, potentially revealing something about moral character, whether that of the current Nordic peoples or of the Britons imagined to have evolved from them. The enabling concept here is what Johannes Fabian famously designated Evolutionary Time, the notion that not only past cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of Time – some upstream, others downstream. Civilization, evolution, development, acculturation, modernization (and their cousins, industrialization, urbanization) are all terms whose conceptual content derives, in ways that can be specified, from evolutionary time.3

By this thinking, even as nineteenth-century Norway (say) was coterminous with nineteenth-century Britain, each reflected different places on a fixed social and temporal stratification. And in the establishment of socio-temporal strata, no details were too small, no conclusions too speculative. Dropping courtesy From these details, unaffected simplicity emerges as a distinctly Nordic virtue. Says Leith (1840–1926), the Icelanders’ manners ‘are generally very good, although not exactly the same as our own. Of course, many of them seem a little rough to us; but the people have what may be called natural good manners, and I think this arises from their nature being so kindly and simple.’4 Many writers replicate Slingsby’s comment on plain but satisfying meals of bread and cheese, and even more elaborate meals have a rusticity that bespeaks their unsophisticated circumstances. Morris, for instance, describes a feast that included smoked mutton, smoked

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salmon, and various kinds of cheese, ‘together with some plovers we had shot which they roasted for us’.5 What is missing are sauces, seasonings, and cooking preparations more elaborate than smoking or roasting. Clothing varies from the plain and homespun to the primitive (such as bear skins) to that of the Sámi couple Martinière describes as dressed in feathers, skins, fish scales, and other exotica.6 Occupied with trading, farming, and, increasingly, maintenance of a tourist industry, Scandinavians were represented as pursuing commensurately unaffected recreation. Tobacco and various kinds of ‘strong drink’ are mentioned frequently, while Coles’s guides through the Icelandic interior, almost like the costumed docents in a folk museum, spontaneously (it seems) break into the quintessential Icelandic travel song, ‘Á Sprengisandi’. Coles is so taken by the experience that he not only translates several verses but provides musical notation for them.7 To early modern Norwegians or Icelanders themselves, of course, any primitivism likely seemed less charming than debilitating. Indeed, part of the charm of visiting rustic circumstances is the mere fact that the visitor is just that – someone who can almost vicariously participate in primitive meals and then, like Morris, return to the comforts of Bloomsbury in London. Lacking this option, his guides remained in what was effectively the past, where simple meals and simple food were not diversions but necessities. By extension, while the Icelanders and Norwegians who made British travel possible benefited economically from the experience, the benefits were scarcely unqualified. For one thing, an increasing dependence on travellers disrupted local social practices and left those involved at the economic mercy of visitors and their whims. Should travellers ever cease to come, the new economy would collapse. For another, these interactions emphasised the cultural as well as geographic and economic marginality of the Nordic regions. More so than North America or Polynesia, they were recreational places to be visited by the more financially fortunate and personally secure. It is in this way that approaches to the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages manifested what Fabian calls the ‘denial of coevalness’: ‘a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse’.8 From this perspective, tourism was an anthropological exercise that mimicked visits from a sophisticated, colonial society to an undeveloped isolated land. It is therefore certainly worth asking how much Morris or any traveller truly understood about the Nordic customs they

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could embrace and endorse so vigorously. Landor thus tells of a Norwegian coffee ritual that involved turning over the empty cup and saying to the ‘lady of the house’ ‘Tak for Madan’, which means ‘thanks for the food’.9 He renders the phrase as ‘thanks for the mistress’, however, which certainly is a small translation error. Any concomitant misunderstanding of social practices likewise might be of little consequence, were it not for the personal significance that travellers invested in what they saw, or thought they saw. Landor’s small error, for example, transforms an everyday idiomatic expression of gratitude, an expression that still occurs in a common table prayer, into an affirmation of gendered social roles that well-suits Victorian sensibility: meals become the responsibility of women, who become ladies and not just females. Of greater consequence, Slingsby claims, ‘As I have stayed at all sorts of farm-houses and with many of the Norse gentry and merchants, I have got to know and I hope to appreciate fully the characteristics and sterling good qualities of a race to which I am proud to believe that we are nearer akin than to any other in Europe.’10 The simple experience of living in farmhouses qualifies Slingsby (he supposes) to talk about Norwegian temperament, and having immersed himself in the Nordic experience he is in turn able to talk about the ‘racial’ similarities that Britons share with Norwegians more than with any other modern people. In effect, lodging becomes a trope of ethnicity and moral character. This Scandinavian–British brotherhood, as Clarke imagines the relationship, is repeatedly stressed throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: ‘Every Englishman was considered by the Norwegians as a brother: they partook even of our prejudices; and participated in all our triumphs … They sang “Rule Britannia”, in every company. Their houses were furnished with English engravings, and English newspapers were lying upon their tables.’11 Just as travellers understood themselves to be able to read Nordic personal character in the physical world they inhabited, then, so the Nordic peoples (according to visitors like Clarke) materially remade their world in ways that displayed their shared ethnicity with their visitors. The result was something like a barbershopmirror heuristic, by which visitors saw the Nordic landscape as affirming a connection with Britain, Scandinavians transformed that landscape to justify the affirmation, visitors saw further ­evidence of a ­connection, and so forth. For the sceptical Laing, writing in 1836, this brotherhood was abused when put to explicitly political ends, as when Britain

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meddled in Nordic politics simply as a means of furthering its own Continental ambitions. ‘In 1813’, he says, our government was party to a treaty with Sweden, – the foulest blot, perhaps, in British history, – by which we agreed, in consideration of Sweden joining the Allied Powers against Buonaparte, to give Sweden the kingdom of Norway, of which neither of the contracting parties had at that moment possession, even as military occupants of the territory, and far less any shadow of rightful claim to it.

Such political fratricide (as it were) would amplify Britain’s already substantial ethical obligations in Scandinavia, latent in the common background described by Sammes and Stillingfleet. By this line of reasoning, Britain bears direct responsibility for the dynamics of the Nordic states and the conditions of their people: ‘Norway has a claim morally and politically upon the British nation, which renders her social condition and her present constitution of peculiar interest.’ Indeed, Laing argues that it is precisely because Britain acknowledged the Norwegian constitution approved at Eidsvoll in May of 1814, and with it the notion of Norway as a separate nation, that Great Britain is therefore morally and in honour bound to preserve the national independence of Norway, and her singularly liberal and well constructed constitution. Norway never can become a province of Sweden nor be deprived of her present constitution, while there exists in the British cabinet honour or respect for its own guarantee.12

Fashioned by historical consanguinity and interventionism, this is a political responsibility rooted in the kinds of honour and ethical obligation that rise above any local politics and reflect a contemporary fellowship that is fraternal rather than paternal. Such fellowship is etched in British critics’ attitudes towards their own landscape as well. In the Middle Ages, Scandinavian settlement had been strongest in the historical Danelaw and the northern counties, producing a residue of Norse place names, vocabulary, and customs there in particular. At the moment Laing was translating Snorri’s Heimskringla and writing of his own ­three-year residency in Norway, this residue became evidence of continuity between areas like the Lake District and their Nordic past and present.13 Through the efforts of local archaeological trusts, professional groups like what became the Viking Society for Northern Research, and imaginative efforts like W. G. Collingwood’s ­historical novel Thorstein of the Mere (1895), such evidence justified the sense (for

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some) that the Nordic-influenced areas of Britain, in comparison with the rest of the country, not only were distinctive, more ethical, and irreproachable but also embodied the very best of British moral make-up. ‘Most of the qualities which are especially cherished in the north of England to-day’, Slingsby asserts, ‘the sturdy independence, dogged endurance, and self-reliance, to name no others, and the best blood which we possess, we have derived from our “forelders,” the Vikings of Scandinavia.’14 Because of this consanguinity, any accounts of Scandinavian character equally serve as accounts of British character. The positive, typically British traits that Slingsby itemises in the north of England – independence, endurance, and self-reliance – are in fact the very qualities that travellers witnessed (at least some of the time) among Nordic peasants. As early as Olaus Magnus in the sixteenth century, commentators of all kinds attributed the hardiness of the people to the austerity of their diet and the hardiness and austerity together to the severity of the environment. Perhaps because of this severity, von Troil thought eighteenth-century Icelanders a dour lot: ‘I hardly remember to have seen any one of them laugh.’ But this same environment produced a kind of patriotic contentment that von Troil or any later Victorian traveller would have recognised and admired: ‘They have an inexpressible attachment for their native country, and are no where so happy.’15 This good nature and sincerity, born from and expressed in the simplicity of the lifestyle and the harshness of the environment, became among the most prominent and replicated Nordic virtues in early modern visitors’ accounts. At the outset of this period, according to Martinière, ‘The Peasants of Norway are plain hearted, hospitable, given much to Fishing, their principal Commerce being in Herrings, Mulletts, Codds, Stock-fish, and other sorts both Salt and Dry.’16 Using much the same imagery, Von Troil illustrates the earnest and genuine behaviour that he sees as superior to the lifestyle pursued by the sophisticated travellers who witness and record it. He assures the reader that ‘an Icelander is not less happy for being unable to season his food with the productions of a distant climate: he is content with what nature affords him, satisfies the cravings of his stomach, and enjoys his health, whilst we frequently surfeit ourselves by feasting on delicacies, and loathe the most wholesome food’.17 Projecting this simplicity to a national level, Mackenzie imagines the Icelandic people and their political history as one and the same. In the very first sentence of his 1811 Travels in the Island of Iceland

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he observes, ‘The history of Iceland, though possessing little importance in its relation to the political events of other nations, is nevertheless curious and interesting in many of its features.’ Despite the severities of the climate, the seclusion of the people, and the island’s literal marginalisation in European politics, the community there ‘has preserved, through the progress of nearly a thousand years, an enlightened system of internal policy, an exalted character in all religious and social duties, liberal methods of education, and the culture of even the more refined branches of literature and knowledge’. As written in the nineteenth century, history often was the record of great deeds – sieges, rebellions, and battles – and in this sense Iceland would seem ahistorical. At the same, time, it is the narrower scope of Icelandic activities that produced the integrity and virtue of the people: ‘The records of Iceland, in short, are not so much those of kings and governments, as of a community of families and a people; and the philosopher or moralist, while they glean over the fields of history for the materials of their study, will find a harvest provided even in the annals of this remote and desolate island.’18 At some point, the reputation of honest simplicity becomes limiting, something that guarantees a charming but almost ornamental status to Scandinavia and its people. Latham thus claims that ‘Many travellers have spoken positively contemptuously of them [Norwegian institutions]; others have damned them with faint praise; as if, in the essentials of civilisation; they had differed in kind from ourselves’. The Norwegians themselves, however, ‘wish to be known as something better than hardy peasants and hospitable mountaineers’. Seeing Norwegian culture as instead differing in degree but not kind from that of Britain, he says that Norwegians ‘love to be known for their institutions, rather than for their ­mountains; for things social, rather than for things geological’.19 Any resistance to this typecasting – Scandinavia as a region of simple people engaged in a simple lifestyle defined by the landscape they inhabit – confronted the overpowering and unalterable fact that it was not Scandinavians but (largely) British ethnographers and travellers who were naming the Nordic peoples, telling their history, defining their landscape and languages, and describing their values. However much emphasis is placed on fraternalism, all of these, ultimately, are at least potentially patronising gestures. And so Wollstonecraft, whose attitudes towards Scandinavia are complex and often contradictory, provides an epitome of just the kind of thinking that Latham rejects: ‘Amongst

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the peasantry, there is, however, so much of the simplicity of the golden age in this land of flint – so much overflowing of heart and fellow-feeling, that only benevolence, and the honest sympathy of nature, diffused smiles over any countenance when they kept me standing, regardless of my fatigue, whilst they dropt courtesy after courtesy.’20 The Norwegians, she says, ‘appear to me to be the most free community I have ever observed’.21 Von Troil idolises the peasantry still more, going so far as to assert not just that the Icelandic clergy speak Latin but, improbably, that it is not ‘uncommon for a peasant to say, salve domine, bonus dies, bonus vesper, gratias, proficiat, dominus tecum, vale’ (greetings lord, good day, good evening, thanks, may it be of help to you, may the lord be with you, farewell).22 As much nobility as such rhetoric imposes on the Nordic people, it also trivialises with an affable smile. Significantly, it is not the kind of rhetoric employed by travellers to North America or the Pacific, who, although sometimes seeing these areas as populated by the proverbial noble savage, overwhelmingly treated indigenes and their lands as simply objects to be possessed and utilised. This fundamental difference allows for personal (if droll) commonalities with the Scandinavian peoples but not with Native Americans or Polynesians. Perhaps foremost among these commonalities was the shared commitment to Protestantism, a ubiquitous trope in accounts of Anglo-Scandinavian ethnicity that undergirded common positive traits in both politics and personal character. Writing at a time when Sweden remained one of the most prominent religious and political forces in Europe, Whitelocke (1605–75) thus asserts that ‘the English only are the people with whom the Swedes may hope for a firm amity and union for the Protestant interest, against the common enemy thereof, the Popish party’.23 Connections among Protestantism, England, and the Nordic regions continue to be expressed through the Victorian era by writers like the Howitts; but they also predate Whitelocke, extending back to Gustavus Adolphus in the early seventeenth century. They are in fact the very connections witnessed by Molesworth, William of Orange’s Ambassador to Denmark, when he justified British involvement in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden by describing Britain as being: ‘the Head of more than a Protestant league’. Since the ranks of Whitelocke’s ‘Popish party’ included France, religious and ethical unity with Scandinavia necessarily furthered political ambitions as well.

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Poor brutish sorcerers Had these been the only ways in which British writers circulated Nordic tropes, the story of responses to Scandinavia would be a straightforward account of identification, empathy, and admiration. Sharing geography, history, ethnicity, and religion, all of which pointed to fundamental cultural distinctions between northern and southern Europe, the British and Nordic peoples could be framed as an almost conjoint group whose origins lay in the pre-migration past, whose present was inhabited by decent, moral people, and whose future promised continued decency and economic progress. The best of Scandinavia could be the best of Britain as well. Historiographic representations of Anglo-Scandinavian social dynamics are more complex than this, however. Even as some writers itemised the charm and simplicity of Scandinavian food, clothing, personal habits, and lifestyles, other writers – and sometimes the same ones – memorialised sanitation problems, illiteracy, slovenly habits, superstitions, immorality, idleness, and repulsive physical appearances. Of the Sámi, characteristically treated as the most primitive of the Scandinavian peoples, even among Scandinavians, Martinière (reproducing Boorde’s description of Icelanders) observes, ‘their eyes are a little like Hogs eyes, their eye-brows large and reaching almost to their Temples; they are heavy and stupid, without any civility’.24 Of the Icelanders, von Troil comments that they ‘are middle-sized and well made, though not very strong; and the women are in general ill-featured’.25 Wollstonecraft goes so far as to describe two Swedish men as scarcely ‘human in their appearance’. Reflecting on the ­environment more generally, she says that she did not immediately recollect that men who remain so near the brute creation, as only to exert themselves to find the food necessary to sustain life, have little or no imagination to call forth the curiosity necessary to fructify the faint glimmerings of mind which entitles them to rank as lords of the creation.26

And Landor claims that in large Norwegian towns ‘we sometimes find the women to be rather pretty, having fair complexions, and not ungraceful figures; but the peasant girls are invariably ugly, squalid, and miserable in appearance’.27 Burton offers an even more detailed account of the physical repulsiveness of Icelanders. ‘As a rule’, he begins, ‘the Icelandic face can by no means be called

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handsome.’ But the ‘figure is worse than the face, and it is rendered even more uncouth by the hideous swathing dress’.28 For Wollstonecraft and Burton, as for many period writers on ethnology, appearance, personal habit, and identity were of a piece, together projecting what was regarded as ‘race’. In effect, DNA (a term coined in the mid-twentieth century) encodes and predetermines the characteristics of individuals and the groups to which they belong. Recalling Tacitus’s Germania as well as medieval exegesis of the Tower of Babel story, this is the kind of argument that, in its extreme forms, sustains the domination and even enslavement of entire peoples, as in fact accompanied European expansion across the globe to North America, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. In Scandinavia, the argument justified identification of the comparative inadequacies of the Nordic peoples. And so Burton says of Icelanders, ‘The gait, a racial distinction, is shambling and ungraceful, utterly unlike the strut of Southern Europe and the roll of the nearer East; the tread is ponderous, and the light fantastic toe is unknown.’ Beyond a shambling gait, which recalls Wollstonecraft by suggesting more an ape than a human and evoking a trip to a zoo more than to an open-air museum, lack of personal hygiene and reprehensible personal habits likewise might be attributed to the Icelandic racial stock. Already deficient genetic material is made still worse by the inbreeding supposed to be necessitated by the environment of an island – or, for that matter, of isolated Norwegian and Swedish valleys. The silver lining in this for Burton, asserted with a disconcertingly ingenuous lack of circumspection and compassion, is that such inbreeding produces fewer monsters than might be anticipated: ‘Intermarriage is so general that almost all the chief families are cousins; yet among several thousands the author saw only one hunchback, two short legs, and a few hare-lips.’29 When writers and visitors surveyed Nordic personal habits from this mindset, they witnessed not the charming activities of rural life but primitive qualities that created equal amounts of wonder and disgust. Having entered a Swedish post-house, Wollstonecraft is ‘almost driven back by the stench – a softer phrase would not have conveyed an idea of the hot vapour that issued from an apartment, in which some eight or ten people were sleeping, not to reckon the cats and dogs stretched on the floor’.30 And Landor tells about a Norwegian pastor, visiting England, who relates a hard-to-credit story that none the less reflects badly on the savagery of his native land in the savagery. The pastor tells of being duped into thinking

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an already engaged young woman is in love with him, and when he learns the truth, he challenges the man who purposely misled him to a duel: ‘“And I shot him; shot him through the heart. I stood over his body a moment, to see that he was actually dead, and then made my escape through the fog.”’ In another scarcely believable episode, Landor tells of an unnamed Englishman who, while having dinner at a Norwegian parson’s house, witnesses a pig walk in and go beneath the table, where, the parson’s wife says, it should be allowed to remain. ‘I mention this anecdote’, Landor adds, ‘because I believe it to be a characteristic trait of the manners and habits of that rank of persons of whom it is related,’31 By these accounts, even according to a Norwegian pastor, Norwegians are variously gullible, unpredictable, unhygienic, and occasionally violent. Depictions of Scandinavians generally evoke more disgust and disappointment than anxiety, however, and this is true for all kinds of personal habits. Breton is one of many critics to comment on excessive drinking,32 especially among the lower classes, and Wollstonecraft describes Swedish cooking as ‘a caricature of the French’, with an excess of spices and sugar together destroying ‘the native taste of the food’. She likewise notes that in ‘the article of cleanliness, the women, of all descriptions, seem very deficient’ and that the people are ‘very unfit for the trust’. Counter-intuitively, she manages to connect lasciviousness and inactivity, stating that the ‘sensuality so prevalent appears to me to arise rather from indolence of mind, and dull senses, than from an exuberance of life’.33 Whilst the Scandinavian peoples may be promiscuous, then, theirs is a promiscuity that arises from laziness rather than lust. A general Nordic lethargy also could be used to project a lack of moral fortitude and so help to account for the backwardness of Scandinavia in comparison with Britain. Baring-Gould says of the Icelanders, thus, ‘In character, the people are phlegmatic, conservative to a fault, and desperately indolent. They have a peculiar knack of doing what has to be done in the clumsiest manner imaginable.’34 For Landor, Norwegians are simply too lazy to make the least effort to capitalise on Scandinavia’s natural resources and effectively elevate themselves as a people: It is impossible that any one who has observed with common attention the character of the Norwegian peasantry, should fail to be struck with this universal indolence and apathy. Their country possesses innumerable rich valleys, capable of the highest improvement,

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and the banks of the lakes are exceedingly fertile. But the spirit of inactivity and idleness pervades the whole region, and the inhabitants are perfectly content to derive from their farms what is only just sufficient to satisfy the necessities of nature, when the most trifling attention to cultivation would reward them with abundance, and even luxuries.35

By these representations, the British and Scandinavian peoples may have arisen from the same stock with the same innate virtues, but only Britain, with far fewer natural resources, had a population with the energy to become a global, imperial power. Scandinavia, in contrast, remained fundamentally undeveloped and, in essence, medieval, with the diminished global status of the Nordic countries serving as proof of the unrealised potential and limited aspirations of their peoples. Slovenliness, tastelessness, immortality, and laziness – these are all qualities that in effect make the extraordinary Nordic landscape wasted on the equally extraordinary (but for very different reasons) people who inhabit it. And they are also all qualities that European merchants and missionaries identified among nearly every indigenous people they encountered in their global expansion. In travel writing, Thompson points out, these kinds of ‘pejorative “­othering”’ serve an important justificatory function. They may legitimate the traveller’s personal conduct towards the people he or she met; more crucially, perhaps, they also often work to legitimate the conduct of the traveller’s culture. The traveller’s portrayal of another people or place is often in this way ideologically motivated, seeking at some level to justify and encourage a particular policy or course of action towards those others.36

In the case of Scandinavia, such ‘pejorative “othering”’ nurtured an ideological domination that was more economic or perhaps social than political, since Britain never sought to conquer or colonise the region. At the same time, travellers not only brought in money but effectively reformed the landscape and people in ways that furthered British interests and status. Even within the context of travel writing as a colonising gesture, remarks on Scandinavian primitivism at times are so over-the-top as to become almost caricatures of racial and sexual stereotypes. Having described the Sámi as heavy, stupid, and hog-eyed, for instance, Martinière adds that the women in particular are ‘very lascivious … prostituting themselves to all commers [sic], as often

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as they can do it with security from their husbands’.37 At other times these accounts ingenuously embody the disconnect between the two perspectives I have been documenting. Baring-Gould, for example, may describe Icelanders as ‘desperately indolent’, but he is also one of the most knowledgeable and generally sympathetic of the nineteenth-century travellers, offering significant insights into Iceland and its people. The same disconnect appears in Dillon’s attitudes in his 1840 A Winter in Iceland and Lapland: In the character of the Icelanders I should say gloom prevailed to a great degree, and certainly the first impression on a stranger’s mind will not be favourable to them. His patience will often be put to the test by their dilatory habits, and his temper will be further tried by their manners, many of which are very disgusting; such as transferring milk from one bottle to another through the medium of their mouths, and several other customs too offensive to be particularized; but he will find much honesty and wish to oblige, when it is in their power.38

In essence, to Dillon’s way of thinking, Icelanders may be ­disgusting, but they are at least honest. This disconnect in representations of character particularly animates discussions of religious beliefs in Scandinavia. Indeed, alongside the tradition of praising the purity of Nordic Protestantism and seeing in it a special connection with Britain runs a tradition of emphasising the peoples’ historically superstitious and even ­devilish practices. Martinière thus says that the Sámi are ‘very poor; Brutish and for the most part Sorcerers’ and relates a fantastic account about their reliance on something like a fetch: Every house has belonging to it a great black Cat, of which they make great accompt, talking and discoursing to it as it were a rational Creature. They do nothing but they first communicate with their Cat, as believing she assists them highly in all their enterprizes. Every night they go out of their Cabanes to consult their dear puss; nor can they expect a blessing upon their sports either Hunting, Fishing, Fouling, &c. unless their good Angel goes along with them, which though I have seen many of them, and all have the figure of a Cat, yet by the dreadfulness of their looks, I did and do still think they can be nothing but Devils.39

This pattern of denigrating the other is widespread in medieval and early modern historiographic treatments of non-Christians, whether Jews, Muslims, or Vikings. In early modern Scandinavia, the tradition identified persistent evidence of sorcery (and so

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immorality) and continued to thrive despite both the spread of Protestantism and an increasing early modern fascination with Norse gods and mythology. In his English Atlas Pitt (1639–97), thus, moves directly from a discussion of Thor and the other Norse gods to an account of the seventeenth-century Sámi: ‘Nor is their Idolatry more notorious then [sic] their Witchcraft; it being generally believ’d by all that have heard the name of Laplanders, that they are strangely addicted to Magick, and all arts of Sorcery.’40 Throughout the nineteenth century such demonic associations continued to be written into the Nordic landscape, the most prominent of which was the popular belief that Hekla in Iceland was an entrance to Hell. Setting this condemnatory tradition beside that of the noble primitive illustrates not only the problems presented by Nordic inspiration for medieval memories but also a solution. Travellers could admire and endorse the idea of the Scandinavian people – as ultimately an idea of themselves – even as they demeaned and rejected in horror the reality of being medieval in the modern world. A painful homecoming The curious adventure of Jorgen Jorgenson suggests that Nordic individuals, not surprisingly, could frame their encounters with British travellers in considerably different ways. A Dane who attacked British merchant ships in England as retribution for the 1807 shelling of Copenhagen, Jorgenson was imprisoned, paroled, and forbidden to leave the country. Saying that Britain had humanitarian responsibilities in Iceland, he defied his parole and sailed with trade goods to Reykjavík. In June of 1809, with the assistance of several British citizens, Jorgensen imprisoned the Danish governor, and at the end of the same month he was himself installed in his place. He then proclaimed Iceland independent of Denmark and a protectorate of Britain. With the arrival of a British ship in August, Jorgenson’s two-month revolution was over, and he was arrested for theft. Sentenced to death, he was transported to Australia, where he led a life of still more fantastic adventures.41 Jorgenson, to be sure, was an eccentric opportunist, and his Icelandic coup had no impact on Anglo-Scandinavian relations. Indeed, his installation as Icelandic governor passed largely ­unnoticed among the Icelanders, just as his declaration of Iceland as a British protectorate took place without the sanction or even awareness of the British government. Yet his actions show that

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Nordic peoples could marshal resistance to the economic, political, and military power of Great Britain. As eccentric as Jorgenson’s coup was, it is worth recalling that Denmark itself, following the British shelling, expressly had aligned itself with Napoleon’s France and declared war on Britain. The Danes may have paid deeply for this resistance, but like Jorgensen, Denmark as a country did resist the imposition of British definitions on the Danes and where they lived. Similar resistance appears in the work of Eiríkur Magnússon (1833–1913), one of the nineteenth century’s most prolific Icelandic scholars and advocates. Beginning with his work as a librarian and tutor at Cambridge, he tirelessly popularised appreciation of his native land. In response to 1875 volcanic eruptions and devastation there, for instance, Magnússon went on a lecture tour to raise funds for Iceland by emphasising the longstanding and varied cultural connections between Britain and Iceland.42 He served as Morris’s guide for the 1871 trip that formed the basis of Morris’s Journals of Travels in Iceland. Along with Morris, further, Magnússon prepared the translations of the Saga Library that both emblemised and furthered English readers’ interest in medieval Scandinavian literature. He was very much a romantic, then, but also someone who used romanticism for political purposes, such as the strengthening of Icelandic connections with Britain against Denmark. In a proposal written about 1880, he even actively sought to create regular diplomatic ties between Iceland and the United Kingdom. But ever the pragmatist, Magnússon was also leery of British domination, for he warns that British ‘wealth and power is capable of suffocating our sense of nationhood over time, because a single wealthy Englishman can buy us all … into his service’.43 The Norwegian Aasmund Vinje expressed still greater reservations about British political ambitions, personal character, and memorialising strategies in his 1863 A Norseman’s Views of Britain and the British, which collects a selection of letters to a ‘Professor of Philosophy in the University of Christiana’. Having spent a year in England, Vinje comments on all manner of British habits and ideas and at the outset insists that ‘The British are really a good race. You cannot be long among them before you see that.’ While in the north of England, and especially in Scotland, Vinje does encounter things that remind him of home, but he encounters much more that is unfamiliar and undesirable. The result is that he reverses the paradigmatic memories of Scandinavia as Britain’s failed twin by emphasising not just the differences between Britain

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and Norway but the deficiencies of the former, which he chastises for its emphasis on social class and money. ‘The British place this question of blood, birth, and family quite on a religious footing’, he says; they are ‘far too conceited to learn a lesson from any foreign land’. By way of illustration, Vinje describes ‘a gentleman by birth treating his underling as I would have been ashamed to treat a dog; and the poor creature rebelled not, but licked the chastising hand and skulked away’. Men of genius, Vinje maintains, usually are leaders, but in Britain individuals must first of all make money, and as few men can undergo the twofold exertion of amassing wealth and cultivating the mind, it commonly falls out that the real genius perishes morally and physically in its struggle after riches, leaving, in the best view of the case, to his son, who will probably turn out a third or fourth-rate man, a title and a fortune, or to use the characteristic expression of the British, a ‘position’.44

All these images and arguments constitute a cultural critique – as well as a gesture of self-definition – as strong as anything produced by British views of Scandinavia. By the reckoning of someone like Vinje, if the Nordic people are slovenly and lazy, the British are greedy, shallow, and arrogant. But given the power differential between Great Britain and Scandinavia, as well as the greater number of British travellers, the fact is that British definitions had greater impact, certainly among the British but also among some Scandinavians. Both Magnússon and Guðbrandur Vigfússon (1827–99) may well have had reservations about British ­refashioning of the Nordic past and present, for instance, but both also actively participated in this refashioning through teaching, lecturing, and popularisation. Similarly, although the Icelander Þorleifur Repp (1794–1857) had prickly relations with those around him at the Advocates Library in Edinburgh, he none the less pursued English-language subjects and translations of literary and non-literary English works, among them the Book of Common Prayer. Repp’s advocacy of British–Nordic connections included the assertion that Havelok the Dane was composed in a distinct linguistic variety he called ‘Dano-English’.45 Perhaps the key difference between British representations of Scandinavia and Scandinavian representations (positive or negative) of Britain is the degree to which British representations could further Britain’s own self-construction. Repp might have approved of the British and Vinje might not have, but, when Wollstonecraft,

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Landor, and others spoke about what they encountered in Scandinavia, they equally spoke about what they saw in themselves and at home. By defining themselves through the gaze they used to define the Nordic peoples, British commentators deployed the same ideological memorials used not only by visitors to North America and the Pacific but also by early modern ethnographers. The historically persistent but disconnected character of this redeployment suggests just how useful Scandinavia could be for British self-definition, even before the Anglo-Scandinavian meme began to circulate. Already in the Anglo-Saxon era, for example, accounts of Scandinavians provided opportunities for English writers to imagine their own people. In response to one of the earliest Viking raids, that on Lindisfarne in 793, Alcuin offered the assurance that the marauding was part of a divine plan but also the warning that this plan reflected the personal failures of the people. In a letter to Bishop Higbald of Lindisfarne, he explains the raid this way: Either this is the beginning of greater tribulation, or else the sins of the inhabitants have called it upon them. Truly it has not happened by chance, but is a sign that it was well merited by someone … Do not glory in the vanity of raiment; this is not a glory to priests and servants of God, but a disgrace. Do not in drunkenness blot out the words of your prayers. Do not go out after luxuries of the flesh and worldly avarice.46

Through their very presence, Nordic peoples reminded the AngloSaxons both of their moral inadequacy and of the fact that the Anglo-Saxons (though not, evidently, the Norse) had the potential to resubmit themselves to God and so become ethically restored. By such Augustinian historiography, human history is the evolution of God’s intentions for the world, in which both individual events and historical epochs constitute progress towards judgement and salvation. If events like the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons remind us of God’s beneficence, conquests and depredations remind us of his wrath. All the world’s events thereby assure people that what happens is not random, that they themselves have the ability to learn from the lessons of history, and that an ­omniscient God watches over and manages everything that takes place. The depth of this kind of thinking can be seen in the fact that foreshadowing of Norse depredations to Europe in general was found in Jeremiah 1:14: ‘The LORD said to me, “From the north disaster will be poured out on all who live in the land.”’ In effect,

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medieval Nordic trading and colonising – parts of an economic enterprise that included raiding – became part of a mythic explanation of world history that had been expressed already in the Old Testament. When clerics like Ælfric of Eynsham and Wulfstan of York witnessed the tenth-century resumption of Viking raids, they ­ inevitably did so through the perspectives of Augustinian historiography. Wulfstan opens his justly famous Sermon to the English with the assurance ‘this world is in haste and it is drawing near the end’. The longer time continues, he goes on, the worse things will be, precisely because people continue to sin and will do so until the arrival of Antichrist: ‘and then, indeed, it will be terrible and cruel throughout the world’. For many years Satan has misled Britain in particular, with the result that loyalty has disappeared, while crime and sin have increased. Daily, he says, men ‘added one evil to another, and embarked on many wrongs and unlawful acts, all too commonly throughout this whole nation’.47 Just as the Nordic peoples may affirm and continue these evils, so they are equally punishment for them, making any view of the peoples and their activities doubly useful for British self-definition. In his Chronicles, written during the same period, ealdorman Ethelweard similarly emphasised the disruptive paganism of the Vikings (even though by the year 1000 every Nordic land save Sweden had become Christian), and later, post-Conquest historians like Henry of Huntingdon, John of Worcester, and William of Malmesbury foregrounded this heathen recuperation still more by amplifying the Norse depravity recounted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.48 This Augustinian dynamic persists, albeit intermittently, as late as Robert Fabyan’s posthumously published (in 1516) New Chronicles of England and France, which in detail recounts Danish immorality, greed, violence, and plunder. Writing at the dawn of the early modern period, Fabyan speaks of the ‘abusyon’ and ‘persecucyon’ of the Danes, torching cities, slaughtering innocents, and laying waste to households. But for Fabyan, significantly, the mythic touchstone is no longer the Bible but the language of common people: This worde lorde Dane was, in dyrision and despite of the Danys, tourned by the Englysshemen into a name of opprobrie, and called Lurdayn, whiche, to our dayes, is nat forgotten; but whan one Englisshe man woll rebuke an other, he woll, for the more rebuke, call hym Lurdayn.49

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Even if the folk etymology, which the OED first records in John Rastell’s 1530 Pastyme of People, is completely false, for Fabyan and his audience it reflects a truth of the Danish presence in England.50 When word origins become tropes for social history, cultural memory eclipses lexicography. Whilst the social dynamics for the period I am considering are no longer Augustinian or humanistic, they are just as consequential and, I am arguing, just as rooted in views of the Middle Ages. As much as medieval and early modern historiography diverged in methods from one another, that is, they shared a reliance on Scandinavia and (often) similar images in order to fashion their arguments. Ideas might historically unfold without sequence or coherence, then, even as cumulatively their shared representations reproduce an overarching cultural trope – in this case, the AngloScandinavian Middle Ages. Theoretically sustained by the Enlightenment and its emphasis on intellect, individual achievement, and social progress, many of the contrasts running through seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century accounts of Scandinavia turn not on antagonism (as was the case for many medieval historians) but on the comparative achievements of British and Nordic cultures. Whatever was said about the latter, especially in proportion to the intensity with which it was said, affirmed the opposite about the former. And so Scandinavia – with the possible exception of Copenhagen – was rural, narrow, and primitive, while Britain was urban, global, and sophisticated. The greater the emphasis on the slovenliness and laziness of the Scandinavians, the greater the revelation of their visitors’ industry. Obviously, distinctions as simple as these were easily belied, especially with a more expansive sense of Britain than that evinced by the slim subsection of the populace who wrote about their experiences abroad. Writers like Dickens, indeed, found just as much filth and depravity in London as Landor, Burton, and Wollstonecraft found in the whole of Scandinavia. But my point is not simply that, if English writers’ representations of their homeland were misleading and often untrue, so were their representations of the open-air museums they visited in Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden. The point, rather, is that the two kinds of representation depended on one another. To remember and define Britain, individuals figuratively as well as literally went to Scandinavia, which could be as useful (though for different reasons) as Ireland, North America, Polynesia, and Asia could be for other travellers and colonists.

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In this regard, it is worth recalling here that the majority of British visitors to Scandinavia, unlike the majority of those with whom they came into contact, were highly educated, moneyed, and leisured. Of Slingsby’s interactions with Norwegian mountaineers, Paul Readman observes that only a very ‘few … were of Slingsby’s social status, and many were poor farmers and fishermen’.51 For his part, Morris may have had genuine empathy for what he found in Iceland, and his experiences there may even have played a part in his subsequent embrace of socialism. Yet his visits were still larks. Indeed, his entire Scandinavian enterprise of translation and original work, including his own pseudo-medieval compositions, was possible, in part, because of his superior financial background and education. For Morris, visiting Iceland was something he could afford to do (in several senses), and, when his visit was done, he could resume the life of a modern Victorian aesthete. For the farmers and guides who made his trips possible, remaining in what was in effect a much earlier era was the only option. Social class, then, was a factor in all of the encounters I have described. In some cases, this factor well may have been shrouded in the eyes of visitors and hosts alike. In point of fact, Morris’s Journal demonstrates perhaps surprisingly little awareness of his guides’ social status, much less its impact on his experience and the socialist sympathies he later would develop.52 Conversely, Wollstonecraft, whose personal circumstances involved continual negotiations of status and respectability and who by the time she wrote her Letters was the celebrated (if not aristocratic) author of Vindication of the Rights of Men and Vindication of the Rights of Woman, organised much of her Scandinavian experience around matters of class. In Sweden she speaks casually of ‘the total want of chastity in the lower class of women’; in Denmark she notes, ‘the gross debaucheries into which the lower order of the people fall’ and ‘the promiscuous amours of the men of the middling class with their female servants’. The Danes in general, she says, ‘are the people who have made the fewest sacrifices to the graces’. What else ‘is to be expected in any country where taste and cultivation of mind do not supply the place of youthful beauty and animal spirits?’ Wollstonecraft in fact uses social standing more than nationality to assess the people and experiences she encounters in Scandinavia, deploying it as an evaluative tool to sort people by financial status, character, and morality in rhetoric that sometimes foreshadows Burton’s account of Icelanders: ‘the lower class of

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people here amuse and interest me much more than the middling, with their apish good breeding and prejudices’. Given a choice, and observing that ‘nothing so soon wearies out the feelings as unmarked simplicity’, she ‘could not live very comfortably exiled from the countries where mankind are so much further advanced in knowledge, imperfect as it is, and unsatisfactory to the thinking mind’.53 As a social category, of course, class is economically determined. In the case of post-Enlightenment Europe, economic success often followed from industrialisation, which in turn led to the kind of philosophical and intellectual pushback that we associate with Romanticism and now often label environmentalism.54 Given the other contrasts that animate representations of the Anglo-Scandinavian experience, this dynamic perhaps inevitably runs through them as well. If the economic and social progress that attends industrialisation meant that it was possible for individuals like Wollstonecraft to visit Scandinavia, for example, it also meant that what they found there, in all its primitivism, was inevitably subject to the encroaching modern world. On her visit to Trollhättan, Sweden, to see the canal being built to link Göteborg on the Kattegat with Lake Vänern and, ultimately, the Baltic, a conflicted Wollstonecraft expresses both satisfaction at the progress of civilisation and anxiety at the transformation of the primitive landscape. She thus speaks with guarded admiration of the ‘stupendous attempt to form a canal through the rocks, to the extent of an English mile and a half’ and of the nine hundred men and five years that the project requires for completion, ‘for which there is every reason to suppose the promoters will receive ample interest’. But though Wollstonecraft regarded these engineering efforts as ‘grand proof of human industry’, they were not ‘calculated to warm the fancy’. What she truly admires in the scene is the untamed power of nature that gave rise to the project. ‘I could not help regretting’, Wollstonecraft concludes, ‘that such a noble scene had not been left in all its solitary sublimity’.55 Wollstonecraft’s remarks are part of a larger conflict, which, Peter Fjågesund and Ruth Symes have noted, became perhaps the most prominent feature of particularly nineteenth-century English accounts of travel to Scandinavia. It is in fact, they suggest, the fundamental debate, intensifying as the century progressed, about the usefulness, value and unfortunate side-effects of progress. This particular debate is also characterised by a conflict between

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two very different approaches to contemporary society: one looking back to a simple and supposedly harmonious past; the other looking forward to a future of even more daring achievements.56

By means of the conflicting tropes replicated in diverse English narratives from well before the nineteenth century, Scandinavia and its inhabitants supported both sides of the debate. To Wollstonecraft and other travellers, that is, the crudeness of the people and their surroundings testified to the regions’ fundamentally medieval nature and native decency but also to their potential for and perhaps need of industrial development. This same dichotomy was part of the reason travellers came in the first place. Shortly after the publication of Wollstonecraft’s Letters, for instance, Holland said of Icelanders, Whilst their condition with respect to all the comforts or necessities of life is scarcely superior to the savage state, their moral & intellectual qualities raise them to a level even with the most civilized communities of Europe – and amidst the desarts [sic] which surround them, they still keep alive much of that spirit of literary pursuit which in the 10th, 11th, & 12th centuries gave to their ancestors so much celebrity among the northern traditions.57

In 1908, nearly a hundred years later, Leith once again produced this view: The Iceland of to-day is not very unlike that of the saga times. The island is so far removed from other countries, so cut off by its isolated position, that modern inventions and improvements come to it very slowly, and many have not yet reached it. The absence of them, though it may seem strange to us, yet helps to keep the wonderful simplicity, hospitality, and hardiness of the country and its folk, which make the great charm of Iceland to most strangers who visit it.58

Industrial progress provides travellers with the technological and financial means to visit primitive lands, as well as with the desire to so before the lands, too, inevitably succumb to the progress of the civilisation that travellers bring with them. All of which left the Nordic regions themselves in a double-bind. Staying as they were and keeping the charm of medieval simplicity, they remained anachronisms whose habits marked them as primitive. But should they modernise and try to become less like openair museums and more like Britain and the rest of western Europe, they would lose the qualities that were understood not only to set

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Scandinavia apart but to constitute its greatest ­attractions. Any modernising attempts, further, were probably doomed to fail, since, as travellers repeatedly emphasised, the Nordic regions’ nascent cultural opportunities were but pale reflections of the industrial and civic progress taking place elsewhere. As the embodiment of simplicity projected on to the British past, the Nordic peoples themselves presented an escape and a ­reassurance that Britain had the best of both worlds, medieval and modern. Whether labelled a paradox or simply an inconsistency, these competing outlooks found theoretical support in the medievalism that emerged at the same time. A journey to the ­ open-air museum of Scandinavia may have been possible only with the economic success that allowed for steamships and canals alike, but it became imaginable only through the intellectual distancing that framed Scandinavians as distinct in manner and outlook and ­therefore a curiosity worth seeing. Such a trip, in turn, could be desirable only through a historiographic sensibility that could sustain continuities among these outlooks and so produce cultural memory. This sensibility is what set at least some British travellers apart from everyone else; German travellers might have been just as enthusiastic to visit Iceland, but, rather than expecting to meet their past, they mostly came for natural wonders and what we today would call adventure tourism.59 No more than North America, the Pacific, or the Celtic fringe did Scandinavia offer a resolution to the problematic historical memories of emergent modernism. But the tropes used to represent it did sharpen debate on progress, even as they also enabled a historiographic narrative of Great Britain’s exceptionalism. If one of the fundamental attractions of a Scandinavian odyssey was that it offered a return, I am arguing, the return was in many ways a painful one. And this is the essence of nostalgia – a postClassical Latin word composed, ultimately, of the Greek roots nostos (journey home) and algos (pain) and one that aptly describes Odysseus’s return to Ithaka. For Odysseus, the trip home, replete with monsters and storms, was painful enough, but so, too, was the arrival, when he found the suitors encamped in his house. For British thinkers and critics of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, a journey to the home of Scandinavia certainly presented many challenges and hazards, but, as for Odysseus, the sharpest pains may have come with the recognition of what had been transformed – in their case, in the way the journey retraced what had been lost when the past became the present. According

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to Svetlana Boym, this is the essence of nostalgia as ‘a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.’60 For Iceland in particular, as isolated as it was, Morris thought that much of what had made the Nordic people great was already lost: ‘what littleness and helplessness has taken the place of the old passion and violence that had place here once’. Yet the real pain, the nostalgia, arose from the fact that in the landscape and people he still could see traces of this passion and the past for which he longed: ‘and all is unforgotten; so that one has no power to pass it by unnoticed; yet that must be something of a reward for the old life of the land, and I don’t think their life now is more unworthy than most people’s elsewhere, and they are happy enough by seeming’.61 But the return to an industrial Britain that had lost its medieval simplicity and values made for an equally painful trip home. Forgetting, as Odysseus himself knew, is by far the easier approach to the past, although it is always only temporary. ‘At first glance’, Boym observes, ‘nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time … nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress’.62 Perhaps the greatest attraction and power of the contradictory tropes framing accounts of Nordic people, thus, may have been that they allowed the past to be ­simultaneously ­remembered, revisited, and forgotten. In a world become infinitely more complex than what was understood to be the case in Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and ­ Sweden, the nostalgic pull of Scandinavia made for poignant reminders of what had to be sacrificed for the emergence of a modern Britain. And so Slingsby can imagine that his simple Norwegian meal of cheese and bread reproduces one that would have been eaten in the English Middle Ages. To the Howitts, ‘In martial and maritime enterprise, there is no people who bear any resemblance to them except ourselves. If ever “the child is father of the man” the Scandinavians were the fathers of the English. Their love of war and their passion for sea-faring expeditions were boundless.’63 Travellers like Leith, Landor, and the rest could see others living as they imagined their medieval forebears had, as well as the fact that that lifestyle was no longer viable in the modern world. Either way, whether the homeward journey was to Scandinavia or back to Britain, the journey and the memories it evoked became painful demonstrations of lost innocence.

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Notes   1 www.jorvikvikingcentre.co.uk/about/jorvik-story/return-of-the-v​i​k​i​n​ g​s​/​. Accessed 14 June 2019.  2 Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, p. 3.   3 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 17.  4 Leith, Peeps at Many Lands, p. 36.  5 Morris, Journals of Travel in Iceland, p. 40.  6 Martinière, A New Voyage into the Northern Countries, pp. 126–7.  7 Coles, Summer Traveling in Iceland, pp. 63–4.  8 Fabian, Time and the Other, p. 31.  9 Landor, Adventures in the North of Europe, vol. 2, p. 168. 10 Slingsby, Norway: The Northern Playground, p. 16. 11 Clarke, Scandinavia, p. 265. 12 Laing, Journal of a Residence, pp. iv–v. 13 On connections with the Lake District in particular, see Matthew Townend, The Vikings and Victorian Lakeland: The Norse Medievalism of W. G. Collingwood and His Contemporaries (Kendal: Cumberland and Westmorland Archeological and Antiquarian Society, 2009). 14 Slingsby, Norway: The Northern Playground, p. 14. 15 Von Troil, Letters on Iceland, pp. 27 and 89. 16 Martinière, A New Voyage into the Northern Countries, p. 6. 17 Von Troil, Letters on Iceland, p. 103. 18 Mackenzie, Travels in the Island of Iceland, pp. 3 and 4. 19 Latham, Norway and the Norwegians, vol. 1, p. 2. 20 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, pp. 8–9. 21 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, p. 41. 22 Von Troil, Letters on Iceland, p. 175. 23 Whitelocke, A Journal of the Swedish Embassy, vol. 1, p. 30. 24 Martinière, A New Voyage into the Northern Countries, p. 33. Framing Lapland and as its peoples as both primitive and mysterious in fact predates English treatments of the region, occurring already in medieval Scandinavian accounts. See Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 62–79. 25 Von Troil, Letters on Iceland, p. 87. 26 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, pp. 6 and 7. 27 Landor, Adventures in the North of Europe, vol. 2, p. 85. 28 Burton, Ultima Thule, vol. 1, pp. 132 and 134. 29 Burton, Ultima Thule, vol. 1, pp. 134 and 135. 30 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, p. 93.

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31 Landor, Adventures in the North of Europe, vol. 2, pp. 22 and 66. 32 Breton, Scandinavian Sketches, p. 119. 33 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, pp. 15, 23–4, and 107. 34 Baring-Gould, Iceland: Its Scenes and Sagas, p. xxxvii. 35 Landor, Adventures in the North of Europe, vol. 2, pp. 164–5. 36 Thompson, Travel Writing, p. 133. 37 Martinière, A New Voyage into the Northern Countries, p. 33. 38 Dillon, A Winter in Iceland and Lapland, vol. 1, pp. 133–4. 39 Martinière, A New Voyage into the Northern Countries, p. 60 and 35. 40 Pitt, The English Atlas, vol. 1, sec. 3, p. 7. More generally on superstitions and the Icelandic landscape, see Seaton, Literary Relations of England and Scandinavia, pp. 275–96. 41 Sarah Bakewell, The English Dane: A Life of Jorgen Jorgensen (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005). 42 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, p. 12. 43 Quoted in Wawn, ‘Fast er drukkið og fátt lært’, p. 14. 44 A. O. Vinje, A Norseman’s Views of Britain and the British (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1863), pp. 15, 62, 63, 64, and 77. 45 Andrew Wawn, The Anglo Man: Þorleifur Repp, Philology and Nineteenth Century Britain, Studia Islandica 49 (Reykjavík: Bókaútgáfa Menningarsjóðs, 1991), pp. 120–1. 46 Dorothy Whitelock (ed.), English Historical Documents, 2nd edn (1979; rpt London: Routledge, 1996), p. 902. 47 Michael Swanton (ed. and trans.), Anglo-Saxon Prose (London: Dent, 1975), pp. 116–17. 48 See R. I. Page, ‘A Most Vile People’: Early English Historians on the Vikings, Dorothea Coke Memorial Lecture (London: The Viking Society for Northern Research, 1987). 49 Robert Fabyan, New Chronicles of England and France (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1811), p. 205. 50 S.v. lurdan, n. and adj. 51 Readman, ‘William Cecil Slingsby, Norway, and British mountaineering, 1872–1914’, 1113. 52 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, pp. 276–7; and Ian Felce, William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 156–71. 53 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, pp. 23, 107, 101, 98, 24, and 61. 54 For Eric Hobsbawm’s influential argument about the formative influence of the Industrial Revolution on modernism, see Age of Revolution 1789–1848 (London Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962). 55 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, pp. 95–6. 56 Fjågesund and Symes, The Northern Utopia, p. 32.

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57 Andrew Wawn, ed., The Iceland Journal of Henry Holland 1810, Hakluyt Society Second Series 168 (London: The Hakluyt Society, 1987), p. 31. 58 Leith, Peeps at Many Lands, p. 12. 59 Lerner, Von der Ödsten und Traurigsten Gegend zur Insel der Traüme. 60 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. xiii. 61 Morris, Journals of Travel in Iceland, p. 108. 62 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. xv. 63 Howitt and Howitt, The Literature and Romance of Northern Europe, vol. 1, p. 10.

5 Stories that make things real

The increasingly frequent trips to Scandinavia by British s­ cientists, sports enthusiasts, and travellers, I have argued, can be seen individually and collectively as rides on a time machine, as ways for a modern people to visit their medieval past without sacrificing all the intellectual, economic, and social comforts of their contemporary world. Norway and Iceland, but also Denmark and Sweden, affirmed the presumptive best of the Middle Ages – the noble simplicity of the people in fertile and sublime lands. At the same time, these nostalgic trips demonstrated how much Britain had changed since its shared past with Nordic lands. One could find northern places interesting and even pleasant to visit and still wish to return home. In the modern world, indeed, a medieval lifestyle, if simply replicated, appears grotesque: an experience offering untamed natural wonders and personal innocence but also horrid smells and equally horrid habits. In accordance with Davidson’s analysis of the concept of north, then, Scandinavia might be called an idea as much as a place. It was an idea, further, that was fundamentally political in its effects if not always in the intentions of those who advanced it or in the topics that made it possible. This idea of Scandinavia provided a way to remember a history that began with the migration of ancient people from Troy, that demonstrated their excellence of character and distinctiveness when set against the people of Rome and the areas it founded, and that culminated with the best of this race emerging in contemporary Britain. Other views of Scandinavia certainly were (and are) possible; throughout the late nineteenth century what might be called the British liberal elite took a particular interest in Norway as an emblem of constitutional nationalism and progressivism.1 So, too, were other views of the Middle Ages and its relevance to the present, ones that do not depend on Nordic mediation; Anglo-Celtic d ­ ynamics, for

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example, produced their own powerful cultural memory. Likewise, New Historicism, the sympathetic identification of post-Conquest trauma, or emphases on an early modern, specifically English self-fashioning – all of these modern critical approaches offer ­ alternative ways of remembering the past. By doing so they also expose nineteenth-century historiography’s chimerical pursuit of the absolute truths of historical behaviour: in advancing a Whiggish reading of Scandinavia, that is, Wollstonecraft, Burton, and other writers saw themselves not as advocates of a particular school of thought but simply as objective witnesses of the past and present. This is a conviction that itself becomes a trope for truth during and after the Enlightenment. Literature featured prominently in this museum-like approach to Scandinavia, so much so that critical discussions of AngloScandinavian relations often have begun with and focused on it. I diverge from these discussions in several ways. First, I am here explicitly setting belletristic literature – translations, adaptations, and original compositions – within the context of the linguistic relations among English and the various Nordic languages. Second, as in previous chapters, my concern here is not with the genealogy of texts and stories but with the unsystematic replication of tropes and images to describe language and literature, as well as with what the ideas projected by these uses contributed to the AngloScandinavian Middle Ages. And third, I have reserved consideration of both language and literature for the end of this book, because I want to suggest that their historical role was not so much as the inspiration for medieval memories but as vehicles for topics and images that reproduced longstanding, pervasive ways of framing Scandinavian ethnography and historiography.2 Emblematic of this complex dynamic is the fact that the Frederick Metcalfe who wrote The Oxonian in Thelemarken also wrote both The Saxon and the Norseman and The Englishman and the Scandinavian; or, a Comparison of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse Literature. The same Samuel Laing who published Journal of a Residence in Norway translated Heimskringla. In the tropes associated with them, language and literature thus provided further venues for evidence of continuities and disjunctions between Britain and Scandinavia, although, in one way, this evidence did differ from what I already have considered. While museum displays or snow-covered cataracts appealed to the senses and only through them to ideas about the past, language and literature directly represented how individuals thought about and

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described the physical and mental worlds they inhabited. When travellers encountered modern people unable to speak English, as was the typical situation in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and even the first half of the twentieth centuries, they sometimes described themselves as hearing voices like those we can hear today in recordings preserved from the earliest days of modern technology, speaking with quaint but intelligible accents about odd but recognisable topics. For their parts, speaking from the time when the medieval north and Britain could be imagined as one, the sagas and Eddas verbalised (or at least could be understood to verbalise) insights into the past and how its people thought about it. Nordic language and literature offered ways for readers to learn conceptually, that is, rather than experientially about who they themselves had been and what their own presumptively fundamental traits – such as courage and endurance – were. Like all acts of memory, the nostalgic English encounter with Scandinavia involved the active fashioning of what was being remembered. In defining places worth visiting and making them accessible to visitors, travellers remade the landscape and its significance, just as early modern critics remade ethnicity by positing shared British and Scandinavian ancestry and later travellers remade Scandinavian culture by emphasising its primitiveness. ‘As the word itself suggests’, according to Erll and Rigney, ‘“remembering” is better seen as an active engagement with the past, as performative rather than as reproductive’.3 This kind of active engagement – refashioning – certainly can be disingenuous or politically expedient, and I do not mean to say that in the case of medieval Scandinavia it necessarily and always was. By refashioning, rather, I mean the larger theoretical issues that Ricœur raises: ‘who is remembering’ and ‘what is being remembered’. These questions could be described as the two axes against which any recollection is constructed, and in the imagining of Scandinavia it was their intersection that fashioned a medieval memory. Focused on the historical relations between English and the Nordic languages and on the relevance of Nordic literature to British experience, memories produced by language and literature worked toward this same end. Lacking the mythology of the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, as well as the sagas’ detailed descriptions of daily life in the Middle Ages, English readers could find in Norse literature reasons to believe there had been comparable material in English literary history and that what Norse literature described equally might have been said about the English experience. By a

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parallel interpretative gesture, similarities between Old English and Old Norse could be understood to affirm the essential sameness of those who spoke the languages. With the theoretical underpinning of Herder’s and von Humboldt’s reflections on social identity, the putatively shared language and literature identified in this way became much more than a scholarly diversion.4 I will argue that, like tropes of travel, ethnicity, and personal identity, replicated references to sagas, Eddas, speakers, poets, verse forms, translation, unintelligibility, dialects, and languages served as ways to fashion a historical identity worth remembering for what it revealed about the modern world and for how it illustrated ­contemporary ­divergences from its historical origins. The same tongue As self-evident as distinctions between English and any of the modern Nordic languages might seem, the stories and situations reproduced in British travel accounts offer complex, conflicting pictures of language contact in Scandinavia. Representations of grammatical niceties, translation, and intelligibility move ­narratives forward, leading sometimes to mutual intelligibility and even linguistic sameness but also sometimes to incomprehensibility and indifference. From these contradictory tropes emerges an ideologically charged narrative of cultural history that reproduces contrasting British representations of landscape and ethnicity, one that constructs linguistic sameness or difference in situationally useful ways. The facts about the historical relations among English and Nordic languages are well known and easily stated. Both Old English and Old Norse were Germanic languages, meaning they shared lexical, morphological, and phonological features that imply a shared parent language with Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, and Gothic. Further, the western Germanic languages share grammatical features with the northern ones and against the sole eastern one (Gothic), so much so that the Germanic language family tree often is drawn to show an initial bifurcation of north-western from eastern Germanic and a subsequent split of the western group from the northern one.5 Beginning in the eighth century, the genealogically related Old English and Old Norse languages coexisted for at least several hundred years in Britain, with the former leaving a profound and well-documented impact on the word-formation, vocabulary, and even literary expressions of the latter.6

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The sack of Lindisfarne may be the iconic image of the Viking age in England, but the crucial factor in the persistence of Norse in England was the continued influx of new Scandinavian ­populations. It is this persistent influx that would have disrupted what modern ethnographic studies suggest about the linguistic assimilation of immigrants, who typically within three generations shift from their native language to that of their new environment. Once Danish and Norwegian Vikings began to winter in England in 851, further, they and their language became yearround presences. The establishment of the Danelaw guaranteed the permanent residence of this Nordic population – and effectively invited still more Norse settlers. By this same time, further, Norse s­peakers had come to inhabit parts of Ireland and much of Scotland and the outer islands. With the late tenth-century resumption of Viking raids (specifically from Denmark), still more Norse speakers arrived. Undoubtedly these new arrivals would have had dialect differences with the settlers in the Danelaw. But since a split between East Scandinavian (Danish and Swedish) and West (Norwegian and Icelandic) generally is dated to the twelfth or thirteenth centuries,7 there is every reason to believe that in Anglo-Saxon England Norse dialects were as mutually intelligible with one another as English dialects were. New Scandinavian arrivals to Britain thereby would have helped sustain whatever Norse was already being spoken there. It was this group of Scandinavians that put Danish kings (beginning with Cnut) on the English throne continuously from 1016 until 1042, during which time Norse, like French with the arrival of the Normans, would have had the kind of social prestige that can sustain minority languages despite formidable disparities in the numbers of speakers. Even so, the presence of English loan words in some of the skaldic poems produced in Cnut the Great’s eleventh-century court might seem portents of the linguistic future, in which Norse speakers shifted to English.8 As Russell Poole points out, ‘We can infer a process of dialogue between the Norse and English literary works, involving the transmission of not merely lexis and stylisms but also n ­ arrative, genealogy and ideology.’9 Following the Norman arrival and subsequent socio-political reorganisation of Britain, the influx of Nordic peoples to Britain apparently stopped, leading to the demise of Old Norse there. By the twelfth century, indeed, Norse clearly was in retreat in England proper, leaving evidence of its survival in only a handful of slightly garbled inscriptions. By the thirteenth, there seems little reason to

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believe that even in the Danelaw anything like what might be called a Scandinavian linguistic memory (as opposed to individual Norse borrowings) remained. After that, one had to travel to the Shetland and Orkney islands to hear a Scandinavian language being spoken. So much for the historical record of divergence, shift, and decline. The representations of this record are another issue. In the Middle Ages, indeed, the linguistic equivalence of English and Norse is a recurrent trope of shared ethnicity. Several medieval sources corroborate the extraordinary claim of Gunnlaugs saga that three centuries earlier England, Norway and Denmark all had used the same language. Works like the Old English Battle of Maldon and Old Norse Egil’s Saga, further, contain scenes of Norse and Anglo-Saxons speaking to one another without intermediaries. More generally, while the record often notes the need of translators between speakers of English and those of Irish or French, it does not mention this need between English and Norse ones. The twelfthcentury Icelandic First Grammatical Treatise even claims, ‘we are of one tongue with them [Anglophones], even though one of our languages has been greatly changed or both of them somewhat’.10 The following century, in Heimskringla, Snorri grants linguistic difference but also mutual intelligibility between Old Norse and Old English when he describes an exchange between an English cart-driver and a Norseman, Styrkárr, who asks the Englishman to hand over his fur-lined coat. ‘Not to you’, the cart-driver responds; ‘You must be a Norwegian. I recognise your speech.’11 Whatever its relation to linguistic reality, this trope of linguistic sameness persisted well after a moment when actual Norse and English speakers might have encountered one another. As late as the thirteenth century, when no Norse could have remained in the Midlands, Havelok the Dane depicts Danish and English as ­mutually intelligible in the pre-Conquest period. Whilst this last example is late and so simply might reflect the fantastic world of romance, the grammatical similarities between early varieties of medieval English and of medieval Norse suggest that the languages could well have been mutually intelligible, particularly in their lexis and phonology. But this linguistic equivalence is first formally posited as part of the post-medieval construction of Anglo-Scandinavian ethnicity. Specifically, a shared English–Norse grammatical character is described in detail in George Hickes’s 1689 Institutiones Grammaticæ, which appeared as Sammes and Stillingfleet were arguing on behalf of a shared Anglo-Scandinavian history and ethnicity. By providing the first

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empirical arguments for this equivalence, indeed, Hickes rendered linguistic historiography a device to substantiate ethnic claims and historical memories. Long before the advent of comparative linguistics and the idea of Indo-European language families, Hickes derives Old English, Old High German, and Old Norse (which he calls Cimbrica) from Gothic, and he even provides a tree diagram to illustrate these connections and the development of Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish from Cimbrica. ‘You can see therefore’, he advises his reader, ‘what a great affinity there is among many languages, and how with a little effort, with the aid of ancient writers, it is possible to learn or at least understand the excellent languages of northern Europe.’ In the fashion of the times, Hickes practises a kind of ground-up linguistics, beginning with graphs and moving thence to inflections and parts of speech. He employs the format of Latin grammars and thereby sometimes distorts his material (factoring in the ablative case, for example, which occurs in neither Old English nor Old Norse). But ultimately his book is a paean to vernacular language and literature and to the almost interchangeability of Old English and Old Norse, with the volume containing paradigms that demonstrate the ‘closeness of Anglo-Saxon and Gothic with the old Cimbrian-Gothic’. ‘As for loftiness’, Hickes says, ‘there is in fact nothing loftier than Cædmon, nothing more venerable, among either the Greek or Latin poets.’12 The result of his methods is that the Institutiones becomes, in effect, an argument for the sameness of Gothic, Old English, and Old Norse.13 Hickes’s later Linguarum Veterum Septentrionalium Thesaurus (1703–5) amplifies this effect with an entire volume that conjoins the literary traditions by c­ ataloguing Old Norse manuscripts in Scandinavia alongside Anglo-Saxon manuscripts throughout Britain. If the development of comparative linguistics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries largely undermined representations of Old English and Old Norse as essentially the same language, it could not eliminate them as long as the trope of linguistic equivalence remained ethnographically useful. The notion remains, then, in James Johnstone’s stilted (and florid) Lodbrokar-Quida (1782) and Anecdotes of Olave the Black (1790), which came out of his desire to ‘shew the affinity of the English language with the most pure and original dialect of the Teutonic’.14 On a strictly pragmatic level – that of the Anglophone abroad – some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travellers claimed mutual intelligibility with the Scandinavians they encountered, so much so that visitors and

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residents alike could understand themselves to speak the same ­language. Metcalfe, for example, avers that in Norway of the 1830s, ‘Now and then, you might almost fancy that the peasants were talking English. “Somme weke” sounded uncommonly like what it really means, “some weeks” … A gentleman from the north of England told me that he got on better in the out-of-the-way valleys, with his native tongue, than with his imperfect Norsk.’15 And on his visit to rural Sweden in the 1820s, Clarke found extensive evidence not only of the commensurability between the modern languages but of the continuity between contemporary Swedish and medieval English: The antient language of the people, and their antient mode of dress, is still kept up among them. We were told that in the northern district of this province [Dalecarlia] a dialect is spoken closely resembling English; but the same may be said of other parts of Sweden: and more than once we had an opportunity of remarking, that when the Swedes offered examples of Swedish dialect which to them were almost unintelligible, either owing to their antiquity or to their provincial character, they were, on this account, the more intelligible to us; and so like to our old English language, that they differed from it only as the sort of English used by Robert of Gloucester, exhibiting the transition from the Saxon to the English language, or that which Bellenden adopted in his translation of Boëthius, differs from the English now in use.16

Hearing thirteenth-century English in nineteenth-century Swedish may have been a strictly popular application of Nordic medieval tropes, and it may be as incredible as etymologies that derive English from the angle (Latin ‘angulus’) of the land that the Angles inhabited on the Continent. But, like many linguistic issues, ­ ­language definition depends on more than grammatical structure. As the dynamics of the modern Nordic languages demonstrate, indeed, intelligibility can be asymmetrical, with some speakers (or groups of speakers) understanding (or claiming to understand) another better than they themselves are understood. And while comprehension certainly depends in part on phonological and morphological similarities, it also depends on the extent to which speakers want to understand one another or, more generally, want to be considered as jointly speaking the same language. An utterance’s topic, the ethnicity and appearance of those who speak it, and the context in which the utterance occurs can all affect how speakers process what they hear and whether they regard it as an instance of one language or another.17 Factors like these n ­ ecessarily

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advance broad issues of cultural memory, with the result that mutual intelligibility can function as a trope for whatever identifications one wants to draw; as compelling as the evidence for North-west Germanic may be, indeed, similar claims about mutual intelligibility (hence, genealogical closeness) have been claimed for Old English with Old Saxon and Old Frisian as well.18 All of which means that the question of whether Old Norse and Old English (or modern Norwegian and modern English or modern Swedish and Middle English) are effectively the same language or simply coexisted cannot be answered only by appealing to grammatical similarities or differences. Anyone determined to separate the two regions could use language to do just this, just as anyone desiring to see similarity between Scandinavia and Britain could find commonality of language to support this view. In fact, representations of language and language contact could corroborate both positions. If Hickes identified grammatical evidence of linguistic commonality, individuals like Clarke saw it in rural Swedish dialects that were tantamount (he said) to English. Commonality likewise could be illustrated by one group of speakers learning the language of another group, and travellers sometimes do in fact acknowledge encountering English-speaking Scandinavians. Laing, for instance, contends that in Trondheim he met a ‘gentleman’ who ‘not only understands the English language, but is better acquainted with English literature, than many members of our own Storthing in Westminster’.19 Holland tells of meeting an Icelander ‘who speaks English with considerable fluency, though instructed solely by himself, & never having visited England’, while Morris encountered an Icelander who ‘could talk English as well as myself’.20 By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, when the shared ethnicity of Britain and Scandinavia evidently had become widely accepted, English discussions increasingly employ images and scenes emphasising the notion that the mutual comprehension of British and Nordic speakers lay not in the modern era but in the medieval past. The far more common scenario thus involves Nordic individuals who either know no English or whose command of it is imperfect, conditions that are often represented by tropes of inadequacy and ignorance. Of his time in Reykjavík Dillon comments, ‘The chief disadvantage that I laboured under was my ignorance of both Danish and Icelandic, both of which are spoken in Reikiavik, and I soon found that English, with one or two exceptions, was unknown.’21 Throughout her journey across Sweden, Norway,

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and Denmark, Wollstonecraft likewise encountered individuals who spoke no English or did so only ‘a little’, ‘intelligibly’, or ‘tolerably’.22 Even speakers who tried to improve their language skills, such as a Norwegian man Latham met, came in for criticism: ‘English he knew from having read it, so that when he spoke it, he spoke it as Byron would have written it. He talked like a book, as the common people say, and a very queer book, too.’23 According to Metcalfe, these linguistic difficulties were essentially ingrained in Nordic speakers and made all the worse by their attempts to rationalise their own difficulties: ‘The Norwegians look upon English … as hard to pronounce. On that notable occasion, say they, when the Devil boiled the languages together, English was the scum that came to the top.’24 Scandinavians might speak no English, then, or speak it badly, or speak it artificially, but, worse still, by calling it scum they reveal that they simply could not recognise the power, virtue, and grandeur of the language with which British commerce and political power were, at this very moment, remaking the global economy. In these presentations, Scandinavians, like their counterpart indigenes in Polynesia or North America, could never acquire English well enough to transform their diminished status, so that limited linguistic competence – or, in a phrase used since the early seventeenth century, ‘broken English’ – constitutes and affirms social standing. Even the effective English skills of the Icelander Morris met were compromised by the fact that he was ‘an unpleasant, boastful, vulgar sort of a fellow’. It is the very expectation that Nordic individuals will be able to speak English only imperfectly, if at all, that produces the surprise in a story Landor tells of a pastor’s visit to England. ‘“I so soon acquired the English manners, and spoke the language so fluently”’, says the pastor, ‘“that, among the ladies, I excited no feeling but disappointment; for having no idea that Old Norway produced any thing which was not of kin to a bear, they half expected to behold me with a shaggy hide and short tail.”’25 The pastor’s metaphor here is striking: creating the impression that he is a mute beast then long extinct in Britain, his nationality alone accounts for the surprise at his ability to speak as a man. As with much else that they encountered in Scandinavia, Anglophones seem to have seen and represented language issues only from their own perspective: few English writers evidently entertained the possibility that Norwegians, Danes, Swedes, or Icelanders might have refrained from learning English because

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they did not wish to do so. Additionally, at least in theory, l­ inguistic commonality might also be achieved by an Anglophone acquiring an indigenous language, typically the first step in the type of anthropological journey that tourism reproduced. But in practice, and despite the availability of aids like Bennett’s English–Norwegian Phrasebook, British visitors often seem not to have made the effort to do so. Few expressions of regret appear, though, having attended an Icelandic dance, Holland does acknowledge, ‘In the course of the Ball, we were exposed to much difficulty from our inability to speak the language of the country.’26 With his working knowledge of spoken Icelandic, then, Morris was an exception among travellers. So, too, was Slingsby, who, Readman notes, ‘took the trouble to learn to speak, read and write Norwegian soon after his first visit to the country, and by 1876 was telling Norwegian correspondents that it was perfectly acceptable for them to write back in their native language’.27 Landor, conversely, adopts a self-deprecating attitude towards his own, evidently limited command of Danish: I had studied the Danish language a little whilst at Elsinore, and had taken the precaution to write down about forty useful sentences in English, which I got translated for me into Danish, taking care to spell the words as they were pronounced; so that when I spoke them I had generally caught the accent so correctly as to deceive people into the belief that I knew more than I was really master of.28

If he admits to knowing only a little Danish, then, Landor also undercuts the value and significance of even this knowledge and any commonality it might imply. Danish, it seems, is as easy to learn as the Danes are easy to fool. Indifference is a dominant trope in references to Nordic languages, and one measure of this indifference is an inability to distinguish among the languages. Landor, for example, evidently supposes that the language he learned in Elsinore would do him well throughout Norway, and others that the Dano-Norwegian spoken in Christiania had no differences from the dialects spoken elsewhere.29 Another measure is the divisive purposes that travellers’ incomprehension of Nordic languages could serve. Wollstonecraft even expresses relief that her ‘not understanding the language was an excellent pretext for dining alone’ but also suspicion about ‘peasants, who, taking advantage of my ignorance of the language’, made her pay for an additional horse.30 This kind of linguistic disconnect also could be a vehicle for social concerns. By relying on a French-speaking servant throughout her Scandinavian trip,31

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for instance, Wollstonecraft manages all at once to avoid acquiring a Nordic language, to diminish the status of Nordic languages even within Scandinavia, and to affirm her superior social standing. Yet another measure of travellers’ coolness to learning Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, or Icelandic was their frequent reliance on some other language. When Queen Christina addresses him in Swedish, Whitelocke has her utterance translated into Latin and then responds in French, the language they use for the remainder of their conversation.32 Subsequent visitors to Nordic regions (including Dufferin, Dillon, and Landor) echo von Troil’s claim that Latin was a conversational medium among several groups of speakers.33 For an era when learning remained steeped in the classical languages, claims like these have more credibility than they might if made today: Latin well may have been the preferred language among scholars and the clergy, whilst it was merchants who made the greatest efforts to learn the vernaculars.34 At the same time, the rhetorical effect of Latin conversations as a trope is to redeem (partially) Scandinavia from some of the unfavourable associations of primitivism. Norway and Iceland may have been sublime landscapes peopled by largely uncultivated people, but in their command of learned languages, as well in their personal simplicity and integrity, at least some of these people still could justify the embrace of Scandinavia as an exemplum of a desirable past. Such admirable and precocious peasants contrast with a story Landor tells about an English family in Norway who forgot English and with it their own cultural values.35 Here the language contact situation reproduces common stories about travellers who went native in North America and the Pacific, losing all at once their language and civilisation. As in these global accounts, alluring northern primitivism in the modern world constitutes a regression from and even threat to cultural progress since the Middle Ages. A shared past for Old English and Old Norse was one thing; it helped justify claims for shared ethnicity. Nineteenth-century Swedish peasants who sounded like the knights of medieval romances achieved much the same effect. But a shared modern language – whether through Scandinavians who could speak ­ English or British travellers who could speak a Nordic language – would have closed the cultural distance that many other tropes fashioned between modern Britain and the Nordic regions. Perhaps not really wanting to understand the Nordic speakers they met, travellers, at least in how they represented their experiences and

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whatever the historical linguistic reality, likewise seem not to have wanted to share a language with them. Much as in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Australia, and other colonial territories, indeed, the most frequently occurring tropes used to represent English and language contact in Scandinavia cumulatively emphasise just how different Anglophones were from the speakers around them. Literature The impact of medieval Norse literature on later English literature and culture is a story well told by O’Donoghue, McKinnell, Helgason, and others.36 In talking about British use of Norse literature here, my intention is not to rehearse, much less try to expand on, this well-established story. Instead, I want to position literary activity and its representations in relation to the other ways by which an Anglo-Scandinavian memory was fashioned. Perhaps the earliest English uses of Nordic myth to depict an English past are in Verstegan’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605), which predates Langhorne’s and Stillingfleet’s ethnographic work and uses Norse detail to produce a nuanced account of Anglo-Saxon paganism: ‘Of the weekly day which was dedicated vnto his [Thor’s] peculiar seruice, we yet retaine the name of THURSDAY, the which the Danes, and Swedians doe yet call THORS-DAY.’37 But just as it was Snorri the historian (as Morris styles him) who provided the rationale for Anglo-Scandinavian ethnicity, so it was he who wrote what became the most influential guidebook to a putative Anglo-Saxon mythology – the Prose Edda, which itself well might be regarded as a trope of AngloScandinavian cultural memories. First widely available with the 1665 appearance of Resen’s Latin Edda, the work was introduced to the English reading public by Sammes’s 1676 partial translation of the Prologue. The first extended (if still partial) English translations of both Eddas appeared in Percy’s Five Pieces of Runic Poetry (1763) and twovolume Northern Antiquities (1770).38 It was Percy’s works, in turn, that inspired the burst of literary interest in Norse poetry during the Romantic period (by Cottle, Southey, Wordsworth and others) and, slightly later, in the sagas (by Dasent, Morris, and others). Like many of his predecessors in ethnography and historical studies, Percy approached his material in ways that insistently built accounts of the gods from familiar images of Britain’s and Scandinavia’s putatively shared ethnic identity:

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As to the Anglo-Saxon, and Icelandic poetry: these will be allowed to be in all respects congenial, because of the great affinity between the two languages, and between the nations who spoke them. They were both Gothic Tribes, and used two not very different dialects of the same Gothic language. Accordingly we find a very strong resemblance in their versification, phraseology and poetic allusions, &c. the same being in a great measure common to both nations.39

In imagining the skald as the forerunner of the minstrel, Percy not only connected modern popular English poetry to medieval Nordic origins but provided an ancestry for his contemporaries’ emphasis on sublime emotions and non-Christian virtue.40 In effect, Percy, inspired by Snorri’s Edda, used literary history as a way to extend what had become long-standing ethnographic and historical connections, but, in doing so, he also exposed some of the tensions produced by an Anglo-Scandinavian cultural memory. A compendium of myths such as the Prose Edda, or even individual stories about the gods’ adventures like those in the Poetic Edda, survives in no other early Germanic language. For AngloSaxon literature in particular, acknowledgements of myths and gods are limited to inscriptions, place-names, passing references in a few poems (Widsith and Beowulf, for example), and ecclesiastical dismissal of the gods in a work like Ælfric’s De Falsis Diis. The identification of any Anglo-Saxon cultic veneration, folktales, and popular remembrance depends significantly, then, on comparative Norse evidence.41 The primary evidence for any arguments about a shared, originary Teutonic mythology that could have found expression in English literature and culture is necessarily even more slender, and so likewise must rely extensively on Snorri’s Edda and the Poetic Edda. If within the broader memorial context of the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages the Eddas could be understood to imply gaps in British medieval recollections, then, they also, crucially, could be used to fill them by providing a mythic projection of a landscape and its people that Anglo-Saxon literature evidently lacked. Had there been no Poetic or Prose Edda, English critics past and present would have had much less to say about an early Anglo-Saxon mythology; by the same token, without the Eddas, there would have been much less reason to believe something had been lost. By extension, in uniting landscape, ethnicity, and personal character, such stories offered a presumptive rationale for the memorial linking of the British medieval past with the Nordic places contemporary British travellers visited.

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In this way, among Scandinavian enthusiasts like Thomas Gray (1716–71) and Percy references to Norse mythology functioned as tropes that helped remember what allegedly had been forgotten and, in fact, might never have been. And in modern literary criticism these same views of the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages often continue to serve much the same purposes, providing influential interpretative contexts for the significance of a variety of what otherwise would be acontextual Anglo-Saxon literary and cultural phenomena. Thus, Yggdrasil has been used as a putatively pan-Germanic symbol to explain Anglo-Saxon beliefs about trees; the giant Skrymir’s mitten has been regarded as an analogue for Grendel’s ‘glof’ in Beowulf; a passage from Háttatal (A Listing of Metres) has been used to explain a passage in an Anglo-Saxon will; and the killing of Balder has been understood as a version of the killing of Herebeald in Beowulf.42 Nordic mythology has supplied more general frames of reference for Anglo-Saxon literature as well: the antiquarianism of Gylfaginning (The Deluding of Gylfi) for the Beowulf poet’s own putative antiquarianism; Snorri’s depiction of Odin for accounts of Woden; his explanation of the ‘Hreiðgotar’ for the identity of the Hreithgoths of Widsith; and Heimskringla for the putative fictional reworking of a tenthcentury Danish raid into Grendel’s raid on Heorot.43 ‘Kenning’ and ‘heiti’, two of the basic terms of discussion for Anglo-Saxon poetry, do not occur in the Old English corpus and so likewise come from Snorri’s Edda, bringing with them – specifically by means of late nineteenth-century criticism – Norse poetics as well.44 Perhaps the most celebrated and widely read instance of this mythographic appropriation falls slightly out of my timeframe. I mean J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, published in 1937 but conceptually tied to many of the issues and tropes I have been discussing. Indeed, Tolkien himself emphasised the medieval English roots of Middle-earth, a place name modelled on the Old English ‘middan geard’, by saying that his ambition was to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story … which I could dedicate simply to [sic]: to England, to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our ‘air’ (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East).45

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If the myths of Middle-earth were not specifically those of England’s past, then, they would be stories imbued with its climate and character, and in this sense they also would be stories aspiring to remind contemporary English citizens of their past and to root them in it, which is precisely how a great many readers have approached them. In his review of The Hobbit in The Times (London), C. S. Lewis, who knew the Middle Ages as well as Tolkien did, addresses Tolkien as a ‘Professor’ who ‘has studied trolls and dragons at first hand’; ‘to the trained eye’ Lewis adds in a later review, ‘some characters will seem almost mythopoeic’.46 Other reviews say that readers will find in The Hobbit a ‘combination of the English countryside and magic’ and that the book had come ‘out of the dark Anglo-Saxon mythology, touched with a bit of the English gentleman’.47 In these accounts, echoed by much contemporary criticism, the world of The Hobbit is more than simply the Anglo-Saxon world transformed; it is also a place that is quintessentially English irrespective of time. Bag End, indeed, has been described as ‘the home of members of the Victorian uppermiddle class of Tolkien’s nineteenth-century youth, full of studies, parlours, cellars, pantries, wardrobes, and all the rest’.48 The catch is that some of The Hobbit’s most memorable moments derive not from medieval England but from medieval Scandinavia, specifically Iceland. A prime example is ‘Riddles in the Dark’, a chapter so vitally important to The Lord of the Rings that Tolkien had to rewrite it to shift its emphasis and better connect his novels.49 The chapter tells of Bilbo’s encounter with a strange and eventually threatening character named Gollum, whom he meets in a subterranean, hall-like cave and with whom he engages in a riddling game with a potentially deadly wager: should Bilbo win, Gollum would lead him out of the cave and mountain, but should Gollum win, he would eat Bilbo. Nothing like this survives in Old or Middle English. In fact, nothing like a riddle contest survives. Tolkien took much of his inspiration, rather, from the medieval Icelandic poem Vafþrúðnismál, in which a disguised Odin visits the hall of the giant Vafthrudnir to learn, as the god says, just how wise the giant is. At the end of the game, much like Tolkien’s Bilbo with his question about what he has in his pocket, Odin poses a question that is not a riddle and that the giant cannot possibly answer: ‘What did Odin say into his son’s ear when he was laid on his funeral pyre?’50 Much of the English air of Middle-earth, it would seem, rises from the recycled AngloScandinavian Middle Ages.

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Here again a comparison between the ways early English and Nordic critics talked about the Middle Ages implies quite different memories. On occasion, Nordic medieval interest did extend to English materials. The first edition and translation (in Latin) of Beowulf appeared in Copenhagen, under the aegis of the Icelander Grímur Thorkelin, who (as I noted above) was actually in search of materials on Danish history and insisted that the poem’s language was in fact a Danish dialect; the first vernacular translation of the poem was into Danish by Grundtvig. Similarly, one of the earliest systematic grammars of Old English was Rasmus Rask’s 1817 Swedish Angelsaksisk Sproglære. But Scandinavian critics typically invested more attention in medieval Scandinavian materials. In 1643, twenty-two years before the Dane Resen published the first edition of the Prose Edda and 127 before Percy’s Northern Antiquities, the Icelandic bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson discovered the Codex Regius (and so, effectively, the Poetic Edda). In the centuries to follow, numerous ambitious editions of this Edda appeared from Scandinavian presses, including B. W. Luxdorph’s three-volume Edda Sæmundar hinns fróda (1787–1828) and Finn Magnusen’s four-volume Den Ældre Edda (1819–23). These appeared within a wider context of Scandinavian a­ nthropological interest in the past that is reflected in Olaus Magnus’s 1555 Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus and Ole Worm’s Antiquitates Danicæ (1651). By the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Arnamagnæan Commission in Copenhagen had published a series of editions of the sagas, usually with Latin translations, that generated additional interest and ultimately made possible the English translations of Dasent and others.51 Universally recognised by Nordic critics as the common parent of their own speech, Icelandic received its first formal grammar-book treatment in Runólfur Jónsson’s 1651 Recentissima Antiquissimæ Linguæ Septentrionalis Incunabula. And interest in the sagas proved particularly effective in the modern development of a sense of Icelandic nationalism and identity.52 Two crucial contrasts run through the medieval images remembered and circulated by early modern British and Scandinavian critics, then, as well as through the responses to medieval literature that these memories produced. First, while English writers employed the Eddas and sagas as tropes of their own past, most Nordic writers and readers showed at best tepid interest in what English literature, whether early or late, could reveal about their own experience. They did not need to co-opt the mythology and

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sagas of Anglo-Saxon England, both because they had their own and because there was little to be co-opted. And second, the varying levels of medieval interest among English and Nordic readers arose for very different reasons. To the Scandinavian readers, writers, and editors I have discussed throughout this book, Norse mythology had a distinctively personal application. It depicted not who they hoped to be but who they were. For English readers like Percy and Gray, conversely, the Eddas and sagas could be used to substantiate cultural memories about a northern homeland, ethnicity, and personal character. To put the matter more pointedly, because memories of the Anglo-Saxon past took shape through Snorri’s Edda, readings of the Edda, in a self-enforcing fashion, have enabled that past to conform to an emergent sense of the contemporary world in which they took shape. Replicating the Edda (in whole or part) provided still another opportunity to engineer a British identity that proceeded from pre-literate Germanic traditions recorded by Tacitus, through Anglo-Saxon England and Snorri and, finally, to post-Reformation Britain. By means of such memorialising, the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda together provided a rationale for assertions about Anglo-Saxon belief in heathen myths absent from the English written record, in the gods the myths bring to life, and, therefore, in what might be called a primitive spiritualism that the Anglo-Saxons putatively shared with the early Norse. One reaction to absences in the medieval English mythic record would have been to say that the evidence is too limited to support any judgement about whether or how Anglo-Saxon and Norse peoples shared beliefs. Another perhaps less cautious one would have been to assert that the Anglo-Saxons, or the Teutonic people more broadly, simply never had the kinds of myths recorded in thirteenth-century Iceland, that what the Eddas relate is distinctly Icelandic or at most broadly Nordic. The Anglo-Scandinavian tradition instead relied on Snorri in particular to identify as well as fill the absences. In a very limited way, this approach has meant that talking about Old English poetics often amounts to talking about Old Norse poetics, with much of the primary evidence for both coming from Snorri’s Edda. But more significantly, Scandinavian mythology has itself been one of the tropes that helped sustain the ethnic, historical, and temperament issues that motivated travellers’ visits to Scandinavia, as well as, by extension, the development of Great Britain as a place of shared values, ideas, and ethnicity. It is this presumed fundamental cultural utility that, I

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think, in part accounts for the particular popularity of the Prose Edda among English critics. In the century following Percy’s Northern Antiquities, four more partial translations of the Snorri’s work appeared, and three more partial or complete translations have been published since then.53 If reproducing tropes from the Eddas was a way for writers to reconstruct what they understood to be lost Anglo-Saxon myths, the sagas provided travellers with the inspiration to visit Iceland and to talk about the details of the lost medieval world that still could be found in the present day. Some of these critics, like Morris, effectively used the sagas as guidebooks. Like the trips of many contemporaries, his 1871 trip follows an itinerary of sagas from Njáls saga in the south, to Eyrbyggja saga (The Saga of the People from Eyri) on the Snæfellsnes peninsula in the north-west, to Laxdæla saga and Egils saga near Borgarfjörður in the central west, all the while dropping offhand references to other sagas, such as ‘Biarg, where Grettir was born’. More than this, Morris presumes an implied reader who is just as interested in and knowledgeable about the sagas as he. As in the case of Borgarfjörður, the landscape becomes a kind of pastiche of medieval Nordic literature and so itself a trope for a shared ethnicity and past: I may mention in case you forget it, or are hazy about your saga geography, [Borgarfjörður] is one of the great centres of story in Iceland: Egil lived at Borg, and his son Thorstein, father of Helga the Fair; some way up the river is Gilsbank (Gilsbakki) Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue’s house: and between that and this is Deildar Tongue, where Odd of the Tongue lived; a little north of that is Thverar Lithe, the dwelling of most of the folk in Hen-Thorir’s Saga, and finally, Reykholt is hard by (to the south-east) where Snorri the historian lived and died.54

Coles and Leith weave accounts of the sagas into their travelogues of Iceland,55 while Mackenzie and Dufferin intersperse stories from Icelandic history with synopses of the Vinland sagas. Baring-Gould states that his ‘object in visiting Iceland was twofold. I purposed examining scenes famous in Saga [sic], and filling a portfolio with water-colour sketches.’ To this end, he selected saga specimens ‘with a view towards illustrating the voyages, quarrels, litigations, and superstitions of the ancient Icelanders’, and he filled his book with maps and illustrations of birds, landscapes, and plants. In effect, the physical book is a multi-layered trope of the past, collecting images of the images that brought Baring-Gould to Iceland

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in the first place. ‘It must be remembered’, he says, ‘that the Sagas from which I draw my extracts are not mere popular tales; they are downright history.’56 In these accounts, Iceland becomes every bit the symbol-laden text that the sagas composed there are. Even von Troil, writing before the full impact of Percy’s Northern Antiquities (or of his French sources), observes, ‘You will seldom find a peasant who, besides being well-instructed in the principles of religion, is not also acquainted with the history of his country, which proceeds from the frequent reading of their traditional histories (sagas) wherein consists their principal amusement.’57 Yet while the sagatext of Iceland initially had been written by the Icelanders, it had been (as far as many English writers were concerned) only partially preserved by them. Indeed, Icelandic landscapes as well as texts seem to disclose their full meaning only to tourists schooled in literature and attuned to the changing shapes of culture and of the memorial issues at stake. Metcalfe thus explicitly framed his visit to Iceland as an opportunity to read in the landscape the origins of the English people: I want to see with my own eyes some of the places where the scenes of your Sagas and legends are laid. I belong to a nation arrived at a very high state of civilisation, artificial in the extreme; in short, we live and move and have our being in a state of machinery from beginning to end. And somehow this very modernism begets a desire for reverting now and then to the old things, old people, old ballads, old customs – something fresh, and rare, and vigorous. I want to look for a bit at the rock from whence we were hewn, and the hole of the pit whence we were digged.58

In W. G. Collingwood and Jón Stefánsson’s 1899 A Pilgrimage to the Saga-steads of Iceland, replete with thirteen colour plates, this kind of representation takes on a reverential cast. For Collingwood, a visit to locations mentioned in the sagas is indeed a pilgrimage, one that finds him exhuming bones (of Gudrun Osvif’s-daughter, from Laxdæla saga), identifying similarities between Iceland and northern England, and circulating the images that will evoke, among English readers, a sense of the sublimity of landscape, story, and people. The reading of sagas and legends is thus anything but a diversion for such visitors. Literature, rather, affirms the AngloScandinavian cultural memories that other travellers described in their own encounters with the Scandinavian landscape and the history of their conjoint peoples that ethnographers and historians

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had identified as early as the seventeenth century. In effect, the sagas served as a trope for Iceland, which served as a trope for medieval England, which served as a trope for the ethical core of the modern British nation. Morris and the making of books Whether as glassworker, wallpaper- and textile maker, muralist, or printer, William Morris, the champion of Icelandic literature and the Icelandic landscape, liked making things, especially things that evoked the Middle Ages. The Kelmscott Press, which Morris founded in 1891 and which issued editions of medieval works such as The Canterbury Tales, The Golden Legend, and The Order of Chivalry, produced lavish volumes replete with illustrations reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts. In general, Morris led a life dedicated to crafting such artwork, and his Red House estate at Bexleyheath, south-east of London, is a monument to design and craftsmanship with a Victorian Gothic sensibility. Part of Morris’s making involved medieval literary works. He and the Icelander Eiríkur Magnússon translated Vǫlsunga saga (The Saga of the Volsungs) into English, and together they created the Saga Library, which issued their translations of Bandmanna saga (The Saga of the Allies), Heimskringla, Eyrbyggja saga, and other works. In addition to writing a journal of his 1871 and 1873 trips to Iceland, Morris himself turned the various Volsung poems of the Poetic Edda into a coherent whole and composed historical novels like The House of the Wolfings, which is set in a medieval never-never land that includes Anglo-Scandinavian staples such as Mirkwood and Odin. Like a medieval scribe, further, Morris prepared handwritten decorated copies of his own translations of Egil’s Saga and other works. His calligraphic copy of his translation of Snorri’s Ynglinga saga (The Saga of the Ynglings) is even on vellum.59 In a similar vein of historical meaning and reconstruction, in his translations and original compositions Morris often affected a literal, pseudo-archaic English style to evoke the Scandinavian Middle Ages – and did so, in fact, with increasing diligence in his later publications.60 In describing Grettir’s fight with the hag in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar (The Saga of Grettir Asmund’s Son), for instance, Morris and Magnússon wrote that Grettir ‘therewith got his right hand free, and swiftly seized the short-sword that he was girt withal, and smote the troll therewith on the ­shoulder, and

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struck off her arm’. His translation of Eyrbyggja saga opens with ‘Ketil Flatneb was hight a famous hersir in Norway.’61 In this kind of imaginative reconstruction Morris certainly was not alone. Thorstein of the Mere by his contemporary W. G. Collingwood fictionalised real places from the north of England (Cumbria and Coniston Water) in an idyll about the Viking moral character that putatively infused the region in the past and that remained (Collingwood believed) in the late n ­ ineteenth century. And he did so in language every bit as archaic as Morris’s. Collingwood, thus, has Thorstein say things like ‘where is the house to stand?’ and ‘yonder is our howe’.62 Similar stilted, at times opaque affectations, occur throughout many renditions of medieval Scandinavian literature. From Gray’s seminal ‘The Fatal Sisters’ through Tolkien’s posthumously published The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun and into contemporary popular film treatments, a sometimes impossible English circulates as a marker of medieval authenticity and its ethnic and social implications. In George Dasent’s 1861 translation of Njal’s Saga, which inspired the subsequent Victorian saga craze, Gunnar’s famous request of Hallgerd reads, ‘Give me two locks of thy hair, and ye two, my mother and thou, twist them together into a bowstring for me.’ Her infamous – and equally unnatural if not strictly speaking ungrammatical – reply is ‘Does aught lie on it?’63 In their 1883 Corpus Poeticum Boreale Vigfússon and Powell had dismissed such language as a grave error into which too many English translators of old Northern and Icelandic writings have fallen, to wit, the affectation of archaism, and the abuse of archaic, Scottish, pseudo-Middle-English words. This abominable fault makes a Saga, for instance, sound unreal, unfamiliar, false.64

Vigfússon and Powell certainly have a point. Representing an image of Scandinavia with pseudo-archaic-English is a self-­ contradictory enterprise that ultimately does result in something more unreal and unfamiliar than medieval. But whether the effects of archaic language, or of arguments about the equivalence of Old Norse and Old English, can be called false is a complicated matter. For one thing, what Pollmann calls ‘playing with anachronism’ necessarily has a political effect – in this case, the fashioning of the modern world as well as of the medieval one it remembers.65 For another, falseness depends, quite obviously, on the potential for truth, and that potential is difficult to identity

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in matters of historical memory. It was W. G. Collingwood’s son R. G., after all, who asserted that historians re-create what they hope to understand, selecting events and placing them in narratives in order to tell some meaningful, true, historical story. This is one implication and avowed intention of Dasent’s and Morris’s affected archaic language in their translations: a demonstration of the historical affinity between Norse and English.66 In Ian Felce’s view, indeed, ‘from the beginning of their collaboration, Morris and Eiríkur appear to have used cognates as nodes that opened something like a metaphysical conduit between their own consciousness and that of medieval Iceland’.67 It certainly is possible to intend to tell a lie, then, but two historians – or a Victorian novelist and a modern critic – also can intend to tell truths about the same situation that are quite different from and inconsistent with one another. To the extent that memory is inherently a dynamic between past and present, this kind of inconsistency is unavoidable. More importantly, if Morris and W. G. Collingwood blurred a distinction between artificial construct and original artefact, so, too, did every writer I have surveyed in this chapter and, indeed, this book. Hickes did so by assembling evidence for the interchangeability of medieval English, Icelandic, and Gothic, just as Wollstonecraft did by describing her indifference to learning a Scandinavian language. Both writers identified linguistic evidence not simply to sustain memories but also to produce them. Old English and Old Norse could be represented as effectively the same in Hickes’s analysis because doing so sustained ethnographic beliefs that their speakers were ultimately the same, while in Wollstonecraft’s detailing of Scandinavia, Norwegian or Swedish did not merit acquisition – much less approximate modern English – because to her mind their speakers were primitive and even barbaric. In the same ambivalent vein, early medieval Scandinavian visitors to Britain had been judged to be either savagely different from the British or virtually indistinguishable from them, depending on whether the remembered history was what Fabyan or Havelok the Dane recorded. In every case, belief preceded the identification of facts, which in turn justified the belief. Morris’s handwritten manuscripts thus only image a larger truth about Anglo-Scandinavian relations, which is that memory can be created by the very act of producing the evidence to support it. In many ways, in fact, Morris’s calligraphic copy of his own translation of Ynglinga saga, written and illustrated on parchment, could

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stand as a kind of master trope for the entire Anglo-Scandinavian enterprise. Because literature serves as a way to substantiate memories originating elsewhere, the ministrations of Percy, Morris, and others make good sense as extensions (rather than prerequisites) of the social and political implications of Anglo-Scandinavian memories about landscapes and people. Yet the connections still might be seen as less sequential than simultaneous, which is one of the reasons that I have called the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages a meme. In Morris’s case, social concerns lay at the heart of much of his interest in medieval English and Icelandic writings. Late in life he even became a wholehearted supporter of Karl Marx’s thought and a regular contributor to socialist publications, seeing a return to the Middle Ages, as did many medievalism enthusiasts of the era, as a repudiation of industrialism and the spiritual and imaginative decay that went with it. His Six Centuries of Work and Wages (1884) maintained that a rise of commercialism had produced social decline in England after the fourteenth century.68 But it was in the innocence that he and others projected on to Iceland, even before his turn to socialism, that Morris remembered – or created – the simplicity and integrity of premodern England. In just the same way early modern critics remembered an ethnicity untainted by French or Roman influences, and nineteenth-century travellers to Scandinavia remembered the global achievements of industrial Great Britain. What none of them could do was represent the English Middle Ages without the tropes, stories, and images that enabled them to talk about northern memories. Notes   1 Readman, ‘William Cecil Slingsby, Norway, and British mountaineering, 1872–1914’, 1116.  2 Some of the earliest modern criticism in particular stresses literary matters as originary in Anglo-Nordic dynamics. See, for example, Conrad Hjalmar Nordby, The Influence of Old Norse Literature upon English Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1901); and Frank Edgar Farley, Scandinavian Influences in the English Romantic Movement (Boston: Ginn, 1903).   3 Erll and Rigney, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.  4 For a classic expression of this connection, see von Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-structure and Its

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Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).   5 E.g., R. D. Fulk, An Introductory Grammar of Old English, with an Anthology of Readings (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2014), p. 7.   6 D. Gary Miller, External Influences on English: From Its Beginnings to the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 91–147; Philip Durkin, Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 171–221; Richard Dance, Words Derived from Old Norse in Early Middle English: Studies in the Vocabulary of the South-west Midland Texts (Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2003).  7 See Haugen, The Scandinavian Languages, pp. 198–214. The mid-­ thirteenth-century Third Grammatical Treatise demonstrates an awareness of this split at that time, commenting on the preservation (or not) of before , ‘þýðerskir men ok danskir hafa [it] … þat er nú ekki haft í norrœnu máli’ (The Germans and the Danes have it [v], which isn’t in Norwegian). The original is quoted in Stephen Pax Leonard, Language Society and Identity in Early Iceland, Publications of the Philological Society 45 (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 124; the translation is my own.  8 See Dietrich Hofmann, Nordisch–Englische Lehnbeziehungen der Wikingerzeit (Copenhagen: E. Munksgaard, 1955); Roberta Frank, ‘King Cnut in the verse of his skalds’, in Alexander R. Rumble (ed.), The Reign of Cnut: King of England, Denmark, and Norway (London: Leicester University Press, 1994), pp. 106–24, and ‘Did Anglo-Saxon audiences have a skaldic tooth?’, Scandinavian Studies, 59 (1987), 338–55; Matthew Townend, ‘Contextualising the Knútsdrápur: Skaldic praisepoetry at the court of Cnut’, Anglo-Saxon England 30 (2001), 145–79, and Language and History in Viking Age England, esp. pp. 201–10; Jonathan Watson, ‘The “Finnsburh” skald: Kennings and cruces in the Anglo-Saxon fragment’, JEGP 101 (2002), 497–519; and Sara M. PonsSanz, The Lexical Effects of Anglo-Scandinavian Linguistic Contact on Old English (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013) and ‘Norse-derived terms and structures in The Battle of Maldon’, JEGP 107 (2008), 421–44.   9 Russell Poole, ‘Crossing the language divide: Anglo-Scandinavian language and literature’, in Clare A. Lees (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 606. 10 Einar Haugen, First Grammatical Treatise: The Earliest Germanic Phonology: An Edition, Translation, and Commentary, Language Monograph 25 (Baltimore: Linguistic Society of America, 1950), p. 12. 11 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, vol. 3, trans. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2015), p. 117. The original can be found in Heimskringla, vol. 3,

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Íslenzk Fornrit 28, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson (Reykjavík, Hið íslenzka Fornritafélag, 1951), p. 192. 12 Hickes, Institutiones Grammaticæ Anglo-Saxonicæ et Moeso-Gothicæ (Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1689), no sigs. 13 Hickes’s views were not universally shared in the early modern period, though they were particularly influential. The contrasting position – that Norse and English are clearly distinct languages – appears in Stephen Skinner, Etymologicon Linguæ Anglicanæ, seu Explicatio Vocum Anglicarum Etymologica ex Propriis Fontibus, Scil. ex Linguis Duodecim (London: H. Brome, 1671). 14 James Johnstone, Anecdotes of Olave the Black, King of Man, and the Hebridean Princes of the Somerled Family, to Which Are Added XVIII Eulogies on Haco King of Norway by Snorro Sturlson, Poet to that Monarch (Copenhagen: n.p., 1780), no page numbers. 15 Metcalfe, The Oxonian in Norway, vol. 1, pp. 53–4. In fact, ‘some weeks’ likely would be rendered in Norwegian by the lexically and phonetically distinct ‘noen uker’. 16 Clarke, Scandinavia, pp. 513–14. 17 See further Machan, What Is English? pp. 109–12. 18 Bremmer, Jr, ‘Late medieval and early modern opinions on the affinity between English and Frisian’. 19 Laing, Journal of a Residence, p. 91. 20 Wawn (ed.), The Iceland Journal of Henry Holland, p. 197; and Morris, Journals of Travel in Iceland, p. 96. 21 Dillon, A Winter in Iceland and Lapland, vol. 1, p. 78. 22 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, pp. 38, 52, and 53. 23 Latham, Norway and the Norwegians, vol. 1, p. 137. 24 Metcalfe, The Oxonian in Thelemarken, vol. 1, p. 43. 25 Landor, Adventures in the North of Europe, vol. 2, p. 11. 26 Wawn (ed.), The Iceland Journal of Henry Holland, p. 105. 27 Readman, ‘William Cecil Slingsby, Norway, and British mountaineering, 1872–1914’, 1114. 28 Landor, Adventures in the North of Europe, vol. 1, p. 27. Landor later speaks of meeting a man at Lake Vanern, where he ‘ventured to address him in English and a language that was meant to be Swedish’ (vol. 1, p. 129). 29 See Fjågesund and Symes, The Northern Utopia, pp. 258–60. 30 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, pp. 38 and 94. 31 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, p. 104. 32 Whitelocke, A Journal of the Swedish Embassy, vol. 1, pp. 235–42. 33 Lord Dufferin, Letters from High Latitudes; Being Some Account of a Voyage, in 1856, in the Schooner Yacht ‘Foam’, to Iceland, Jan Mayen,

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& Spitzbergen, 5th edn (London: John Murray, 1867), p. 38; Dillon, A Winter in Iceland and Lapland, vol. 1, p. 20; Landor, Adventures in the North of Europe, vol. 2, pp. 68–9. 34 Seaton, Literary Relations of England and Scandinavia, p. 272; Kristin Bech, Fra Englisc til Englisc: Et Språk Blir til (Oslo: Pax Forlag, 2016). 35 Landor, Adventures in the North of Europe, vol. 1, pp. 241–2. 36 See, for example, Wawn (ed.), Northern Antiquity, ‘The post-medieval reception of Old Norse and Old Icelandic literature’, in Rory McTurk (ed.), A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005), pp. 320–37, and The Vikings and the Victorians; Seaton, Literary Relations of England and Scandinavia, pp. 297–332; Heather O’Donoghue, English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Margaret Clunies Ross, Prolonged Echoes: Old Norse Myths in Medieval Northern Society, 2 vols (Odense: Odense University Press, 1994, 1998), and The Norse Muse in Britain, 1750–1820 (Trieste: Parnaso, 1998); Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901, pp. 186–219. 37 See further Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr, ‘The Anglo-Saxon pantheon according to Richard Verstegan (1605)’, in Timothy Graham (ed.), The Recovery of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), pp. 141–72. 38 These largely translated Paul-Henri Mallet’s Introduction à L’Histoire du Dannemarc (1755) and Monumens de la mythologie (1756) and included Johannes Göransson’s Latin rendering of Gylfaginning from De Yferborne Atlingars (1746). 39 Thomas Percy, Northern Antiquities: or, A Description of the Manners, Customs, Religion and Laws of the Ancient Danes and Other Northern Nations, 2 vols. (London: T. Carnan, 1770), vol. 2, p. 196. 40 Percy offers similar reflections in ‘An essay on the ancient English minstrels’, in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of Our Earlier Poets, 3 vols (London: J. Dodsley, 1765), vol. 1, pp. xv–xxiii. See more generally Margaret Clunies Ross (ed.), The Old Norse Poetic Translations of Thomas Percy: A New Edition and Commentary (Brepols: Turnhout, 2002). 41 For extensive arguments about the persistence of pagan myths during and after the Anglo-Saxon period, see Richard North, Pagan Words and Christian Meanings (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991), Heathen Gods in Old English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and The Origins of Beowulf from Vergil to Wiglaf (Oxford University Press, 2006). 42 Della Hooke, Trees in Anglo-Saxon England: Literature, Lore and Landscape (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), passim; Andy Orchard, A Critical Companion to Beowulf (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer,

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2003), pp. 121–3; Hilda Ellis Davidson, The Sword in Anglo-Saxon England: Its Archaeology and Literature (1962; rpt Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), pp. 188–9; Dorothy Whitelock (ed. and trans.), AngloSaxon Wills (1930; rpt Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 148–9; John D. Niles, ‘Myth and history’, in Robert E. Bjork and Niles (eds), A Beowulf Handbook (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), pp. 220–1. 43 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The monsters and the critics’, in Christopher Tolkien (ed.), The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), p. 22; Christopher R. Fee, with David A. Leeming, Gods, Heroes, & Kings: The Battle for Mythic Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 20; John D. Niles, Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), p. 126; and Helen Damico, ‘Grendel’s reign of terror: from history to vernacular epic’, in Daniel Anlezark (ed.), Myths, Legends, and Heroes: Essays on Old Norse and Old English Literature in Honour of John McKinnell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 148–66. 44 See further Tim William Machan, ‘Snorri’s Edda, mythology, and Anglo-Saxon studies’, Modern Philology 113 (2016), 296–309. 45 J. R. R. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, sel. and ed. Humphrey Carpenter, with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 144. 46 C. S. Lewis, ‘A world for children’, TLS, 2 October 1937, 713; ‘Shorter notices’, The Times (London), 8 October 1937, 20. 47 Anne T. Eaton, ‘The classic tales of childhood: A journey through the timeless lands of the great storytellers’, New York Times Saturday Review of Books, 10 November 1940, 20; Frances Clarke Sayers, ‘Of memory and muchness’, The Horn Book Magazine, 20 (1944), 161. 48 Tom Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p. 5. The presumption of a specifically medieval English basis for Tolkien’s legendarium pervades recent criticism. See, for example, Tom.Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology, rev. edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003); Jane Chance (ed.), Tolkien and the Invention of Myth: A Reader (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004); and Stuart Lee and Elizabeth Solopova, The Keys of Middle-earth: Discovering Medieval Literature through the Fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). A recent review article of five books about Tolkien underscores this point. See Roz Kaveney, ‘An English mythology’, TLS, 24 February 2016, 9. 49 In the original, 1937 version, Gollum is less terror than amusing distraction, the ring is simply magical, and nothing is made of its larger implications for Middle-earth. ‘Riddles in the Dark’ was reworked as Tolkien was completing The Lord of the Rings and published with a new edition of The Hobbit in 1951, three years prior to the

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second novel’s appearance. On the revisions, see John Rateliff, The History of the Hobbit, rev. edn (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), pp. 153–97. 50 Tim William Machan (ed.), Vafþrúðnismál, 2nd edn (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2008), p. 69. A similar narrative occurs in in the thirteenth-century Icelandic Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks (The Saga of Hervar and Heithrek), where Odin (again in disguise) wagers his freedom on the successful outcome of a riddle contest. On the relations between Vafþrúðnismál and Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks, see Machan (ed.), Vafþrúðnismál, pp. 107–8. 51 Wawn, The Vikings and Victorians, pp. 44–5. 52 Jón Karl Helgason, ‘“We who cherish Njáls saga”: The Alþingi as literary patron’, and Jesse L. Byock, ‘Modern nationalism and the medieval sagas’, in Andrew Wawn (ed.), Northern Antiquity: The Post-medieval Reception of Edda and Saga (Enfield Lock: Hislarik Press, 1994), pp. 143–61 and pp. 163–87. 53 Extracts from Gylfyaginning appeared in Pigott’s 1839 Manual of Scandinavian Mythology; in 1842 George Dasent provided a translation of Gylfyaginning in its entirety (more or less), along with a small section of Skáldskaparmál (The Prose or Younger Edda Commonly Ascribed to Snorri Sturluson (Stockholm: Norstedt and Sons, 1842)); in 1847 a new translation of Gylfyaginning appeared in a reissue of Northern Antiquities and again a few years later in Rasmus Anderson’s The Younger Edda, Also Called Snorre’s Edda or the Prose Edda (Chicago: S.C. Griggs, 1880); Arthur Brodeur’s English translation of both Gylfyaginning and Skáldskaparmál was published as The Prose Edda (New York: American Scandinavian Foundation, 1916), and Jean Young’s rendering of the former alone likewise as The Prose Edda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964). The complete translation is Anthony Faulkes’s Edda (London: Dent, 1987), though all of Snorri’s work save Háttatal appears in Jesse L. Byock’s The Prose Edda (London: Penguin, 2005). See further Andrew Wawn, ‘Early literature of the North’, in Peter France and Kenneth Haynes (eds), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 4: 1790–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 274–85. 54 Morris, Journals of Travel in Iceland, pp. 99 and 154. 55 Coles, Summer Traveling in Iceland; and Leith, Peeps at Many Lands. 56 Baring-Gould, Iceland: Its Scenes and Sagas, pp. xiii and xiv. 57 Von Troil, Letters on Iceland, pp. 170–1. 58 Metcalfe, The Oxonian in Iceland; or, Notes of Travel in that Island in the Summer of 1860 (London: Longman, 1861), pp. 56–7. 59 William Whitla, ‘“Sympathetic Translation” and the “Scribe’s Capacity”: Morris’s calligraphy and the Icelandic sagas’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 10 (2001), 27–108. 60 Felce, William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas, pp. 114–17.

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61 William Morris, The Collected Works of William Morris, 24 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1910–15), vol. 7, p. 163; William Morris and Eiríkur Magnússon, The Story of the Ere-Dwellers, the Saga Library vol. 2 (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1892), p. 3. On Morris’s affected medieval language, see Karl Litzenberg, ‘The diction of William Morris: A discussion of his translations from the Old Norse with particular reference to his “Pseudo-English” vocabulary’, Arkiv för Nordisk Filologi 53 (1938), 327–63. On its relations to Morris’s more general (and evolving) social thought, see Marcus Waithe, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 71–116. 62 W. G. Collingwood, Thorstein of the Mere: A Saga of the Northmen in Lakeland (London: Arnold, 1895), pp. 112 and 147. 63 Dasent, The Story of Burnt Njal (1861; rpt London Abela, 2010), p. 258. 64 Vigfússon and Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale, vol. 1, p. cxv. 65 Pollmann, Memory in Early Modern Europe, pp. 61–71. 66 Ian Felce has argued that for Morris at least, the intention of the archaic language was quite the opposite: to demonstrate affinities between Norwegian and modern English. See ‘The Old Norse sagas and William Morris’s ideal of literal translation’, Review of English Studies 67 (2016), 220–36, and William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas, pp. 111–34. See his essay and book for further discussion of Victorian suspicion about ‘pseudo-Middle-English’, and also for consideration of Morris’s increasingly affected style. 67 Felce, William Morris and the Icelandic Sagas, p. 129. 68 Chandler, A Dream of Order, pp. 220–33.

6 Narrative, memory, meaning

By early June of 1941 the German–Italian Axis, still aligned with the Soviet Union, controlled virtually all of Europe, from Norway to Italy and from France to Poland. Although Great Britain had withstood the initial onslaught of German bombing, Nazi planes continued their harassment of shipping as well as city life, and, after the evacuation from Dunkirk the previous year, British ­military strategy had been largely defensive. With the involvement of the United States lying seven months in the future, Britain was the only free government actively resisting Axis expansion. For all of Winston Churchill’s rhetoric about fighting on the beaches and in the fields and streets, there seemed ample warrant for doubting that Britain could long endure against a regime that vigorously embraced its Germanic past, even as its ongoing war crimes gradually came to light. In Oxford, J. R. R. Tolkien was completing his sixteenth year as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford. The Hobbit had appeared nearly four years before, and Tolkien already was hard at work at what would become The Lord of the Rings. His day job required him to teach Old and Middle English as well as Old Norse, however, and, having done so for most of his adult life, Tolkien had not only unquestioned professional expertise in the areas but also, given the imaginative formation of Middle-earth, personal interest. Perhaps as a result, in this dismal time he paid particular attention to the Nazi rhetoric that evoked medieval Scandinavia. On 9 June Tolkien wrote a letter to his son Michael, who was then an Officer Cadet at Sandhurst, the Royal Military College. In it, he expresses outrage over what the Nazis had accomplished, especially their appropriation of putatively panGermanic values:

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I have spent most of my life, since I was your age, studying Germanic matters (in the general sense that includes England and Scandinavia). There is a great deal more force (and truth) than ignorant people imagine in the ‘Germanic’ ideal. I was much attracted by it as an undergraduate (when Hitler was, I suppose, dabbling in paint, and had not heard of it), in reaction against the ‘Classics’.

If Hitler is a dabbler in the arts, of course, Tolkien is professor of medieval literature, a position that entitles him to state that he knows ‘better than most what is the truth about this “Nordic” nonsense’. A veteran of the First World War who fictionalised some of his wartime experience in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien acknowledges ‘a burning private grudge’, although he focuses not on Nazi conquests or atrocities but, initially, on Hitler’s intelligence. Having already dismissed the ‘ignorant people’ who misunderstand the ‘“Germanic” ideal’ and the Nazi leader as one who dabbles in paint, Tolkien directs his ‘grudge’ ‘against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will)’. Sounding even more professorial, Tolkien then indicates that the real problem is not simply Hitler’s wilful ignorance but the fact that with it he is ‘Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light. Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler than in England, nor more early sanctified and Christianized.’1 The Nazis did indeed broadly embrace the medieval Scandinavian world. Partly filtered through Richard Wagner’s own appropriation of Norse myths and gods in Der Ring des Nibelungen, Nazi pageantry, symbolism, imagery, and rhetoric drew heavily on Norse traditions. As has often been pointed out, the prototypical Nazi soldier on propaganda posters – tall, thin, blond-haired, and blue-eyed – would be far more likely to march out of Norway or Sweden than anywhere in Germany. More generally, the notion of an ‘Aryan race’ identified an ethnic and racial entity that united the Germanic peoples, including those living in Scandinavia, against an array of hostile forces, much as in the Poetic Edda the gods of Asgard had united against the giants or Gunnar Gjukason had marshalled Burgundian resistance to the Huns. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS and one of the architects of the Holocaust, actively embraced the heroic

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and noble ideals that the historian Tacitus said had been lost among his fellow Roman citizens but remained as characteristically Germanic – and in the process gave rise to the notion of a pan-Germanic people. Before and during the Second World War, Himmler in fact had searched in vain to find the Codex Aesinas, thought to contain portions of the sole, lost medieval manuscript copy of Tacitus’s Germania (the Codex Hersfeldensis), even going so far, after the overthrow of Mussolini in 1943, as to send ­commandos into Italy to look for the book.2 In his letter to Michael, J. R. R. Tolkien objects to the line the Nazis drew from Odin and Sigurd to world war and the Holocaust still largely unknown in 1941. He objects to the Nazis’ perversion of Norse ideals as he understands them and adopts a superior posture to Hitler’s ‘intellectual stature’ that leaves the Nazis beneath intellectual contempt and the truth of his own views beyond question. Even so, Tolkien’s truths, like anyone else’s, necessarily reflect something of the context in which he discovered them. Elsewhere, indeed, he acknowledges that he came to his own understanding of the Middle Ages partly through the belletristic works of Morris and W. G. Collingwood. Their beliefs in the fundamental commensurability of medieval Britain and Scandinavia, their ­conviction in the indelible impact of the latter on the former, and even their literary style all imbue his scholarship as well as his fiction. Through them, as a result, much of what Tolkien expressed to Michael is deeply rooted in historical representations of the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages. The personalisation of his sentiments as a ‘private grudge’, for example, reproduces the intensely individualised responses of many earlier travellers to Scandinavia, while the notion of a fixed, true history that can be perverted and misapplied repeats the kinds of empirical stratagems that Hickes pursued, as well as the kinds of personal judgement that Wollstonecraft made. Also recalling seventeenth-century critics like Sammes and Stillingfleet, Tolkien collapses distinct groups of people into one ethnically defined Germanic tribe. As for someone like Whitelocke, this tribe became fundamentally Christian and, inspired as it was by a ‘northern spirit’, implicitly Protestant and distinct from the people of Catholic, southern Europe (even if Tolkien himself was a practising Catholic). The very certitude that this ‘northern spirit’ was the noblest and earliest ‘sanctified and Christianized’ in England motivated the many British travellers who described Norway and Iceland in order to develop a picture of Britain. By Tolkien’s

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account, further, the English descendants of this ancestral tribe have remained fundamentally Germanic, despite extensive intermingling with Celtic and Romance peoples, as well as (by the 1940s) those from around the globe. At the same time, it is worth considering the similarities between what Tolkien claims for himself and what he rejects in others. Indeed, if his ideas echo the sentiments that underwrote memories of the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages, they also share some qualities with the ones he reviles. One of the things that motivated Tacitus, and something of particular interest to Himmler and other Nazis, was a sense that Rome had become weak and debased. By imaginatively confederating a diverse group of tribes into the Germanic people, Tacitus could set them off as constitutionally different from the citizens of Rome. In effect, he imagined Germanic ethnicity and so allowed for the personalised projection of individual sentiment in group identity. Glorifying the Germanic people’s virtue, courage, and honour, further, dynamically enabled Tacitus to define the depravity of his own compatriots and so ­distinguish one group from the other. When Nazi rhetoric picked up on this distinction, it maintained the ethnic implications of northern versus southern Europe and collapsed imperial into Christian Rome – which is precisely what English critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had done. Tolkien’s definition of ‘Germanic matters’ in the ‘general sense that includes England and Scandinavia’ re-enacts the same kind of pan-Germanic ethnography pursued by both Nazi propagandists and early modern English critics like Sheringham. By ending in Britain rather than Germany, the descent from Germanic origins drawn by English ethnographers diverges in crucially important ways from that drawn by the Nazis. Yet those who drew the individual parallel descents shared the same genealogical methods and even incorporated some of the same details (such as the significance of Odin). It is worth recalling, indeed, that Tolkien openly acknowledges as much in his own appropriation of Scandinavia in the later letter (composed as he was completing The Lord of the Rings) that he wrote about his desire for an English mythology. His stories, he said, would speak ‘of our “air”’ or ‘the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe’.3 More narrowly, his characterisations of orcs as slant-eyed and of Gollum as hissing like Fagin in Dickens’s Oliver Twist reproduce prewar ethnic and racial stereotypes that Britain shared with Germany.4

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These parallels and overlaps take on particular force in light of Assmann’s description of historical memory as a situational process: ‘it is the result of a cultural process of construction and representation. This process is always guided by particular motives, expectations, hopes, and aims, each of which takes its form from the referential frame of the present.’5 As obviously ruinous, perverse, and even demonic as the Nazis’ practices and beliefs were, their use of Nordic imagery and ideas depends on many of the same kinds of historiographic manoeuvres and even some of the same tropes that I have traced in this book and that Tolkien himself used. However much the Nazis’ notions of world dominance differed from the aspirations of every English writer I have considered, both groups shared the strategy of incorporating a Nordic past in their cultural memories. What I have called a parallel descent from Germanic prehistory thus has unsettling epistemic implications. If memory is conditioned not only by what is being remembered but by who is doing the remembering, as Ricœur and Assmann maintain, then the process itself – the tropes it uses and the fact that it combines them – is in some ways subject-neutral. It is such malleability and reproducibility that would allow for the creation of competing views from the same recirculated images – totalitarianism as well as fantasy. These may be the qualities that give historical memory its greatest power. At least they did so for the memories of the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages. A usable past British scientists, linguists, historians, and travellers independently shared and circulated a host of tropes: of mountains, glaciers, waterfalls, animals, cities, farms, activities, historical events, stories, foods, customs, clothing, gods, and much more. Doing so, they remembered various and sometimes conflicting things about the Nordic region. They remembered it as a land of resources, wonders, and terror; its people as noble, decent, and primitive; and its languages as fundamentally like English but not worth learning. In these recollections, Scandinavia was a glorious, even sublime, place to visit, but a dreary and benighted region to inhabit. It had a wonderful landscape with a rewarding history that was squandered on an indolent and unpromising people. Developed as a mirror of medieval Britain, Scandinavia was also a photographic reverse image of the modern era.

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For the early modern period, the colonisation of first Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and then lands much farther afield in North America and the Pacific helped shaped Great Britain’s geographic and political status. The simultaneous discovery of Scandinavia, its history, and its people, I suggest, served much the same purpose. Indeed, the tropes I have considered essentially colonised the Nordic region, past and present, in ways that helped define Britain’s history, character, and mythology. Discovering their medieval past by these means, English writers, whether travellers, scientists, or poets, and whether writing learned criticism or gossipy travelogues, affirmed Britain’s contemporary exceptionalism as well. Scandinavia was a spectacle whose meaning contributed to the meaning of Britain, making it possible to see in it the dignity of the United Kingdom’s past and the desirability of its present. The significant impact that the medieval north has had on English literature, from the days of Gray and Blake through those of Morris and Collingwood to those of Tolkien and Auden, is thus only one aspect of this far more significant impact on cultural memory. As ‘that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler’ showed, not only can the same event be remembered differently but the same memory can serve different purposes. These competing memories are like the competing narratives of historiography in general. In Hayden White’s analysis, ‘events are real not because they occurred but because, first, they were remembered and, second, they are capable of finding a place in a chronologically ordered sequence’. Further, in ‘order to qualify as historical, an event must be susceptible to at least two narrations of its occurrence. Unless at least two versions of the same set of events can be imagined, there is no reason for the historian to take upon himself the authority of giving the true account of what really happened.’6 From this perspective, medieval Scandinavia became real to English writers in proportion to the number of differing accounts of its lands, languages, and people. Even with all its permutations, the Anglo-Scandinavian narrative that appears in the tropes I have traced in this book is in fact only one such account. Early medieval Augustinian historiography, which framed the vicissitudes of Viking raids as a part of God’s unfolding plan, is another account. And late medieval historiography, written at a time when the presence of Scandinavians did not require divine explanation, is yet another. In Robert of Gloucester’s late thirteenth-century Chronicle, the Norse, no longer the scourge of a wrathful God, have become simply brigands and thugs:

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þat luþer folc of denemarch robbede & slowe uaste, Chirchen and abbeys barnde & adoun caste Men leye vnbured to drawe, þat reuþe it was ynou. Þat feble folc to wildernesse & to wodes faste drou.7 [The wicked people of Denmark robbed and indiscriminately killed, and burnt and destroyed churches and abbeys. It was more than a pity that corpses lay unburied. The helpless people fled quickly to the woods and wilderness.]

By this formulation, Nordic people still might have incinerated churches or left the dead unburied, but they did so motivated less by the devil than by plain malice. Whether arising because the time of Viking raids was long past, or because Norse and Anglo-Saxon descendants had long intermingled, or even because the earliest influences of humanism narrowed critical focus to the world of earthly men and women, this is a much simpler way to remember the Norse than Alcuin’s and Wulfstan’s had been. Robert of Gloucester certainly does not deny the existence of God’s plan for Britain. But from his perspective, the Norse lack any particular significance in this plan. In the absence of that significance, the Anglo-Scandinavian cultural narrative of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries could arise. Imagining ethnic and social correspondences between Scandinavia and Britain competes with any inherited memory of Norse depravity, while framing visits to Scandinavia as opportunities to visit the medieval past reorients the direction of human history. In this imagining, the Middle Ages point no longer to Judgement Day and the end of Christian history but to the emergence of Great Britain as a global power, thereby affirming Koselleck’s view that the ‘concept of modernity, or of new history or new time, arose unexpectedly out of the formation of the concept of a “Middle Ages.”’.8 For its part, in its resistance to utilitarianism, materialism, and rationality, Victorian medievalism offered another competing history by rendering the Middle Ages a pastoral story told against the social dislocation caused by progress and the industrial revolution, and so in some ways a story that could be told only because of them.9 The truth of this narrative, in turn, has been challenged in Britain and beyond by more than Nazi propaganda. North American writers clearly did share many British viewpoints on the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages, employing many of the images and tropes I have discussed. Indeed, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82) was perhaps as ­fascinated

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by the medieval north as were his contemporaries Morris and W. G. Collingwood. Similarly, beginning in the nineteenth century North American as well as British universities actively cultivated ethnographic arguments about the British and Scandinavian peoples. The creations of the first academic department of Scandinavian Studies (at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) in 1875 and of a Readership in Scandinavian at Oxford for Vigfússon in 1884 confirmed the academic status of the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages on both sides of the Atlantic. Since then, this status has grown to the point that today most major research universities in the Englishspeaking world likely have at least one medieval specialist in Norse literature, often housed in the university’s English department.10 Further, what might be called an Anglophone industry of editing and translation has cultivated global interest in tales of the gods and heroes among not simply academic Anglophone audiences but popular ones as well. Indeed, through the proliferation of Nordicinspired fantasy literature, video games, comics, and films, the popular Anglophone audience for these tales has grown far more intensely than has the academic one.11 But North American writers also produced their own distinct, competing memories of Anglo-Scandinavian history. To Longfellow, for instance, the truth of the Norse narrative bypasses any connections between the modern British and the medieval Scandinavians. In place of regnal genealogies and migration myths, he uses imagery that stresses raw and starkly drawn emotional power of a kind that recalls Frithjof’s saga, a wildly popular ­pseudo-medieval poem of the early nineteenth century that was translated many times, including by the Robert Latham who wrote so much about Norway.12 ‘I am the God Thor’, begins one of Longfellow’s poems: I am the War God, I am the Thunderer Here in my Northland, My fastness and fortress, Reign I forever! Here amid icebergs Rule I the nations; This is my hammer, Miölner the mighty; Giants and sorcerers Cannot withstand it!13

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Not images of bread, brown cheese, and boiled lamb, then, but of giants, sorcerers, and Thor’s hammer. Even in Longfellow’s day this competing American memory was itself challenged by others. One such memory, employing many of the same tropes British ethnographers had used, essentially expanded arguments about the ethnic identity of British and Scandinavian peoples to include citizens of the United States. Boston resident Alan French (1870–1946), a translator and writer of medieval historical fiction and non-fiction, thus reproduced Sheringham’s use of ‘our’ (Latin ‘noster’) to collapse American, British, Nordic, and even German ethnicity by asserting that heroism in Njal’s Saga shows us our part-ancestor, the Norseman, as he was in his natural surroundings. We see his command of the sea, his habits on the land, his religion, both the old and the new, and his customs and laws. Because he was what he was, we are to-day, in part, what we are: for he represents, with slight differences, all the old nations of Teutonic stock, and in this picture of him the modern Scandinavian, Englishman, German, and native-born American can see the strength of the root from which they spring.14

This memory easily assumed a specifically racial cast when the origin of the United States and its population was imagined to be fundamentally white, northern European, and Protestant rather than southern European and Catholic, much less Native American or African. It was the Icelander Leif Eiriksson, then, and not the Italian Christopher Columbus, who increasingly was recollected to be the first European in North America.15 Another North American memory, also related to Leif, connected contemporary Scandinavian immigrants to the alleged actual presence of their medieval forebears by means of the mention, description, and sometimes depiction of objects understood to be Norse. Encouraged by Carl Christian Rafn’s 1837 Antiqvitates Americanæ, which claimed to identify Viking artefacts across the eastern seaboard of the United States, this memory of Norse visitors found its audience among the many nineteenth-century Scandinavian emigrants and its justification in the subsequent, wilful discovery of an abundance of alleged axes, carvings, mooring holes, and the like. Perhaps most famously, the Kensington Runestone claims to record that twenty-two ‘Northmen’ and eight ‘Goths’ visited Minnesota in 1362, an improbable (in fact, impossible) journey ‘far west’ of Vinland. Despite this impossibility, and, despite obvious

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linguistic and archaeological signs that point to a hoax, both popular and academic accounts of the discovery have proliferated, with the stone becoming, in effect, a trope in competing arguments about ethnic heritage, immigration, and national identity.16 This modern-day narrative of ethnic patrimony eventually competed with one that remembered Scandinavia as a region of louts and buffoons. Even as Nazi rhetoric embraced the profound and sacred significance of what it styled as its Germanic ancestry, that is, a wartime cartoon like ‘Donald Duck and the Golden Helmet’ mocked these ideas and the people who held them. Live-action Hollywood films like The Vikings and the recent Thor continue this cartoonish narrative, lacking even the emotional power that Longfellow described. In some versions of this narrative, medieval Scandinavia becomes simply a metonymy, something associated with earlier readings that can be used to craft new narratives that draw, in turn, on these readings rather than on any actual Norse materials. In the process, originally discordant memories produce memories that are even more discordant. Through its associations with the Nazis, for example, the Scandinavian Middle Ages can evoke violence and hostility, and with these associations underwrite heavy metal music as well as white supremacy – in effect, it becomes a trope for still more tropes. Through a connection to Tolkien and Middle-earth, the Scandinavian Middle Ages generates video games, fantasy literature, and rune-inscribed crystals.17 An easy response to narratives like these, one that would recall Tolkien’s response to the Nazis, would be to say that they have nothing to do with medieval Scandinavia, to call them improbable memories poorly supported by an assemblage of random details and leaps of imagination. Indeed, one of Rafn’s major pieces of evidence for a Viking presence in the United States (which he never visited in person) was the ‘Newport Tower’, a seventeenthcentury stone structure in Rhode Island that is impossible to attribute to the Norse if for no other reasons than that they did not build towers and that they rarely built anything in stone. But the ­empirical unreality of memories like these makes them no less real for those who hold them. The same historiographic gestures that fashioned Viking towers out of colonial windmills animates Hickes’s composition of linguistic genealogies, Morris’s making of his own medieval manuscripts, the forging of the Kensington Runestone, and, for that matter, identification of a noble northern spirit. Following White’s analysis, in fact, the more narratives there are, the more real any one of them might be. We ­obviously will not

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agree on which one is absolutely true: ethnographic commonality, noble northern spirit, Germanic ideal, Romantic heroism, grim determination, violent terror, or fanciful land of make-believe. But that unresolvability is what has sustained the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages and the tropes associated with it, from the end of the medieval period to the present. The fact that we continue to manufacture narratives to compete with one another, using many of the same tropes I have identified here, replicates the sense that Tolkien had about medieval Scandinavia – that if something can be ruined, perverted, and misapplied, it necessarily makes a claim to be real. To say this is not to question the motives or integrity of anyone who remembers or what they remember. It is to echo Ricœur and Assmann by avowing that memory is always crafted within some context. A century ago, in discussing which works might figure in a nascent canon of American literature, Van Wyck Brooks stressed this same invested character of memory. ‘What is important for us?’ he asked. ‘What, out of all the multifarious achievements and impulses and desires of the American literary mind, ought we elect to remember?’18 Brooks encapsulated this invested memory with the phrase ‘a usable past’, or a recovered past that allows for the creation of sense and practical value in the future as well as the present.19 In the case of the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages, medieval memories, crafted through modern experiences, have made possible pasts that could be used to fashion far more than simply literary or linguistic history. They are pasts that can be used to create cultural memory: ethnic identity, personal and social character, narratives of historical progress or decay, and affirmations of national and even international significance. Krakens In Great Britain of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, memory made this usable past – and the present that extended from it – out of the objects, people, events, and tropes that permeate British accounts of Scandinavia. And here I intend ‘made’ in two senses – the production of the narrative that rendered the past meaningful, but also the production of the very objects that enabled that narrative. For if the remembered past does not appear ready-made and value-free, neither do the artefacts of that past. Just as poems like the Battle of Maldon or Gray’s ‘The Fatal Sisters’ fashion events, people, and dialogue, so do

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editions like Percy’s Five Runic Pieces fashion a category of sublime medieval Scandinavian verse. By identifying shared ancestors and history Sheringham’s De Anglorum Gentis Origine Disceptatio manufactures a shared Anglo-Scandinavian ethnic identity, just as by positing linguistic relations among the various languages spoken by these ancestors Hickes’s Institutiones Grammaticæ produces a Germanic language family. Translations like those by Cottle and Dasent are objects that make some version of the medieval Nordic region accessible to those who cannot read Old Norse, while the medievalism novels of Morris and Collingwood fabricate new relics of the Middle Ages. It was the replication of all of these objects, by individuals chronologically and geographically unconnected to one another and in some cases (in Boym’s phrase) ‘institutionalized in national and provincial museums and urban memorials’, that produced the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages I have explored here.20 In many cases, some pre-existing thing – some poem, story, or artefact, but also meals, waterfalls, and animals – was transformed into another object or trope more meaningful for the construction of a usable Anglo-Scandinavian past.21 Hekla became the Hell mouth, mountains became the abodes of hulders (secretive forest creatures), and rocks became witnesses to the raw power of untamed nature. Animals in particular were susceptible to being remade in significant ways. The pig that joins the parsonage dinner in Landor’s account emblemises his disgust for Norwegian peasantry and evokes the same response from his readers. Seeing animals as symbols not of personal identity but of ethnic origins, Metcalfe avers that ‘One feature of Norwegian character, which some assert to be a remnant of their original Oriental descent, is their a­ffection for their horses’.22 For Martinière the danger and mystery of Scandinavia allegedly can be found in both the herds of polar bears that attack travellers and the elk that will travel anywhere their owners desire because they understand human speech.23 In the Anglo-Scandinavian context, bears in particular seemed capable of bearing symbolic weight, whether in early Norse stories (such as Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka (The Story of Audun the Man from the West Fjords) or Hrolfs saga Kraka (The Saga of Hrolf Kraki), in natural history accounts like Martinière’s, or in Landor’s narrative of the Norwegian pastor who surprises his British friends by not being a bear. But foremost of these meaningful if incredible animals, and the final trope I want to consider, is the kraken.

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Huge and threatening, krakens recall Homer’s Scylla and Charybdis, the Loch Ness Monster, and a host of other sea-­ creatures that appear in the mythologies and fiction of the world.24 Their prototype in Norse literature, the Midgard-serpent, features prominently in mythic battles with Thor in particular that suggest a continuous cosmic struggle between forces of chaos and order. In Hymiskviða (The Lay of Hymir), using an ox head for bait the god hooks the monster and brings it to the surface, while various accounts of the Ragnarok describe how in that final battle the god and the monster will fight each other to the death. Like the Midgard-serpent, krakens are described in various ways, sometimes serpent-like and sometimes more like enormous fish. One of the earliest and most detailed references to what is evidently a kraken comes from the thirteenth-century O ˛ rvar-Odds saga (The Saga of Arrow-Odd), in which the titular hero sails his ship between two mysterious rocks and later allows a group of his men to explore a third rock for water. When that island sinks from sight, taking the men with them, Odd’s precocious and newly encountered son Vignir explains: I’ll tell you about it: these were two sea-monsters, one called SeaReek, and the other Heather-Back. The Sea-Reek is the biggest monster in the whole ocean. It swallows men and ships, and whales too, and anything else around. It stays underwater for days, then it puts up its mouth and nostrils, and when it does, it never stays on the surface for less than one tide. Now that sound we sailed through was the space between its jaws, and its nostrils and lower jaw were the two rocks we saw in the sea. The island that sank was the Heather-Back.25

Although the word kraken is not used here, the creature clearly conveys all the randomness, horror, and mystery that came to be associated with krakens. Even the word itself is a little obscure. It presumably derives from the Old Norse noun kraki, which can refer to the dragging of something beneath the water and is related to (and semantically overlaps with) the verb kraka. The -n is the ordinary suffixed definite article of the Nordic languages, though its appearance in the English borrowing makes it part of the root.26 In any case, these same terrifying qualities appear in a creature described in the Old Norse Konungs skuggsjá (King’s Mirror) from about the same time. Framed as a father–son dialogue, Konungs skuggsjá speaks of many marvels, including mermen, before turning to an enormous and rarely seen fish (‘fiskur’). ‘In our ­language

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we generally call it sea-vapour [hafgufa]’, says the father, but he admits that none ever has been caught, alive or dead, and that the creature’s size is unknown. He speculates there may in fact be only two in the entire ocean, recalling both O ˛ rvar-Odds saga and the Odyssey. To eat, the ‘hafgufa’ gives out a great belch (‘ropa mikinn’), which produces food that attracts fish in the area. They eat unwittingly inside the creature’s mouth until the ‘hafgufa’ closes its jaws and consumes all the fish that themselves had been greedily (‘girntust’) feeding within them.27 The monster remained in the Scandinavian imagination past the Middle Ages. Olaus Magnus’s magnificent sixteenth-century Carta Marina is replete with imagery of krakens and other monsters. (See Figure 3.) On his futile trip to Greenland to find surviving Norse colonists, the Danish missionary Hans Egede (1686–1758) describes an encounter in 1734 with a ‘most dreadful Monster’ off the coast of Greenland: This Monster was so huge of Size that coming out of the Water, its Head reached as high as the Mast-Head; its Body was as bulky as the Ship, and three or four Times as long. It had a long pointed Snout, and spouted like a Whale-Fish; great broad Paws, and the Body seemed covered with Shell-Work, its Skin very rugged and uneven. The under Part of its Body was shaped like an enormous huge Serpent, and when it dived again under Water, it plunged backwards into the Sea, and so raised its Tail aloft, which seemed a whole Ship’s Length distant from the bulkiest Part of the Body.28

In the original Danish, Egede refers to the monster only as a ‘Bæst’ (beast),29 and it evidently was a Danish contemporary, Erich Pontoppidan (1698–1764), who gave the actual word kraken currency in his 1752 Förste Forsög paa Norges naturlige Historie. It was translations of both Egede’s and Pontoppidan’s books that brought kraken, word and idea, into English. And they did so, it should be noted, in the midst of the Anglo-Scandinavia historiographic memorialisations I have been considering in this book. Following a lengthy discussion of sea-monsters, Pontoppidan turns to ‘incontestibly the largest Sea-monster in the world; it is called Kraken, Kraxen, or, as some name it, Krabben’. He prefers the latter, since it ‘seems indeed best to agree with the description of this creature, which is round, flat, and full of arms, or branches’. In other words, Pontoppidan imagines the kraken as a kind of giant crab, although he, too, allows that the animal is largely unwitnessed and unknown. He has heard that fishermen sometimes rejoice to

Figure 3  Detail from Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina

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find a sea-bottom much shallower than expected, since it suggests that a kraken is lying on the bottom with an abundance of fish above it. When the bottom seems to rise the fishermen flee, and shortly afterwards the kraken sometimes partially emerges from the water. Its back is a mile and a half in circumference, but it ‘looks at first like a number of small islands, surrounded with something that floats and fluctuates like sea-weeds’. The kraken’s arms are big enough to pull the largest man-of-war to the bottom, and when the kraken sinks into the depths, it creates a whirlpool ‘that draws every thing down with it’. Pontoppidan continues with descriptions of the kraken’s slyness, of the discovery of a young kraken’s corpse, and of the disappearing islands of legend that actually were (he maintains) krakens. But Pontoppidan insists that the kraken ‘has never been known to do any great harm, except they have taken away the lives of those who consequently could not bring the tidings’.30 The ultimate trope of unknowability, krakens are real precisely because those who have seen them have not lived to tell what they saw. Whether or not the ‘name was first brought into general notice by Pontoppidan’, as the OED asserts,31 kraken certainly does occur with increasing frequency in English writing after that time. Hundreds of sources record the word in its heyday (1780–1880),32 though not always in creditable ways. William Guthrie’s 1770 A New Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar largely summarises earlier views of the kraken, but he adds that one was shot in 1756 and that ‘its existence [is] proved so strongly, as to put it out of all doubt’.33 In a later edition (1815) an editor backs off of the certitude expressed by Guthrie (who had died in 1770), putting these remarks into a footnote and prefacing them by saying that ‘it is not probable’ that sea-serpents or krakens ‘ever had existence’.34 And the ever-sceptical Wollstonecraft goes well beyond Guthrie’s editor: I almost forgot to tell you, that I did not leave Norway without making some inquiries after the monsters said to have been seen in the northern sea; but though I conversed with several captains, I could not meet with one who had ever heard any traditional description of them, much less had any ocular demonstration of their ­existence. Till the fact be better ascertained, I should think the account of them ought to be torn out of our Geographical Grammars.35

If krakens are a trope of unknowability, then, they are also a trope of unbelievability, and so embody the kinds of self-­contradiction that constrained so many images from an Anglo-Scandinavian

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cultural memory. Forty years after Wollstonecraft’s Letters, indeed, in his Scandinavian Sketches (1835), Breton shares none of Wollstonecraft’s scepticism when he uses Hymiskviða to substantiate contemporary kraken sightings.36 And in 1856, Metcalfe is at least willing to believe that a school of porpoises he sees off the Norwegian coast could be a kraken.37 Still later, in Tennyson’s melodramatic ‘The Kraken’, the beast sleeps dreamlessly, a cross between some primeval relic and the mark of the devil: There hath he lain for ages and will lie Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep, Until the latter fire shall heat the deep; Then once by man and angels to be seen, In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.38

With the droll phrase ‘release the kraken’, uttered in the 2010 blockbuster film Clash of the Titans, krakens became a fully formed modern meme, a circulating piece of popular culture. Appearing in films, books, video games, and Internet chatter, they no longer are things simply real or fictitious but rather phenomena whose meaning, rooted in their replication, remains open to individual uses. While all this may seem a long way from the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages, I see the trope as underscoring many of my argument’s major concerns. The detailed, unconnected accounts of krakens and their characteristics give substance to the unreal and produce truth through their contradictions. As White would have it, the greater the disagreements about the size, shape, and habits of the kraken – or as Tolkien might have it, the fact that krakens can be misdescribed – the stronger the implication that krakens exist. Such perspectives, in turn, sustain broader truths of ‘Geographical Grammars’ (in Wollstonecraft’s phrase) and of ‘man and angels’ (in Tennyson’s). Depending on who sees them and when, krakens can testify for the divine plan of Augustinian history, the mystery of nature, or the credulity of people. With their malleability of meanings extending from the Middle Ages to the modern world, krakens affirm not only the continuity of the past with the present but the power of memory to interpret and fashion culture. With memory as a way to develop national consciousness from imagined communities, especially in the early modern period, whether or not something ‘actually happened’ is immaterial. It happened if it is remembered.39 Tolkien notwithstanding, the meanings of medieval Scandinavia, the English Middle Ages, and the relations among

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them have been and remain unfixed. They have been situational, memories that were manufactured much as Morris manufactured books, and no less true for this. In the absence of historical English records comparable to the Poetic Edda and Snorri’s Prose Edda, in the absence of records to account for English exceptionalism, Nordic tropes offered inspiration and a means to fashion a usable medieval past. Providing a place, a people, and an ethnicity, this inspiration l­ikewise affirmed the importance of Great Britain and its role in global politics. Modern objections that the Æsir were not from Asia, that Old English is not Old Norse, or that particular memories ruin, pervert, and misapply a noble northern spirit therefore miss not only the cultural impact of such beliefs but the fact that modern scepticism, like Wollstonecraft’s scepticism of krakens, is itself a constructed memory in competition with other such memories. There may not be real krakens in the oceans, but that does not make them any less real as cultural icons, in the past or today. In the same way, Scandinavia may not really have been a time machine that allowed British travellers to visit their own past. But that realisation diminishes neither the cultural meanings and significances that arose from the tropes used to describe Scandinavia, nor the ability of these tropes to account for disconnected historical developments beyond those described by genealogy and intellectual history. All this may have been possible without medieval Nordic tropes, just as Nordic tropes might have led to a different view of the Middle Ages. But many of the traditions of Anglo-Scandinavian historiography depend on the particular past that has inspired them. We may write still more of what White calls competing narratives, and to an extent that is what I have done here. But they will compete with a memory whose impact and breadth make it as real as any memory can be, one so thickly drawn that its tropes, presumptions, and facts cannot easily be left behind. Indeed, any definition of the reality of the English Middle Ages cannot but evolve from what the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages came to mean.

Notes  1 Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, pp. 55–6.  2 On the grafting of racism on to Norse myths, see Heather O’Donoghue, From Asgard to Valhalla: The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 128–62; and Michael

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­ üller-Wille, ‘The political misuse of Scandinavian prehistory in the M years 1933–1945’, in Else Roesdahl and Preben Meulengracht Sørensen (ed.), The Waking of Angantyr: The Scandinavian Past in European Culture (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1996), pp. 156–75. On the conceptual influence of Tacitus’s conception of the Germanic on Nazism, see Christopher B. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s ‘Germania’ from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).  3 Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 144.  4 O’Donoghue, From Asgard to Valhalla, pp. 185–7.  5 Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, pp. 71–2.  6 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 20.  7 The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, ed. William Aldis Wright, lines 6086–9.  8 Koselleck, Futures Past, p. 160.  9 See Michael Alexander, Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 10 On the development of professional medieval studies in this period, see Haruko Momma, From Philology to English Studies: Language and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Niles, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901, pp. 220–64. 11 Martin Arnold, Thor: Myth to Marvel (London: Continuum, 2011); and Jón Karl Helgason, Echoes of Valhalla: The Afterlife of the Eddas and Sagas (London: Reaktion Books, 2017). On the connections between popular medievalism and professional medieval studies, see David Matthews, Medievalism: A Critical History (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015). 12 See further Wawn, ‘The cult of “Stalwart Frith-thjof” in Victorian Britain’, in Andrew Wawn (ed.), Northern Antiquity: The Postmedieval Reception of Edda and Saga (Enfield Lock: Hislarik Press, 1994), pp. 211–54. 13 Longfellow, ‘The Challenge of Thor’, in Poems and Other Writings, The Library of America (New York: Penguin, 2000), lines 1–12. See further Erik Ingvar Thurin, The American Discovery of the Norse: An Episode in Nineteenth-century American Literature (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999); and Geraldine Barnes, Viking America: The First Millennium (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001). 14 Alan French, Heroes of Iceland: Adapted from Dasent’s Translation of ‘The Story of Burnt Njal,’ the Great Icelandic Saga (Boston: Little, Brown, 1905), p. xxi. Also see Helgason, The Rewriting of Njáls Saga: Translation, Politics and Icelandic Sagas (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1999), pp. 65–79.

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15 See further Annette Kolodny, In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the AngloAmerican Anxiety of Discovery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 16 Harris Burkhalter, ‘Bothering the brains of the learned: NorwegianAmerican ethnic identity and perceptions of the Kensington Runestone in American popular culture’, in Terje Mikael Hasle Joranger and Harry T. Cleven (eds), Norwegian-American Essays 2014: Migrant Journeys: The Norwegian-American Experience in a Multicultural Context (Northfield: Norwegian-American Historical Association, 2014), pp. 145–72; and David M. Krueger, Myths of the Rune Stone: Viking Martyrs and the Birthplace of America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 17 See the various essays in Machan and Helgason (eds), From Iceland to the Americas: Vinland and Historical Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020). 18 Van Wyck Brooks, ‘On creating a usable past’, in Claire Sprague (ed.), Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years, rev. edn (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), p. 225. 19 Terry Eagleton has offered a contemporary version of this same idea: ‘Among other things, the point of fictionalising history is to reconfigure the facts in order to throw into relief what you take to be their underlying significance’: The Event of Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 116. 20 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. 15. 21 On the range of things (texts, objects, and artefacts) that could be remembered in the early modern period, see the essays in Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Müller, and Jasper van der Steen (eds), Memory before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 22 Metcalfe, The Oxonian in Norway, vol. 1, p. 50. 23 Martinière, A New Voyage into the Northern Countries, pp. 118–19 and 40. 24 A useful survey occurs in Richard Ellis, Monsters of the Sea (New York: Knopf, 1994). 25 Arrow-Odd, in Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards (trans.), Seven Viking Romances (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 86. 26 Jan de Vries, Altnordisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, 2nd edn (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1962), s.v. kraki. 27 Konungs skuggsjá: Speculum Regale, ed. Det Kongelige Nordiske Oldsriftselskab (Copenhagen: Thiele, 1920), pp. 38–9. 28 Hans Egede, A Description of Greenland (London: C. Hitch, 1745), pp. 87–9. 29 Hans Egede, Det gamle Grønlands nye perlustration, eller Naturelhistorie (Copenhagen: Groth, 1741), p. 48.

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30 Erik Pontoppidan, The Natural History of Norway, 2 vols (London: Linde, 1755), vol. 2, pp. 210–13. In the Danish original, the alternative names are spelled as they are in English: ‘Kraken, Kraxen … Krabben’ (Förste Forsög paa Norges naturlige Historie, 2 vols (Copenhagen: Lillie, 1752, 1753), vol. 2, p. 340). 31 OED, s.v. kraken. 32 This period shows the most frequent usage both in books.google and in google ngram. In the Corpus of Historical American English, examples cluster in the period 1830–60, and then drop to nearly zero prior to a contemporary resurgence. 33 William Guthrie, A New Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar; and Present State of the Several Kingdoms of the World (London: J. Knox, 1770), pp. 19–20. 34 William Guthrie, A New Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar; and Present State of the Several Kingdoms of the World, 2 vols (Philadelphia: Johnson and Warner, 1815), vol. 1, p. 82. 35 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, p. 90. 36 Breton, Scandinavian Sketches, p. 248. 37 Metcalfe, The Oxonian in Norway, vol. 1, pp. 103–6. 38 Tennyson, ‘The Kraken’, in Poems (London: Everyman, 2004), lines 11–15. 39 Pollmann, Memory in Early Modern Europe, pp. 93–118.

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Index

Ælfric 60, 105 De Falsis Diis 6, 54, 128 Grammar 6 Æsir see Old Norse Gods Alcuin 104, 151 Alfred the Great, King of England 5 Anderson, Johann 37 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 4, 9, 59, 75, 105 archaic style 135–7 Assmann, Jan 15, 46, 149, 155 Auden, W. H. 150 Auðunar þáttr vestfirzka; The Story of Audun the Man from the West Fjords 156 Babel, Tower of 55–7, 97 Balder 129 Bandmanna saga; The Saga of the Allies 135 Baring-Gould, Sabine 31–2, 39, 98, 100, 133 Battle of Brunanburh, The 9 Battle of Maldon, The 9, 120, 155 Bede, The Venerable 4, 56–7 Ecclesiastical History 59 Bennett’s English-Norwegian Phrasebook 39, 40, 125 Beowulf 10, 128–9, 131 Bergen 40, 78 Blake, William 150 Bonaparte, Napoleon 39, 77 Book of Common Prayer 103 Boorde, Andrew 12, 96 Borch, Ole 36 Boswell, James 37 Boym, Svetlana 111, 156 Brackmann, Rebecca 2

Brennu-Njáls saga; The Saga of Burnt Njal 44, 133, 136, 153 Breton, William Henry 30, 41–3, 98 Scandinavian Sketches 27, 161 Brooks, Van Wyck 155 Burke, Edmund A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 35 Burton, Richard 27, 31–2, 35, 41, 66–7, 96–7, 106–7, 116 Ultima Thule 27, 42 Byron, George Gordon 124 Cabot, John 7, 76 Camden, William 54 Carlyle, Thomas 19 Past and Present 80 Charles XI, King of Sweden 72 Chaucer, Geoffrey 7 Canterbury Tales, The 135 House of Fame 6 Pardoner’s Tale 6 Wife of Bath’s Tale 6 Christian II, King of Denmark 78 Christian IV, King of Denmark 78 Christian V, King of Denmark 44 Christina, Queen of Sweden 26, 126 Christiania 30–4, 40–1, 45, 125; see also Oslo Churchill, Sir Winston 145 Clarke, Daniel 30, 33, 41, 91, 122–3 Travels in Various Countries of Scandinavia 29 Clash of the Titans 161 Cnut the Great, King of Denmark and England 6, 10–11, 54, 76, 119

186 Codex Aesinas 147 Codex Hersfeldensis 53, 147 Codex Regius 6, 79, 131 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor ‘Kubla Khan’ 42, 50n.54 Coles, John 31, 90, 133 Summer Traveling in Iceland 27 Collingwood, R. G. 13, 137 Collingwood, W. G. 43–4, 137, 147, 150, 152, 156 A Pilgrimage to the Saga-steads of Iceland 134 Thorstein of Mere 92, 136 Columbus, Christopher 7, 76, 153 Copenhagen 30, 32, 39–40, 78, 89, 106, 131 shelling of 77, 101 Cottle, Joseph 127, 156 Coxe, William 32, 34 Danelaw, The 5–6, 11, 75, 92, 119–20 Dasent, George Webbe 127, 131, 136–7, 143n.53, 156 Davidson, H. R. Ellis Gods and Myths of Northern Europe 68 Davidson, Peter 28, 41, 115 Davis, Kathleen 15, 80, 89 De Varagine, Jacobus The Golden Legend 135 Dickens, Charles 106 Oliver Twist 148 Dillon, Arthur 30, 39, 123, 126 A Winter in Iceland and Lapland 100 Dufferin, Lord Frederick 126, 133 Edmund Ironside, King of England 10 Egede, Hans 38, 158 Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar; The Saga of Egil Bald-Grim’s Son 8–9, 120, 133, 135 Hofuðlausn; Head-ransom 9 Erik Bloodaxe Haraldsson 8 Erlingson, Bjarni 6 Erll, Astrid 1, 117 Ethelred II, King of England 5 Ethelstan, King of England 8 Ethelweard 9, 105 Chronicle 10

Index ethnic identity 55, 60, 153–5 ethnicity 1, 14, 51, 59, 68, 79, 117–18, 122, 128, 132, 138, 162 Anglo-Nordic; AngloScandinavian 56–7, 64, 77, 79, 95, 120, 127, 156 English 57, 63 Germanic 55, 147–8, 153 Nordic 61, 67 shared 16, 53–4, 64, 80, 87, 91, 96, 120, 123, 126–7, 133, 156 tropes of 65, 91 Eyrbyggja saga; The Saga of the People from Eyri 133, 135–6 Fabian, Johannes 89–90 Fabyan, Robert 106, 137 New Chronicles of England and France 3, 105 Felce, Ian 137 First Grammatical Treatise 120 Fjågesund, Peter 28, 108 Foucault, Michel 38 Frantzen, Allen 2 Frazer, James The Golden Bough 69 Frederick III, King of Denmark 78 French, Alan 153 Frey 68 Frigg 68 Frithjof’s saga 152 Gade, Kari Ellen 6 Gaimar, Geoffrei L’Estoire des Engleis; History of the English 11 Geysir 32, 36 Gil, Alexander Logonomia Anglica 54 Gjukason, Gunnar 146 Gray, Thomas 129, 132, 150 ‘The Fatal Sisters’ 136, 155 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar; The Saga of Grettir Asmund’s Son 135 Grimm, Jacob 67 Grundtvig, Nikolaj 19, 84n.48, 131 Nordens Mythologi eller SindbilledSprog 68–9 Nordens Mytologi eller Udsigt 68 Gudrun Osvif 134 Gunnar Hamundarson 43, 136 Gunnlaug Ormstunga 133

Index Gunnlaugs saga Ormstunga; The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent Tongue 5, 8–9, 120 Gustav I, King of Sweden; Gustav Eriksson 77 Gustav II, King of Sweden; Gustavus Adolphus 77, 79, 95 Guthrie, William A New Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar 160 Guthrum 5 Gylfaginning; The Deluding of Gylfi 129, 143n.53 Göransson, Johannes 72, 85n.56, 141n.38 Harald Bluetooth 78 Harald Hardrada 10 Háttatal; A Listing of Metres 129 Hávamál; Sayings of the High One 58 Havelok the Dane 11–12, 103, 120, 137 Hekla 28, 32, 35, 101, 156 Helgason, Jón Karl 127 Henderson, Ebenezer 38, 63, 83n.32 Henry II, King of England 57 Henry IV, King of England 77 Henry of Huntingdon 105 Hesiod 60 Hickes, George 17, 19, 121, 123, 137, 140n.13, 147, 154 Institutiones Grammaticæ 120, 156 Linguarum Veterum Septentrionalium Thesaurus 121 Higbald, Bishop of Lindisfarne 104 Himmler, Heinrich 146–8 Hitler, Adolf 146–7, 150 Hliðarendi 43 Holland, Henry 37, 43, 109, 123, 125 Homer 60, 157 Odyssey 25, 158 Hooker, William 41 Horrebow, Niels The Natural History of Iceland 37 Howitt, Mary; William; the Howitts 65, 80, 95, 111 Hrolfs saga Kraka; The Saga of Hrolf Kraki 156 Hundred Years War 10, 77 Hymiskviða; The Lay of Hymir 157, 161

187 Imlay, Gilbert 33–4 Ivar the Boneless 76 John of Worcester 105 Johnson, Dr Samuel 37 Johnstone, James Lodbrokar-Quida 121 Anecdotes of Olave the Black 121 Jordanes De Origine Actibusque Getarum 29 Jorgenson, Jorgen 101–2 Jónsson, Runólfur Recentissima Antiquissimæ Linguæ Septentrionalis Incunabula 131 Julius Caesar Commentarii de Bello Gallico 56 Kempe, Margery The Book of Margery Kempe 25–6 Kensington Runestone 153–4 King Horn 12 Konungs skuggsjá; King’s Mirror 157 Koselleck, Reinhart 3, 151 Laʒamon Brut 7 Lai de Haveloc; Lay of Haveloc 11 Laing, Samuel 19, 63, 65, 91–2, 123 Heimskringla 64, 116 Journal of a Residence in Norway 116 Landor, Edward 27–8, 30, 33, 41–3, 91, 96–8, 104, 106, 111, 124–6, 140n.28, 156 Adventures in the North of Europe 25 Landres Þáttr; The Story of Landres, The 6–7 Langhorne, Daniel 14, 19, 61, 127 Elenchus Antiquitatum Albionesium Brittanorum, Scotorum, Danorum, Anglosaxonum 56–7 Latham, R. G. 30, 94, 124, 152 Laxdæla saga; The Saga of the People from Laxdale 6, 133–4 Leif Eriksson 153 Leith, Mary 89, 109, 111, 133 Peeps at Many Lands 27 Lewis, C. S. 130 Libelle of English Policy 7

188 Ling, Per Henrik Eddornas Sinnesbildslära för Olärde Framställd 74 Loki 68 Lonely Planet travel guides 39 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 151–4 Lull, Ramón The Order of Chivalry 135 Luxdorph, B. W. Edda Sæmundar hinns fróda 131 Mackenzie, George 37, 63, 133 Travels in the Island of Iceland 93 McKinnell, John 127 McTurk, Rory 6 Magnus, Olaus 70–1, 81, 87, 93 Carta Marina 36, 158–9 Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus 36, 71, 81, 131 Magnusen, Finn; Finnur Magnússon 70, 74 Den Ældre Edda 69, 131 Eddalæren og dens Oprindelse 69 Magnússon, Eiríkur 81, 102–3, 135 Mallet, Paul-Henri 141n.38 Mandell, Peter 51 Mandeville, John The Travels of Sir John Mandeville 25–6 Margret I, Queen of Denmark 77 Martinière, Pierre 38, 90, 93, 96, 99, 100, 156 Voyage des Pais Septentrionaux 35–6 Marx, Karl Six Centuries of Work and Wages 138 meme 16–17, 104, 138, 161 memory act of 13, 33, 117 American 153 Anglo-Scandinavian 3, 87, 127–8 British 10, 57, 81, 155 constructed 162 cultural 14–16, 46, 51, 79–80, 106, 110, 116, 123, 127–8, 150, 155, 161 definition of 1, 14, 161 historical 12, 14, 137, 149 inherited 151

Index institutional 38 linguistic 120 Metcalfe, Frederic 19, 33, 37, 42–3, 122, 124, 134, 156, 161 Englishman and the Scandinavian, The 116 Oxonian in Thelemarken, The 116 Saxon and the Norseman, The 116 Molesworth, Robert 45, 95 An Account of Denmark 44 Morris, William 14, 17, 33, 36–7, 43–5, 89–90, 111, 123–5, 127, 133, 135–8, 144n.66, 147, 150, 152, 154, 156, 162 House of the Wolfings, The 135 Journals of Travels to Iceland 102, 107 Mussolini, Benito 147 nationalism 17, 115 Icelandic 131 Nazism; Nazis 53, 145–9, 151, 154, 162n.2 Newport Tower 154 Niles, John 2 The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 19 Nimrod 55 Njord 68 Noah 55–7, 72 sons of 82n.9 Nora, Pierre 14 Norman Conquest (1066) 2, 6, 8, 10, 52, 54–5, 57, 79 O’Donoghue, Heather 127 Odin; Woden 6, 57–65, 67–8, 70, 83n.32, 129–30, 135, 143n.50, 147–8 Odysseus 111 Ohthere; Óttarr 9 Olaf kvaran Sigtryggsson 12 Old Norse Gods; Æsir; Vanir 9, 58–9, 62, 67–8, 74, 101, 127–8, 146, 152 Olive and Landres 7 Orosius Historiae adversus Paganos 9 Orpheus 56–7 Oslo 30, 89; see also Christiania Orvar-Odds saga; The Saga of Arrow-Odd 157–8

Index Parker, Matthew 2 Percy, Thomas 19, 128–9, 138, 141n.40 Five Pieces of Runic Poetry 127, 156 Northern Antiquities 127, 131–4 Peringskiöld, Johann 74–5, 83n.15 Heimskringla: eller Snorre Sturlusons Nordlänske Konunga Sagor 72 Pigott, Grenville 63–4 Pitt, Moses 30 English Atlas 29, 101 Pliny Naturalis Historia 29 Poetic Edda 57, 67–9, 72, 74, 117–8, 127–8, 131–3, 135, 146, 162 Pollmann, Judith 52, 136 Pontoppidan, Erich 160 Förste Forsög paa Norges naturalige Historie 158 Poole, Russell 119 Powell, F. York Corpus Poeticum Boreale 136 Priam 68 race 29, 51–2, 55, 91, 97, 115 Aryan 146 British 102, 91 Nordic 67, 91 Scandinavian 63 Rafn, Carl Christian 154 Antiquitates Americanæ 153 Ragnars saga Loðbrókar; The Saga of Ragnar Shaggy-breeches 76 Rask, Rasmus Angelsaksisk Sproglære 131 Rastell, John Pastyme of People 106 Readman, Paul 50n.50, 107, 125 Repp, Þorleifur 103 Resen, Peder 67, 83n.32 Edda Islandorum; Edda of the Islanders 61, 127, 131 Reykjavík 31–2, 89, 101, 123 Ricœur, Paul 13, 81, 117, 149, 155 Rigney, Ann 1, 117 Robert of Gloucester 122, 151 Chronicle 7, 10–11, 150 Rollo; Göngu Hrólf 80 Rudbeck, Olaus 18, 71,74 Atlantica 72–3

189 Sammes, Aylett 14, 57, 60–2, 67, 77, 81, 87, 92, 120, 127, 147 Saxo Grammaticus 67, 71 Gesta Danorum 58 Sheringham, Robert 14, 19, 56, ­ 60–2, 67, 70, 75, 82n.9, 148, 153 De Anglorum Gentis Origine Disceptatio 55, 156 Sigurd the Volsung 147 Sigurðsson, Lárus ‘The Dream’ 27 Sir Orfeo 12 Skadi 6 Slingsby, William 35, 40–3, 50n.50, 50n.58, 64, 89, 91, 93, 107, 111, 125 Smyser, H. M. 6 Southey, Robert 127 Stefánsson, Jón 44, 134 Stillingfleet, Edward 62, 92, 120, 127, 147 Stockholm 31, 40, 72, 78, 89 Sturluson, Snorri 18, 59–62, 71–2, 83n.15 Heimskringla 70, 74, 92, 120, 129, 135 Prose Edda 6, 9, 57–8, 67–69, 72, 83n.32, 117–8, 127–9, 131–3, 162 Ynglinga saga; The Saga of the Ynglings 83n.15, 135, 137 Suhm, Peter Om Odin og den Hedniske Gudelære 68 Svein Forkbeard 75–6 Sveinsson, Brynjólfur 131 Symes, Ruth 108 Tacitus 53–4, 79, 132, 148 Annales 54 De Origine et Situ Germanorum; Germania 53, 55, 59, 97, 114, 147 Taylor, Paul Beekman 6 Tennyson, Alfred ‘The Kraken’ 161 Thirty Years’ War 79 Thompson, Carl 99 Thor 64, 101, 127, 152–4, 157 Thor (film) 154 Thordarson, Olaf Málskrúðsfræði; Third Grammatical Treatise 6, 139n.7

190 Tolkien, J. R. R. 14, 142n.49, ­ 145–50, 154–5, 161 Hobbit, The 129–30, 145 Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, The 136 Lord of the Rings, The 130, 145–6, 148 Tolkien, Michael 145, 147 Treharne, Elaine 2 Trollhätten 35, 41, 108 Tuisco 57 Turville-Petre, Thorlac 12 Ulysses 68 Uppsala 18, 58, 72 Vafþrúðnismál; The Lay of Vafthrudnir 58, 130, 143n.50 Vanir see Old Norse Gods Verstegan, Richard 55, 79 Restitution of Decayed Intelligence 127 Vigfússon, Guðbrandur 103, 136, 152 Viking Society for Northern Research 92 Vikings 9, 12–13, 15, 26, 54, 56, 64–6, 88, 93, 100 artefacts 153 moral character of 136 nostalgia for 80 raids 2, 10, 104–5, 119, 150–1 Vikings, The (film) 154 Vinje, Aasmund 103 A Norseman’s View of Britain and the British 102 Vinland 35, 153 sagas 133 Virgil Aeneid 25 Vǫlsunga Saga; The saga of the Volsungs 135 Vǫluspá; The Sybil’s Prophecy 58 Von Herder, Johann Gottfried 79, 118

Index Von Humboldt, Wilhelm 79, 118 Von Ranke, Leopold 14 Von Troil, Uno 39, 41, 93, 95–6, 126, 134 Letters from Iceland 33, 36–7 Wagner, Richard Der Ring des Nibelungen 146 Wawn, Andrew 80 White, Hayden 150, 154, 161–2 Whitelocke, Bulstrode 38, 95, 126, 147 Widsith 128–9 Wille, Hans 68 Udtog af den Nordiske Mythologie, eller Othins Gude-Lære; Precis of Northern Mythology, or Odin’s Doctrine 67 William of Malmesbury 105 William of Normandy, King of England 8, 10, 54 William of Orange 44, 95 Wise, Francis 60, 62 Wollstonecraft, Mary 16, 17, 33–6, 39, 41–2, 45, 94, 96–8, 103, ­ 106–8, 116, 124–6, 137, 147, 160–2 Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark 29, 33, 36, 107, 109 A Vindication of the Rights of Man 35, 107 Wordsworth, William 127 World War I; First World War 146 World War II; Second World War 147 Worm, Ole 74–5 Antiquitates Danicæ 131 Wulfstan 151 Sermo Lupi ad Anglos; Sermon of the Wolf to the English 54, 105 Yggdrasil 18, 58, 69, 72, 129; see also Olaus Rudbeck Þiðreks saga; Thidrek’s Saga 71