What is North?: Imagining the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day (North Atlantic World, 1) 9782503585024, 2503585027

Citation preview

What is North?

The North Atlantic World Land and Sea as Cultural Space, ad 400–1900

Volume 1 General Editor Alexandra Sanmark, University of the Highlands and Islands Editorial Board Kevin J. Edwards, University of Aberdeen Donna Heddle, University of the Highlands and Islands Andrew Jennings, University of the Highlands and Islands Natascha Mehler, German Maritime Museum

What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day

Edited by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle

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

© 2020, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2020/0095/161 ISBN 978-2-503-58502-4 eISBN 978-2-503-58503-1 DOI 10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.117646 Printed in the EU on acid-free paper.

Table of Contents

Introduction Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle

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‘Upon the Utmost Corners of the Warld’. Orkney in Early Maps and Literature Donna Heddle

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‘Beyond the Range of Human Exploration’. Cormac and the ‘North’ in the Seventh Century Oisín Plumb

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The Old North in Medieval Wales Marged Haycock

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The Future Is East. Ideological Mapping in the Vínland Sagas John Moffatt

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Moulding One Another. Grettir and the Landscape Eduardo Ramos

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The Worlds in Grímnismál. Norse and Medieval Christian Understandings of Space Vittorio Mattioli 113 The Literary Landscape of Old Norse Poetry Agneta Ney

129

Sámi Magic and Rituals from Historia Norwegie to Johannes Schefferus, c. 1150–1680 Ellen Alm and Rune Blix Hagen

153

On Solid Ground. Learning from the Lore of Imagined Lands Karin Murray-Bergquist

175

Maeshowe, Orkahaugr. The Names of Orkney’s Great Burial Mound as Nodes in a Heteroglossic Web of Meaning-Making Ragnhild Ljosland

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Rites, Runes, and Maeshowe. Northern Landscapes and Lived Belief Jay Johnston

211

Ballantyne ‘on the Rocks’. The Arctic as Adventure-Arena Jochen Petzold

227

Self-Images of Icelanders and their Attitude towards Greenland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson

245

Literary Encounters with the Arctic Landscape. Among Nordic Explorers and Trappers Henning Howlid Wærp

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Jessie Saxby and Viking Boys. Concepts of the North in Boys’ Own Fiction Lynn Powell

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‘Neath the Midnight Sun’. Imagining the Canadian North through School Readers Claire Smerdon

293

The Image of the North as the Home of Evil in English Children’s Books Anna Heiða Pálsdóttir  311 Northernity. Inventing the North in Fantasy Literature Jim Clarke

325

Narrating Norden. Legacies, Links, and Landscape and their Symbolic Significance for Nordic Identity and Community Read through Nordic Noir Crime Fiction John W. Dyce 353 Reinventing Agnes. The Role of Icelandic Landscape, Nature, and Seasons in Hannah Kent’s Speculative Biography Burial Rites Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir

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List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1. 1628 reconstruction by Petrus Bertius of the world map according to Pomponius Mela (c. 40 ad). Reproduced with the permission of Jim Siebold. 19 Figure 1.2. Ptolemy’s world map on a modified spherical projection. © The British Library Board Shelfmark IC. 9304. Reproduced with the permission of the British Library 21 Figure 1.3. Anglo Saxon Mappa Mundi, c. 1025–50. BL, Cotton MS Tiberius B. V., 56v. © The British Library Board. Reproduced with the permission of the British Library. 24 Figure 1.4. Untitled [Tabula Primae Europae]. Ptolemy: In the public domain. 27 Figure 1.5. Blaeu, Willem Janszoon, 1571–1638. Blaeu, Joan, 1596–1673. Orcadum et Schetlandiae Insularum accuratissima descriptio (Amsterdam: Blaeu, 1654). Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. 28 Figure 6.1. ‘Finnur Magnússon’s cosmological map of Norse mythology’, after Magnússon, Eddalaeren og dens Oprindelse, iii (Copenhagen, 1825), p. 340. 114 Figure 8.1. Sapmi — ‘The land of the Sámi’, black area illustrating ‘Sapmi’. Source: Wikimedia Commons, released into the public domain under a CCBY-SA 3.0 licence. 154 Figure 8.2. Shaman trance. Source: Johannes Schefferus Lapponia, NTNU Library. 156 Figure 8.3. Gand as an arrow (with bow and butt). In a manuscript written by a missionary in Trøndelag in 1723. Source: XA Qv. 374, NTNU Library. 158 Figure 8.4. A Sámi and a sailor dealing wind-knots. From Olaus Magnus, 1555. Source: NTNU Library. 159 Figure 8.5. Sámi idolatry. Source: Johannes Schefferus Lapponia, NTNU Library. 161 Figure 8.6. Johannes Schefferus’s book Lapponia. Source: NTNU Library. 163 Figure 8.7. The rune drum (‘Runebomme’). Source: Johannes Schefferus Lapponia, NTNU Library. 166 Figure 8.8. A gand tyre. Source: Johannes Schefferus Lapponia, NTNU Library. 168 Table 8.1. The numbers of convicted people in documented witch trials in the northern part of Norway (the present-day counties of Finnmark, Troms, and Nordland), 1593–1695. The numbers in parentheses show the number of death sentences. 169 Figure 13.1. Interior of a shepherd’s hut in Iceland, watercolour by Bayard Taylor from 1862. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC Digital ID, ppmsca 22887. 248

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Figure 13.2. Ingólfur Arnarson, the first settler of Iceland and his company, as they were introduced by the Danish painter Peter Raadsig in the middle of the nineteenth century. Courtesy of Reykjavík Art Museum. 250 Figure 13.3. Use of the term skraeling in Icelandic newspapers and magazines in the period 1840–2015. 255 Table 18.1. A concordance of ‘north*’ sample in The Worm Ouroboros. 336 Table 18.2. Collocates of ‘north*’ sample in the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard. 338 Table 18.3. Collocates of ‘north*’ sample in Titus Groan. 339 Table 18.4. Collocates of ‘north*’ sample in The Fellowship of the Ring. 341 Table 18.5. Concordance of ‘north*’ sample in A Wizard of Earthsea. 342 Table 18.6. Collocations of ‘north*’ sample in The Sword of Shannara. 343 Table 18.7. Collocations of ‘north*’ sample in Legend. 344 Table 18.8. Collocations of ‘north*’ sample in Northern Lights. 345 Table 18.9. Concordance analysis sample of A Game of Thrones. 347 Table 18.10. Collocations of ‘north*’ sample in The Name of the Wind. 348 Figure 18.11. Comparative density of appearance of ‘north*’ across the corpus. 349

Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle

Introduction

Pure ‘Northernness’ engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity […] and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this day before, long, long ago.1 C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

The geography of the ‘North Atlantic world’ is ideally suited to the fostering of a fascination of all things northern by its people. The British Isles, Scandinavia, Iceland, Greenland, and Eastern Canada, alongside many smaller islands, form a broken bridge across the northern extremities of the Atlantic Ocean. For the storytellers and writers of the past, each more northerly land was far enough away that it could seem fabulous and even otherworldly. Yet each was just close enough for myths and travellers’ tales to accrue. The long tradition of North Atlantic accounts of the North, from which C. S. Lewis’s vision of ‘Northernness’ emerged, was shaped by geography, politics, mythology, and Christianity. Echoes of these forces, and their impact on the North Atlantic world’s understanding of ‘the North’ are to be found throughout the discussions in this book. The concept for this volume emerged from the third International St Magnus Conference, which took place in Kirkwall on 14–16 April 2016. The theme of the conference was ‘Visualising the North’. Topics that were explored included ‘Inhabiting the North’ — examining the lives of established populations and new settlers and their strategies for survival; the vision of ‘northernness’ in early maps and literature; and physical, mythical, and literary landscapes of the North. The varied papers highlighted a number of key questions that need to be engaged with if we are to understand the place of the North in the psyche of the North Atlantic world. Does the North have any definable characteristics? Where is it located? Who, or what, lives there? These considerations, which all contributed to the overarching question ‘what

1 Lewis, Surprised by Joy, p. 74. What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 9–14 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120783

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is North?’, suggested a natural theme for this first volume of the Brepols series The North Atlantic World: Land and Sea as Cultural Space AD 400–1900, developed by the Institute for Northern Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands. Each of the papers here seeks to address these questions. They do so from many angles, considering numerous locations and an immense span of time. Several began life as papers presented at the conference. All are united by their engagement with the North Atlantic world’s relationship with the North. The wider field of studies on the North has seen some significant contributions in recent years. In 2004 Peter Davidson’s survey, which tracks global ideas of North in history and culture from antiquity to modern times, argued that ‘everyone carries their own idea of north within them’.2 Visions of North in Premodern Europe, edited by Dolly Jørgensen and Virginia Langum, is a collection of essays, published in 2018, which explore the North in Europe from ancient times to the eighteenth century.3 Robert Rix’s 2014 publication The Barbarian North in the Medieval Imagination focuses in particular on medieval views of the Scandinavian North from the Anglo-Saxon world.4 Peter Fjågesund’s The Dream of the North, also published in 2014, examines the role that a ‘sense of “northernness”’ played in the shaping of Northern European identity and politics from ancient times until 1920.5 This new volume seeks to contribute to this discourse by charting attitudes to the North in the North Atlantic world from the time of the earliest extant sources until modern times. This is a heterogeneous but culturally intertwined area. While the range of experiences of the North set out in the papers presented here is huge, the presence of repeated themes throughout the contributions is testament to the interrelationships of many communities in the North Atlantic world throughout their cultural history. However, it must be noted that the intertwined Celtic, AngloSaxon, and Norse milieu of the ‘North Atlantic world’ whose perspectives are the focus of this book were not the only peoples of the North Atlantic seaboard. Sámi, Inuit, and Canadian First Nation peoples all appear in the guise of ‘outsiders’ in the sources discussed here. The ‘othering’ of these peoples was a significant feature in the development of conceptions of the North in the North Atlantic world. One theme which emerges repeatedly in any survey of the North and ‘Northernness’ is that of hostility. The character of this hostility varies depending on the context of the portrayal. Often it is manifest in a harsh environment in which the untamed elements ravish a wild landscape. It is usually cold and often dark. However, it is not empty. In accounts as diverse as Icelandic sagas and nineteenth-century tales of Arctic explorers, the North is held to be the abode of barbarous or savage peoples, who, despite their resilience and often ingenious strategies for dealing with the elements, are considered immeasurably inferior in character and intellect to those hailing from the civilized South, wherever ‘South’ may be. Magic, often malevolent, is not uncommon. Its use



2 Davidson, The Idea of North, p. 22. 3 Jørgensen and Langum, Visions of North in Premodern Europe. 4 Rix, The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination. 5 Fjågesund, The Dream of the North, p. 13.

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both emphasizes the ungodliness of its practitioners and imperils the outsider, as is discussed here by Ellen Alm and Rune Blix Hagen, and Anna Heiða Pálsdóttir.6 Further still than the hostile human inhabitants, the non-human residents of the North pose threats to the unwary. Monsters and wild beasts of both the physical and the mythical realms await those who dare to push the limits of human exploration. Monstrous beasts of the physical realm considered in this volume include bears in the contribution of Eduardo Ramos, whales in Jochen Petzold’s chapter, and ‘tiny loathsome creatures’ which, though not easy to identify as a recognizable animal, are nonetheless portrayed as creatures entirely of the physical world, discussed by Oisín Plumb.7 More ‘legendary’ creatures are also a feature of the North in Ramos’s chapter, and in the contributions by Marged Haycock, Vittorio Mattioli, and Lynn Powell. Trolls, and their Shetland cousins the trows, are particularly ubiquitous, and have in some places become part of the identity of the North.8 Such a setting provides the ideal stage for the brave and noble to demonstrate their heroism. The northern ocean and its islands provide the perfect stage for a spiritual journey in medieval Irish literature. Such journeys could serve the purpose of both advancing the explorers’ relationship with God, and of fulfilling Christ’s instruction to spread the word of God to the periphery of the earth.9 Establishing new territories or trading routes is a further motivating factor for some who venture into the North. Karin Murray-Bergquist argues that in folklore surrounding the North there is often a ‘desire to claim, from the unknown, an amount of control or ownership’.10 Whether they are driven by a desire to spread the word of God, establish or consolidate new territories or settlements, or discover new routes for trade and transit, these adventurers bring with them the mark of civilization and order. They come as emissaries from the familiar to the unfamiliar, returning again to recount their tales to an audience who yearn for such adventure but are glad to be far removed from its perils. Though the adventurers represent civilized society, they nonetheless possess within themselves an element of the wild. The far-distant North entices this part of the protagonists’ character away from the comforts of civilization and allows an outlet for the more rugged and adventurous parts of their being to be explored. Here,

6 Alm and Hagen, ‘Sámi Magic and Rituals from Historia Norwegie to Johannes Schefferus, c. 1150–1680’, this volume; Anna Heiða Pálsdóttir, ‘The Image of the North as the Home of Evil in English Children’s Books’, this volume. 7 See in this volume the contributions by Ramos, ‘Moulding One Another: Grettir and the Landscape’, p. 105; Petzold, ‘Ballantyne “on the Rocks”: The Arctic as Adventure-Arena’, p. 230; Plumb, ‘“Beyond the Range of Human Exploration”: Cormac and the “North” in the Seventh Century’. 8 See in this volume Ramos, ‘Moulding One Another: Grettir and the Landscape’, pp. 96, 101–02; Haycock, ‘The Old North in Medieval Wales’, p. 61; Mattioli, ‘The Worlds in Grímnismál: Norse and Medieval Christian Understandings of Space’, p. 123; Powell, ‘Jessie Saxby and Viking Boys — Concepts of the North in Boys’ Own Fiction’, p. 280. 9 Murray-Bergquist, ‘On Solid Ground: Learning from the Lore of Imagined Lands’, p. 175, this volume; Plumb, ‘“Beyond the Range of Human Exploration”: Cormac and the “North” in the Seventh Century’, this volume. 10 See in this volume Moffatt, ‘The Future Is East: Ideological Mapping in the Vínland Sagas’, p. 71; Murray-Bergquist, ‘On Solid Ground: Learning from the Lore of Imagined Lands’, p. 186.

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the great test of one’s character is not mere survival, it is in the retention of civility and morality in the face of the robustness needed to endure. R. M. Ballantyne’s mid-nineteenth-century polar literature, discussed here by Petzold, casts a European camp as an ‘Arctic centre of civilization’.11 However, the North is a zone where the exemplary conduct of even the most heroic characters can be challenged. As John Moffatt argues in this volume, ‘the North into which the protagonists venture is a subjunctive adjacent space, a space of next steps where the social and ethical implications of settlement must be imagined and faced’.12 It is in facing such ethical challenges that one can succeed in conquering the North. Not all see the North as somewhere to be conquered. It can be a place where people go to lose themselves, far removed from the chaos of civilization. It is this latter, calmer, North, which features in Henning Howlid Wærp’s discussion of ‘Arctic pastoral’ literature.13 It can be a place of joy — sometimes achieved through heroic adventure, but at other times reached through a more spiritual and peaceable engagement with both the seen and unseen. At times the ancient grandeur of the landscape is seen as a bridge between the present and events of antiquity. Names of places and peoples can also function as a bridge to the events of the past, though their form and perceived meanings may change as a people’s understanding of the past evolves. The contributions by Ramos, Mattioli, Powell, Jay Johnston, Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir, Agneta Ney, and John W. Dyce all consider this interaction between landscape and the history of the North.14 Ragnhild Ljosland considers how the shifting interpretations of the names given to Maeshowe can reveal ‘not only how the mound itself has been understood over time, but also into how it connects with a wider narrative web of how people in the Victorian period understood and constructed “the Old North”’.15 Notwithstanding its more whimsical connotations, the North was often a tangible place that had to be engaged with politically. ‘May you possess the North’ was a wish expressed in medieval Welsh literature conveying a real, albeit increasingly unrealistic, hope for the reclamation of lost lands.16 The potentially jarring contrast between the tangibility and exoticism of the North could serve a useful purpose: holding the North

11 Petzold, ‘Ballantyne “on the Rocks”: The Arctic as Adventure-Arena’, p. 239, this volume. 12 Moffatt, ‘The Future Is East: Ideological Mapping in the Vínland Sagas’, p. 75, this volume. 13 Wærp, ‘Literary Encounters with the Arctic Landscape — Among Nordic Explorers and Trappers’, p. 262, this volume. 14 See this volume, contributions by Ramos, ‘Moulding One Another: Grettir and the Landscape’; Johnston, ‘Rites, Runes, and Maeshowe: Northern Landscapes and Lived Belief ’; Mattioli, ‘The Worlds in Grímnismál: Norse and Medieval Christian Understandings of Space’; Powell, ‘Jessie Saxby and Viking Boys — Concepts of the North in Boys’ Own Fiction’; Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir, ‘Reinventing Agnes: The Role of Icelandic Landscape, Nature, and Seasons in Hannah Kent’s Speculative Biography Burial Rites’; Ney, ‘The Literary Landscape of Old Norse Poetry’; Dyce, ‘Narrating Norden: Legacies, Links, and Landscape and their Symbolic Significance for Nordic Identity and Community Read through Nordic Noir Crime Fiction’. 15 Ljosland, ‘Maeshowe, Orkahaugr — The Names of Orkney’s Great Burial Mound as Nodes in a Heteroglossic Web of Meaning-Making’, p. 207, this volume. 16 Haycock, ‘The Old North in Medieval Wales’, p. 59, this volume.

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under real political or spiritual control was the ultimate expression of earthly power over nature. Orkney is one place where the concrete and fantastical have frequently collided in the popular imagination: ‘on the edge of civilizations, certainly, and barbarous at times, but always within the confines of the known world’.17 Orkney’s role as the place of juxtaposition of real and imagined norths is considered here by both Plumb and Donna Heddle.18 Although many of the characteristics attached to the North emerge repeatedly from ancient times to the present day, there is seldom agreement on where the North is located. Often, the North is considered to be ‘somewhere else’. Whether the reader agrees with Jim Clarke’s assertion that North is ‘A direction moreso than a destination’, it is certainly the case that the North is not a place that can be easily plotted on a map.19 In the North Atlantic world, it repeatedly competes with the West as the location of the furthest frontiers. In fact, there is often a relationship between North and West as places of ‘the edge’. This is particularly prevalent in medieval Irish narratives.20 Murray-Bergquist argues that, in the nineteenth century, a shift in emphasis took place from West to North as a place of strangeness as Western North America came to be increasingly settled by Europeans.21 North is sometimes a place apart — somewhere to be distanced from in order to assert one’s own respectability. Moffatt argues that even the Vinland sagas, the ultimate expression of Norse north-western exploration, emphasize the Christian Nordic world’s ‘close cultural and economic ties with an emergent Western European mainstream waiting back in the east’.22 Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson discusses the prominent role played by Greenland in the shaping of Icelandic identity in modern times — as a barbarous place to be contrasted to the thoroughly European Icelandic civilization.23 However, Icelandic attempts to distance itself from the wild North stands in stark contrast to other territories’ wholehearted embracing of northernness as an indispensable part of their identity. Powell’s contribution considers the manner in which one children’s author, Jessie Saxby, emphasizes ‘the strength of Shetland’s Norse past and its unique northern identity’ within her work.24 Claire Smerdon discusses how Northern landscapes as portrayed in school reading books in Canadian classrooms

17 Heddle, ‘“Upon the Utmost Corners of the Warld”: Orkney in Early Maps and Literature’, p. 18, this volume. 18 Heddle, ‘“Upon the Utmost Corners of the Warld”: Orkney in Early Maps and Literature’ and Plumb, ‘“Beyond the Range of Human Exploration”: Cormac and the “North” in the Seventh Century’, this volume. 19 Clarke, ‘Northernity: Inventing the North in Fantasy Literature’, p. 325, this volume. 20 See in this volume contributions by Murray-Bergquist, ‘On Solid Ground: Learning from the Lore of Imagined Lands’; Plumb, ‘“Beyond the Range of Human Exploration”: Cormac and the “North” in the Seventh Century’, p. 40. 21 Murray-Bergquist, ‘On Solid Ground: Learning from the Lore of Imagined Lands’, pp. 176–77, this volume. 22 Moffatt, ‘The Future Is East: Ideological Mapping in the Vínland Sagas’, p. 77, this volume. 23 Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson, ‘Self-Images of Icelanders and their Attitude towards Greenland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, this volume. 24 Powell, ‘Jessie Saxby and Viking Boys — Concepts of the North in Boys’ Own Fiction’, this volume.

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throughout much of the twentieth century helped to bestow a ‘distinctly Canadian identity’ on the texts.25 What is North? It will not come as a surprise that the contributions in this volume together provide a multitude of possible answers to this question. However, the many overlaps in each paper’s perspective are testament to the enduring links between times and places in the North Atlantic world, as well as to the significant place held by the North in the North Atlantic imagination. Whether it is a tangible place, or an ‘imaginary paradise’, the North is always there.26

Works Cited Primary Sources Lewis, C. S., Surprised by Joy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955) Secondary Works Davidson, Peter, The Idea of North (London: Reaktion, 2005) Fjågesund, Peter, The Dream of the North: A Cultural History to 1920, Studia Imagologica, 23 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014) Jørgensen, Dolly, and Virginia Langum, eds, Visions of North in Premodern Europe, Cursor Mundi, 31 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018) Rix, Robert W., The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination: Ethnicity, Legend, and Literature, Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion and Culture, 11 (Oxford: Routledge, 2015)

25 Smerdon, ‘Neath the Midnight Sun’: Imagining the Canadian North through School Readers’, p. 298, this volume. 26 Dyce, ‘Narrating Norden: Legacies, Links, and Landscape and their Symbolic Significance for Nordic Identity and Community Read through Nordic Noir Crime Fiction’, p. 374, this volume.

Donna Heddle

‘Upon the Utmost Corners of the Warld’1 Orkney in Early Maps and Literature

The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.2 Ursula K. Le Guin

Where Is Orkney in Reality — and in our Imagination? This paper postulates a theory of the liminal correlation between the depiction of Orkney in early maps and early literature — between factual and fictional representation. It will give an overview of the evolving physical forms and metaphysical symbolism of Orkney and its strategic context in the emerging landscape to the developing understanding of the science of cartography. Chronologically the direction of travel is from vague politically motivated maps and clear geographical literary reference — to the end of the world, for example — to maps which reflect more accurately Orkney’s actual location with a conversely more metaphysical description and significance found in the literature. The narrative moves from mainly geopolitical constructs to geopoetic ones.3 The exocentric metaphysical landscape of Orkney will be explored through analysis of extracts from works of non-fiction and writers such as Chaucer, William Fowler, and Alexander Pope. The paper will conclude by drawing some conclusions about the legacy of this symbolism with reference to Mary Shelley and Sir Walter Scott and the nature of Orkney’s historical location on a geographical and metaphysical level.

1 Fowler, ‘In Orknay’, l. 1. 2 Le Guin, ‘World Making’, p. 48. 3 Geopoetics is a school of thought founded by the Scottish poet Kenneth White that explores creative relationships with nature in order to reach a better understanding of the world we live in. Professor Donna Heddle, Director, Institute for Northern Studies, Head of Cultural Heritage, and Chair of the Tourism Group, University of the Highlands and Islands. Donna. [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 15–35 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120784

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History of Maps in Brief The usual way to find a location is to use a map. What are maps? Maps are for information and navigation pure and simple but they are also political constructs as well as spatial ones. Why make them? They symbolize man’s desire to give context to chaos and mystery, whether it be environmental or spiritual, and thus are some of the most significant as well as the most subjective of social documents. They are also an excellent means of the encapsulated communication of complex ideas but are also bounded by being a creator of locative identity at a particular time in a particular cultural context. As Jeremy Black notes, ‘The map [is] the creator and sustainer of images of national identity and shape’.4 Modern readers have a fixed concept of a map’s appearance and structure. If we look at the history of maps in general we can see that they can be in the form of wall paintings, three dimensional structures, and many other unfamiliar formats. One of the earliest maps was found in 1963 in Catal Hyük in Anatolia, near the modern Turkish capital, Ankara. It is a wall painting dating from about 6200 bc depicting the positions of the streets and houses of the town together with topographical and geological features such as the volcano close to the town. Early cartographical representations tended to concentrate on very local features. In Egypt geometry was used from very early times to help measure phenomena affecting the land such as the annual flooding of the Nile and to reconstruct land boundaries which had been there before the inundation. The oldest existing version of such a map is the Turin papyrus which dates from around 1300 bc. Early world maps are not geographically orientated, instead they reflect the religious belief of the time. A very early map in clay tablet form dating from around 600 bc has a very stylized form of Babylon at the centre indicated by a rectangle and the Euphrates river by vertical lines. The world is depicted as circular and surrounded by water which fits the Babylonian cosmic belief system, and indeed those of many civilizations including the Norse. This is already evidence of location being viewed in both a physical and metaphysical context. Mathematically based cartography on a large scale was the province of the Greeks. Ptolemy wrote his major work known as Geographia cosmographia, or Geographike hyphegesis, in about 140 ad. It is formatted in eight books, which attempt to map the known world giving coordinates for over eight thousand places in terms of what are essentially latitude and longitude. The maps make use of available data which is good for the Roman Empire but data for anywhere outside the Roman Empire is sketchy at best, despite Ptolemy’s excellent mathematical theories and astronomical observations, and indeed even portions of the Roman Empire itself are skewed. These are not maps based on personal experience or for practical navigation purposes.

4 Black, Maps and History, p. 146.

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The first volume deals with the basic principles and philosophy of cartography and covers the problem of map projection, or how to map the sphere onto the plane, along with two examples of such projections, and information on the construction of globes. Ptolemy identifies two distinct types of cartography, the first being world cartography which is ‘an imitation through drawing of the entire known part of the world together with the things which are, broadly speaking, connected with it’.5 The second type is regional cartography which differs from the first in being ‘an independent discipline [which] sets out the individual localities’.6 This definition of regional cartography is a key factor when one is looking at the metaphysical location as well as the geographical! Ptolemy therefore gave the world the shape we recognize today and his projection was pre-eminent for over a thousand years. European maps were very much defined by religious beliefs during the medieval period. The T-O map format was very common.7 These maps had Jerusalem at the centre and east orientated towards the map top. The expansion of the Viking Age and their explorations in the North Atlantic began to be incorporated into the prevailing world view in the twelfth century and we start to see more references to the Northern lands in general. Cartography in Arab countries and along the Mediterranean was more geographically orientated and thus is an extremely valuable source of mapping of the period. There was, of course, no general distribution as this is pre-incunabula and all maps were drawn and coloured by hand. The next great leap forward for cartography was the advent of published maps. Martin Waldseemüller, a key contributor to the developing science of cartography, produced what is generally thought to be the first modern atlas. The term ‘atlas’ was first used by Gerardus Mercator in c. 1578. Waldseemüller’s atlas was published in Strasbourg in 1513 and contained twenty-seven maps of the ancient world and twenty new maps created from more recent discoveries. It was the first to cover 360 degrees of longitude and to show the complete coast of Africa. He wrote on surveying and perspective, how to use globes, and how to produce maps with standard orientation. Modern maps have north at the top as standard practice, but early Christian maps had north at the top or an east–west projection while early Arabic/Muslim maps place south at the top. Therefore what we consider to be a map is very much a subjective construct detailing geographies of the mind, not geographical locations.

5 Ptolemy, Geographia cosmographia, ed. and trans. by Berggren, Lennart, and Jones, i.1 (p. 57). 6 Ptolemy, Geographia cosmographia, ed. and trans. by Berggren, Lennart, and Jones, i.1 (p. 57). 7 T and O map or O-T or T-O map (orbis terrarum, orb or circle of the lands; with the letter T inside an O), is a format of medieval world map, also known as a ‘Beatine map’ or a ‘Beatus map’ as a very early version of this sort of map is attributed to Beatus of Liébana, an eighth-century Spanish monk, who included it in the prologue to his twelve books of commentaries on the Apocalypse.

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Where Is Orkney? Taking all these factors above into account — where, in a very real sense, is Orkney in time and space? In a modern geographical sense, the location of Orkney is fixed and readily identifiable. The Orkney Islands lie off the northern coast of Scotland in a wild setting where the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean meet. They lie on a latitude of 59 degrees north, and are at their widest about thirty miles from east to west and at their longest fifty-three miles north to south. The total number of islands is more than seventy but this is difficult to verify as several are mere rocky outcrops or skerries. It is generally accepted that sixteen are inhabited.8 This northern archipelago covers an area of 974 square kilometres (376 square miles), with a coastline of approximately 570 miles. Orkney can be divided into three distinct areas — the Mainland, the North Isles, and the South Isles (some linked together by the Churchill Barriers). The population of Orkney is 21,349 (2011 census) with the highest population density in the main towns of Kirkwall and Stromness on the Mainland. These bald facts do not reflect the historical interpretation of Orkney’s location, however.

The Historical Interpretation of Orkney’s Location The interpretation of Orkney in maps and literature appears to be in a state of permanent disequilibrium. The written non-fictional references come before the maps or are concurrent with the earliest of them, but the written fictional references all come after Orkney’s geographical location is established through cartography, particularly that of Ptolemy. Perception is a key driver here. Islands that we absolutely know the dimensions of today were not fully mapped — numbers, shape, and orientation all fluctuate. Even nomenclature is open to debate. Orkney has always had a name of some sort, though. Island names have evolved — the principal island is now referred to as ‘Mainland’ which derives from the Old Norse name ‘meginland’ but the Norse originally called this island ‘Hrossey’ or ‘Horse Island’. The name ‘Pomona’ or ‘Pomonia’ (possibly after the Roman goddess of gardens) can be seen on maps occasionally (see Fig. 1.6 below) but has never been used by Orcadians. The early maps exhibit a lack of geographical certainty and are explicative in tone, as are the fictive and non-fictive literary references. Later on, when location is absolutely fixed, the metaphysical location becomes key. The Middle Ages was entranced by mythical lands and mysterious islands outside civilization. The interesting thing about Orkney is that it has never been a myth — on the edge of civilizations, certainly, and barbarous at times, but always within the confines of the known world. We do have the development of modern concepts of human articulation with a real



8 This can be hotly contested in an Orkney pub on a Saturday night. It seems we inhabitants are still scoping out the exact nature of the archipelago.

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or imagined environment and a sense of geographical wonder which we can factor into the interpretation of both fictive and non-fictive references. By 1541, the name ‘Orcades’ and fairly accurate specifics of up to sixty-five Orkney Islands were regularly appearing on globes, maps, and charts. These were in marked contrast to the very basic and inaccurate depictions of Scotland, Britain, and Europe at the time.

Orkney in Early Maps and Non-Fictional Literature Let’s look at where Orkney is portrayed in a selection of particularly well-known historical maps, moving from key world projections to more specific views of the islands themselves. The Roman cartographer Pomponius Mela’s projection dates from ad 40 (see Fig. 1.1). The archipelago in the top left-hand corner of Mela’s map is clearly marked ‘Orcades’ and consists of thirty islands all close together. This is the earliest surviving

Figure 1.1. 1628 reconstruction by Petrus Bertius of the world map according to Pomponius Mela (c. 40 aD). Reproduced with the permission of Jim Siebold.

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use of the term ‘Orcades’ on a map. There is a lack of detail but the fact that there are thirty islands depicted while larger neighbouring, easier to access, landmasses are far less detailed tells us something about the significance of Orkney in world geography terms at this time. This awareness of Orkney is reinforced by Pliny’s (ad 23–79) depiction of forty islands also known as ‘Orcades’. Pliny notes as follows ‘Among these there are the Orcades, forty in number, and situate within a short distance of each other, the seven islands called Acmodæ, the Hæbudes, thirty in number’.9 The Roman writer Tacitus, documenting the campaigns of his father-inlaw, the Roman general Agricola, from ad 80–85 states that after the defeat of the Picts at the Battle of Mons Graupius, Agricola despatched a force to sail around the northern tip of Britain. This expedition, which took place around 84 ad, saw the explorers experience favourable weather and return unscathed after having first found Orkney. This is unlikely to be factually accurate as little or no actual description is given and a certain amount of political ‘spindoctoring’ may be coming into play. According to Tacitus, ‘Round these coasts of remotest ocean the Roman fleet then for the first time sailed, ascertained that Britain is an island, and simultaneously discovered and conquered what are called the Orcades, islands hitherto unknown’.10 He then goes on to tell how the explorers sighted the island of Thule before being forced southwards by the onset of winter.11 Those waters, they say, are sluggish, and yield with difficulty to the oar, and are not even raised by the wind as other seas. The reason, I suppose, is that lands and mountains, which are the cause and origin of storms, are here comparatively rare, and also that the vast depths of that unbroken expanse are more slowly set in motion. But to investigate the nature of the ocean and the tides is no part of the present work, and many writers have discussed the subject. I would simply add, that nowhere has the sea a wider dominion, that it has many currents running in every direction, that it does not merely flow and ebb within the limits of the shore, but penetrates and winds far inland, and finds a home among hills and mountains as though in its own domain.12 Ptolemy was well aware of the existence of Orkney — see Fig. 1.2. He also produced an early depiction of Britain in about 140 ad (see Waldseeműller’s version of this at Fig. 1.4). Orkney is clearly marked in both his world and British depictions which says something about its significance as a marker of the end of the known world at any rate

9 Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, trans. by Bostock and Riley, iv.30. The reference to ‘Acmodæ’ may be a reference to Shetland; the ‘Hæbudes’ referred to are the Western Isles. 10 Tacitus, Complete Works of Tacitus, ed. by Bryant, chap. 10. 11 The position of Thule has been long debated but it is generally thought that the Roman seamen sighted Shetland. Some scholars believe Agricola actually reached and landed in Shetland. There are no references to Shetland as such in early maps. 12 Tacitus, Complete Works of Tacitus, ed. by Bryant, chap. 10.

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Figure 1.2. Ptolemy’s world map on a modified spherical projection. © The British Library Board Shelfmark IC. 9304. Reproduced with the permission of the British Library

and some islands are actually named on the British map — for example, he names ‘Ocetis’ which may be Eday, as is noted in Blaeu’s Atlas of 1654 (see extract below). Ptolemy used data from many of his predecessors, particularly Marinus of Tyre (fairly inaccurate) and the Roman geographer Diodorus Siculus, who was writing circa 56 bc. The earliest surviving mention of the Orkney Islands is in fact found in the accounts of Diodorus Siculus, who sought to record the then known world by bringing together a number of mariners’ accounts, notably that of the Greek Pytheas of Massilia, who is believed to have sailed around Britain in 325 bc and written an account of his travels entitled Concerning the Ocean. This account now only survives in quotes in later texts such as that of Ptolemy. It is therefore reasonable to identify the unmarked group of islands at the top left-hand corner of this world map as Orkney as no other Scottish islands are mentioned by Diodorus Siculus. Ptolemy used information from vague travellers’ reports but had to make estimates based on a number of unknown variables such as the difficulty of the terrain and how straight the route had been. His maps are therefore inaccurate in many ways but they are a considerable improvement in both detail and projection on earlier maps. They dominated world cartography and it would be hundreds of years before more accurate maps were drawn.

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Diodorus Siculus described Britain as a triangle with three named points — Cantium, Belerium, and, most northerly of all, a promontory called Orca — a place of wild seas. Britain is triangular in shape, very much as is Sicily, but its sides are not equal. This island stretches obliquely along the coast of Europe, and the point where it is least distant from the mainland, we are told, is the promontory which men call Cantium, and this is about one hundred stades from the land, at the place where the sea has its outlet, whereas the second promontory, known as Belerium, is said to be a voyage of four days from the mainland, and the last, writers tell us, extends out into the open sea and is named Orca.13 Orca is generally identified as Orkney, or Dunnet Head in Caithness which is the most northerly point of mainland Scotland. Dunnet Head is the more likely of the two identifications as Orkney is clearly visible from there across the Pentland Firth. This visibility from larger landmasses is crucial to its inherent political and geographical significance. The interpretations of these named headlands vary but, regardless of opinion, it shows an early mention of Orkney being used as a reference point. Orkney is clearly of great strategic importance at this time; possibly most importantly, Orkney is a visible endpoint of the known world, and as such, it figures on Ptolemy’s pre-eminent world projection. Having fixed Orkney’s actual geographical location at this early period, can we now map the metaphysic change in the perception of Orkney in literature from a place of violence and remoteness to one of order and peace through literature of the period, itself underpinned by greater geographical knowledge? More specific detail (marred by historical inaccuracies) is given in Camden’s ‘Orkney and Shetland’ description contained in Blaeu’s Atlas of Scotland of 1654, which incorporates a range of somewhat inaccurate quotes from classical sources: From the Hebrides to the north east, if you follow the coast, you will at length see the Orcades, now Orkneys, more or less 30 islands spread out over the intervening Ocean. An old parchment so calls them as if ‘Argat’, that is, as it understands, above the Getae: I should prefer, above Cat, for they lie opposite the Cath region of Scotland, which because of the promontory they now call Caith-ness; its inhabitants seem to be wrongly named by Ptolemy Carini instead of Catini. At the time of Solinus they were uninhabited and bristled with rush-like grasses; now however they have been cultivated, but without woods, and are sufficiently productive of barley and wheat, but totally lacking in trees. Pomonia, famous for the episcopal cathedral, is the principal among them; called by Solinus ‘long Pomona’ because of the long extent of daylight, today it is Mainland to the inhabitants, as if it were a continent, with the episcopal seat in the small town of Kirkwall; it is adorned with two castles. It produces tin and lead. Ocetis is also counted among them by Ptolemy, which we conjecture is now called Eday. But

13 Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, v.21, trans. by Oldfather iii, 153.

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whether I should say that Hoy is Pliny’s Dumna which is counted among them, I have not decided. Certainly if it is not, I should prefer to think that Dumna is Fair Isle, that is beautiful island, in which the only town is called Dumo[?], than with Becan[?] to think of Wardhuys in Lappland[?]. Julius Agricola, the first to circumnavigate Britain with his fleet, discovered the hitherto unknown Orkneys, and tamed them; far from Claudius having conquered them (as is stated in Jerome’s chronicles), in Hadrian’s time Juvenal wrote Why have we moved armies Beyond the shores of Ireland and the recently taken Orkneys and the Britons content with minimal night? And later when the Roman Empire in Britain was falling, they were the home of the Picts, not the Romans, and Claudian said poetically in jest ‘Drenched with routed Saxon blood were | The Orkneys’.14 Despite several early historical accounts, the forces of the Roman Empire never made it as far north as Orkney in any great numbers — if they ventured this far at all. However, the references to Orkney qua Orcades as the northernmost point of the Roman Empire firmly fix its physical location and its metaphysical location as the edge of civilization and of the known world for centuries to come. Orkney is the very edge of the known — as can be seen in the voyages of Cormac found in Adomnán’s Life of St Columba, probably written between 697 and 700, in which the first of three voyages is to recognizable civilization, the second is (noted in the quote below) to Orkney, the edge of civilization, and the third to the unknown and uncharted North. The extract also underlines that Orkney is clearly considered to be connected to the Pictish kingdoms of Scotland and is therefore part of a recognized social and political construct. The blessed man’s prophecy concerning the voyage of Cormac, grandson of Léthan. At another time, Cormac, a soldier of Christ of whom we have briefly related some few things in the first part of this book, attempted for the second time to seek a desert place in the ocean. After he had sailed away from the land, with full sails, over the limitless ocean, in those same days St Columba, while he was beyond the spine of Britain, charged King Brude, in the presence of the subject-king of the Orcades, saying: ‘Some of our people have recently gone out desiring to find a desert place in the sea that cannot be crossed. Earnestly charge this king, whose hostages are in your hand, that, if after long wanderings our people chance to land in the islands of the Orcades, nothing untoward shall happen to them within his territories’. The saint spoke thus, because he foreknew in the spirit that after some months this Cormac would come to the Orcades. And it did afterwards so happen. And because of the aforesaid commendation of the holy man, Cormac was delivered from imminent death in the Orcades.15

14 Irvine, Blaeu’s Orkneys and Schetland, p. 58. 15 Adomnán, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson, ii.42 (p. 167).

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Figure 1.3. Anglo Saxon Mappa Mundi, c. 1025–50. BL, Cotton MS Tiberius B. V., 56v. © The British Library Board. Reproduced with the permission of the British Library.

We also find reference to Orkney as the isles of the Picts in this quote from the ninth-century fragmentary manuscript known as the ‘Bern Chronicle’ (which is, as David Dumville notes, essentially a reproduction of Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica verse 24, with some additions and amendments):

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Anno ab incarnatione Domini lxvi Claudius secundus Romanorum Brittanias adiens, plurimam insule partem in deditionem recipit. Orcadas quoque insulas Pictorum romano adiecit imperio, atque inde Romam rediit. (In the 46th year from the incarnation of our Lord, Claudius was the second of the Romans to invade Britain, and a great part of the island surrendered to him. And he added the isles of Orkney, the isles of the Picts, to the Roman empire and from there he returned to Rome).16 This text was written by an English author and his addition of the Picts to the original quote from Bede reflects his opinion of the political status of Orkney. Orkney is clearly significant on the world stage and connected to Britannia. This map (Fig. 1.3) appears in a copy of a classical work on geography, the Latin version by Priscian of the Periegesis, that was among the manuscripts in the Cotton library (MS Tiberius B. V., fol. 56v), now in the British Library. The map was probably created in Canterbury based on a Roman model as it uses Roman province names. It does not follow the largely symbolic early medieval mapping tradition, but equally it is not based on the famous Ptolemaic coordinate system. East is at the top as we would expect, but Jerusalem is not in the centre, and the Garden of Eden is not depicted at all. The map is apportioned into the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, with the Mediterranean Sea in the centre. There is a considerable amount of detail given — for example all the waterways of Africa, not just the religiously significant Red Sea, are clearly indicated in red, with mountain ranges in green. Britain is depicted in considerable and relatively accurate detail as we might expect from an Anglo-Saxon map and appears as one island, which was unusual in the medieval period. There is an oversized Cornish promontory, with the Isle of Man, Mona (Anglesey), Ireland, and a plethora of Scottish islands all indicated. London and Winchester are represented as town buildings, and the river Thames and another river clearly pictured. The Orkney Islands can be clearly identified sitting in the bottom left-hand corner of the map. The prominence given to Orkney — equal in size to Britain — clearly indicates a political agenda which underlines the significance of the islands — backed up by entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. For example, the only entry for ad 46 is regarding Orkney: This year, Claudius, the second of the Roman Emperors who invaded Britain, took the greater part of the island into his power, and added the Orkneys to the dominion of the Romans. This was in the 4th year of his reign.17 This would reflect the fact that the Orkney jarldom would have been at the zenith of its influence at this time, which is of course backed up later on by the Orkneyinga Saga.

16 Dumville, ‘A Note on the Picts in Orkney’, p. 266; trans. by Heddle. 17 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. by Ulwencreutz, p. 38.

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Orkney in Early Maps and Fictional Literature Early cartography, with its sense of an East–West projection, clearly influences the geographical placing of Orkney, as can be seen in the following quote from Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Criseyde’. That Grekes been of heigh condicioun, I woot eek wel; but certein, men shal finde As worthy folk with-inne Troye toun, As conning, and as parfit and as kinde, As been bitwixen Orcades and Inde. And that ye coude wel your lady serve, I trowe eek wel, hir thank for to deserve.18 971 Orkades and Inde; the Orkneys and India, the western and eastern limits of the world And allied to this a perception of location based on proximity to a larger neighbour as seen in the following quote from chapter 5 of Orkneyinga Saga Readily these noble people Will obey thee as thy subjects. Use your power with moderation; Hjaltlanders! your fame is well known. Till we had thee, fierce in battle, To these eastern shores, there was not Any prince on earth who conquered Those far distant western islands19 Martin Waldseeműller’s seminal cartography redefined Orkney’s place in the world. As previously noted, his 1513 edition of ancient and modern maps based on Ptolemy’s Geographia was the first to be known as an atlas, and he reinforces the northerly location of Orkney in both world and area specific maps. His map of Britain from 1520 was the first modern map to be added to the Geographia This map (Fig. 1.4) is a map of part of the world, not a whole world projection. Waldseemüller gives a fairly accurate representation of Orkney in his map of Britain, based on the Ptolemaic projection. It is far more accurate than the representation of the British mainland. Again, although Scotland lies on an east–west Ptolemaic orientation, Orkney is the most northerly point given, and is placed in the top right-hand corner of the map. We can see this move from a westerly marker of civilization to a northerly extremity reflected in the sonnet by William Fowler (1560–1612) below, in which the Pathetic Fallacy gets an early airing in his depiction of equinoctial storms, and Orkney is given both a westerly and a northerly orientation but is still within the borders of the known world. 18 Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, ed. by Benson, v: ll. 967–73. 19 The Orkneyinga saga, ed. by Anderson, p. 16.

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Figure 1.4. Untitled [Tabula Primae Europae]. Ptolemy: In the public domain.

Sonet: In Orknay UPON the utmost corners of the warld, and on the borders of this massive round, Quhaire fates and fortoune hither hes me harld, I doe deplore my greiffs upon this ground; and seing roring seis from rocks rebound by ebbs and streames of contrair routing tyds, and phebus chariot in their wawes ly dround, quha equallye now night and day divyds, I cal to mynde the storms my thoughts abyde, Which ever wax and never dois decress, for nights of dole dayes joys ay ever hyds, And in their vayle doith al my weill suppress: So this I see, quhaire ever I remove, I change bot sees, bot can not chainge my love.20

20 Fowler, In Orknay, p. 260.

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Figure 1.5. Blaeu, Willem Janszoon, 1571–1638. Blaeu, Joan, 1596–1673. Orcadum et Schetlandiae Insularum accuratissima descriptio (Amsterdam: Blaeu, 1654). Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

Blaeu’s depiction (Fig. 1.5) narrows down the geographical focus still further and looks somewhat similar to the Orkney that we see on the map today. There are still noticeable inaccuracies, however. Greater specificity does not necessarily lead to greater accuracy. This is of course a map of the Orkney and Shetland Islands, not a world projection. Buchanan’s ‘Orkneys’ description contained in the Blaeu Atlas of 1654 shows a surprising move from the othered savages of earlier descriptions to peaceable churchgoers and an interest in the people as well as the location! In their daily life the common people, especially in the countryside, still retain much of the old parsimony. And so they enjoy great and almost continuous health of mind and body; diseases are rare among them, and many die weakened only by old age. Ignorance of luxuries, deriving from honourable poverty, does more among them to safeguard health or to restore it if lost, than does the art of physicians (of whom they have none) among other peoples. Most have a quite intelligent nature, capable of learning any skill or discipline; many are distinguished by a tenacious memory, an elegance of form, and a tallness of stature, cheerful in countenance, strong and spirited, and they display strength and a fearless spirit for fighting privately or publicly, when the occasion presents itself. They

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are themselves acute speakers according to their education, or avid listeners to and retailers of what is put forward acutely by others. They either express or try to express the humanity and civility which they have taken from Scots who live among them. Even the country people listen carefully to sermons, and by mutual repetition of what has been heard recall them to mind in a surprising manner.21 Our later cartographers had changed their minds on Orcadians in accordance with Renaissance and humanist principles. Orkney’s tenure as the most northerly inhabited point of reference was eroded as navigation improved. We see Thule (previously occasionally mentioned if not mapped) appearing on maps in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Literature reflects this new awareness of relative rather than ultimate location, for example in this extract from Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, Epistle II. Ask where’s the North? At York’t is on the Tweed; In Scotland at the Orcades; and there, At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where.22 The concept of Orkney as the northern limit of Scotland is reinforced by Robert Burns in ‘Caledonia, A Ballad’ (1789). There was once a time, but old Time was then young, That brave Caledonia, the chief of her line, From some of your northern deities sprung, (Who knows not that brave Caledonia’s divine?) From Tweed to the Orcades was her domain.23 Orkney was no longer the northerly limit of the civilized world. This reflects the general sea change in cosmic perception in the seventeenth century. Orkney becomes a powerful metaphysical presence because its geographical location was now firmly established — it is not where it is, but what it is that counts.

The Locative Legacy In his studies on the spiritual crisis and revolution of the seventeenth century (From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe) Alexander Koyré explores the concept of moving from a world view that is fixed to one which encompasses a universe of infinite time and space. This new cosmology set aside the geocentric world of the Greek — the original kosmos — and the humanity-orientated world of the Middle Ages, replacing them with a decentred world of practical modernity, i.e. the move is from man as the centre of the universe to man in his place in the universe. This fundamental transformation had many consequences, the most significant of 21 Irvine, Blaeu’s Orkneys and Schetland, p. 56. 22 Pope, Essay on Man and Other Poems, epistle 2, v, ll. 6–8. 23 Burns, The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, p. 246, ll. 1–5.

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which were the replacement of the philosophy of cartography with the practical implementation of its principles, and the rise of modern subjectivity, which brought with it a new awareness of humanity’s relationship with the world, leading to the rise of Romanticism. Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. Nostalgia, a passionate involvement with nature, and nature reflecting the state of man all have a place in Romantic literature. The Romantic landscape is closely allied to man’s inner consciousness — as well as inculcating a sense of the sublime in the viewer. The Romantic ideal is therefore a movement from the qualifying merits of exact geographical location to the vagaries of the inner metaphysical landscape. Orkney serves as something of a literary microcosm in this Romantic context — albeit both in a negative and a positive Romantic sense.

The Negative View The key revelatory scene in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) takes place on an Orkney island which clearly represents the state of mind of Victor Frankenstein. We are given a detailed description of how to get there and an accurate reading of Orkney’s locale — but geographical location is not the primary significator. Having mentally and physically cut himself off from the civilized society exemplified in his own mind by the landlocked and sublime landscape of his native Switzerland, the uncongenial environs of this land apart mirror the storm-tossed landscape of his soul, which is a windswept desert. Having parted from my friend, I determined to visit some remote spot of Scotland, and finish my work in solitude. I did not doubt but that the monster followed me, and would discover himself to me when I should have finished, that he might receive his companion. With this resolution I traversed the northern highlands, and fixed on one of the remotest of the Orkneys as the scene of my labours. It was a place fitted for such a work, being hardly more than a rock, whose high sides were continually beaten upon by the waves. The soil was barren, scarcely affording pasture for a few miserable cows, and oatmeal for its inhabitants, which consisted of five persons, whose gaunt and scraggy limbs gave tokens of their miserable fare. Vegetables and bread, when they indulged in such luxuries, and even fresh water, was to be procured from the main land, which was about five miles distant. On the whole island there were but three miserable huts, and one of these was vacant when I arrived. This I hired. It contained but two rooms, and these exhibited all the squalidness of the most miserable penury. The thatch had fallen

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in, the walls were unplastered, and the door was off its hinges. I ordered it to be repaired, bought some furniture, and took possession; an incident which would, doubtless, have occasioned some surprise, had not all the senses of the cottagers been benumbed by want and squalid poverty. As it was, I lived ungazed at and unmolested, hardly thanked for the pittance of food and clothes which I gave; so much does suffering blunt even the coarsest sensations of men. In this retreat I devoted the morning to labour; but in the evening, when the weather permitted, I walked on the stony beach of the sea, to listen to the waves as they roared, and dashed at my feet. It was a monotonous, yet ever-changing scene. I thought of Switzerland; it was far different from this desolate and appalling landscape. Its hills are covered with vines, and its cottages are scattered thickly in the plains. Its fair lakes reflect a blue and gentle sky; and, when troubled by the winds, their tumult is but as the play of a lively infant, when compared to the roarings of the giant ocean.24 Orkney in this context also marks the importance of polar exploration in the 1800s as Victor Frankenstein moves from Orkney to the Arctic for the dénouement of the novel. Orkney was often the last stage on the sea journey north where fresh water was taken on in Stromness. Even in Frankenstein’s outcast state, Orkney is still not the end of the world.

The Positive View We cannot write about the creation of locative identity without saluting the master of Romanticism. When we study the works of Sir Walter Scott, we are aware of the underlying dichotomy of the influences of Romanticism and the Enlightenment. We also have to be aware of historicity — the historic quality or character contained in a text as opposed to the legendary or fictitious. This is a quality continually exploited by Sir Walter Scott in an effort to imbue his works of fiction with a gloss of historical fact. As befits a Scot of his time, who considered himself both a Scot and a North Briton; a closet Jacobite and an open Hanoverian; a practical man and a dreamer; a man of law and a man of action, Sir Walter Scott’s attitude to the history of his own country was rather mixed. He regretted the turbulent days of its recent independent past, as a committed Romantic figure should; but at the same time he admired, in good Enlightenment fashion, the peace and prosperity enjoyed by Scotland as a result of her union with England in 1707 and the strength of the Hanoverian succession. This view of history led to a conflict in his historical writing which is generally resolved through the triumph of law and order over anarchy; of the will over emotion; and a reinvention of Scotland’s past history. Scott is the great Scottish reinventor of the nineteenth century. He is also the great reinventor of Orkney.

24 Shelley, Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus, pp. 174–75.

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Sir Walter was only the second (after Fowler) of our featured writers to actually visit Orkney. His novel The Pirate (1821) was a huge national and international success. It tapped into a nineteenth-century zeitgeist of reinventing the Viking Age into one of nobility and heroism, involving valiant seafarers and doughty farmers alike. It reinforced the prevailing narrative of the Norse origin of the Northern Isles which was fostered by local literary notables at the time. It is however, Canto Sixth of The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805)25 that best exemplifies and sets the groundwork for the Viking imagery Scott sought to promote, mixing lofty heroics and genealogy with a liberal dusting of the supposed pagan savagery of the early history of the Orkney Islands and the Scottish St Clair connection of more recent times. Orkney is once again placed in the locative context of the known world. The quote below underlines Orkney’s physical separation by water from Scotland but yet underlines the political and historical links — very much in tune with Scott’s view of Scotland as a whole defined in terms of a larger neighbour. Scott therefore reinforces the prevailing Norse narrative26 created in the nineteenth century and places the metaphysical location of Orkney squarely between Scotland and Scandinavia where it remains in the modern era. Then from his seat, with lofty air, Rose Harold, bard of brave St Clair; St Clair, who, feasting high at Home, Had with that lord to battle come. Harold was born where restless seas Howl round the storm-swept Orcades; Where erst St Clairs held princely sway O’er isle and islet, strait and bay; – Still nods their palace to its fall, Thy pride and sorrow, fair Kirkwall! Thence of the mark’d fierce Pentland rave, As if grim Odin rode her wave: And watch’d the while, with visage pale, And throbbing heart, the struggling sail; For all of wonderful and wild Had rapture for the lonely child. And much of wild and wonderful In these rude isles might fancy cull; For thither came, in times afar, Stern Lochlin’s sons of roving War. The Norsemen, train’d to spoil and blood,

25 This, his first major poem, was a tour de force of its time and its influence was profound. It catapulted Scott to international success. 26 Orkney’s Neolithic past does not seem to have found favour with pre-twentieth-century writers. The narrative is very much focused on the Norse history.

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Skill’d to prepare the raven’s food; Kings of the main their leaders brave, Their barks the dragons of the wave. And there in many a stormy vale, The Scald had told his wondrous tale, And many a Runic column high Had witness’d grim idolatry. And thus had Harold in his youth Learn’d many a Saga’s rhyme uncouthOf that Sea-Snake, tremendous curl’d, Whose monstrous circle girds the world; Of those dread Maids, whose hideous yell Maddens the battle’s bloody swell; Of Chief, who, guided through the gloom By the pale death-lights of the Tomb, Ransack’d the graves of warriors old, Their falchions wrench’d from corpses’ hold Wak’d the deaf tomb with war’s alarms, And bade the dead arise to arms.27

Conclusion Maps themselves have been evolving from an anecdotal perspective to the factual throughout the ages just like the depictions of Orkney contained in them. Orkney has been a clear metaphysical endpoint for many writers seeking to scope the boundaries of the physical world and that of the imagination. The seeker after Orkney’s physical or metaphysical location has therefore had to navigate seas of cartographical and literary subjectivity to reach a locative haven. It is clear that non-fiction literature influenced the depiction of Orkney in early maps — particularly the accounts of Diodorus Siculus and Pliny which were fundamental to the depiction of Britain in Ptolemy’s projection. Works of fiction, however, have relied upon maps for their orientation of Orkney — but greater geographical knowledge has led to the actual physical location of Orkney being less significant and its metaphysical attributes as a place contained within the known world which can be seen and reached yet very much inhabiting the liminal borders attaining greater importance. Orkney moves from being the uttermost North in ancient times to providing a key geographical marker to the North in later days as our world changed shape. It remains a kind of approachable unothered North but it is still a place apart. The eternal tide still flows between Orkney and the rest of the world.

27 Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto Sixth, ll. 306–45.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Adomnán, Life of St Columba, ed. by Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991; repr. 2002) The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. by Lars Ulwencreutz (London: Lulu.com, 2013) Blaeu’s Orkneys and Schetland: The Orkneys and Schetland in Blaeu’s Atlas of 1654, ed. by James M. Irvine (Kirkwall: James M. Irvine, 2006) Burns, Robert, The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns (Glasgow: Geddes and Grossart, 2002) Chaucer, Geoffrey, ‘Troilus and Criseyde’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 471–585 Diodorus Siculus, Library of History of Diodorus Siculus, iii: Books IV. 59–VIII, trans. by Charles H. Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library, 340 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939) Fowler, William, ‘In Orknay’, in The Oxford Book of Scottish Verse, ed. by John McQueen and Tom Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 260 Orkneyinga Saga, ed. by Joseph Anderson (Edinburgh: Mercat, 1981) The Oxford Book of Scottish Verse, ed. by John McQueen and Tom Scott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966) Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, trans. by John Bostock and Henry Thomas Riley, Bohn’s Classical Library (Princeton: H. G. Bohn, 1857) Pomponius Mela, Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World, trans. by Francis E. Romer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998) Pope, Alexander, Essay on Man and Other Poems (Mineola: Dover, 1994) Ptolemy, Ptolemy’s ‘Geography’: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters, ed. by J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) Scott, Sir Walter, The Lay of the Last Minstrel: A Poem (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2013) Shelley, Mary W., Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (London: Everyman, 1973) Tacitus, Complete Works of Tacitus, trans. by Alfred John Church, William Jackson Brodribb, ed. for Persius by Sara Bryant (New York: Random House, 1873; repr. 1942) [accessed 9 May 2019] Waldseemüller, Martin, The ‘Cosmographiae introductio’ of Martin Waldseemüller in Facsimile, ed. by Joseph Fischer and Franz von Weiser (New York: US Catholic Historical Society, 1907)

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Secondary Works Ascherson, Neal, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland, rev. edn (London: Granta, 2014) Black, Jeremy, Maps and History: Constructing Images of the Past (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) Dumville, David N., ‘A Note on the Picts in Orkney’, Scottish Gaelic Studies, 12.2 (1976), 266 Koyré, Alexander, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1957) Le Guin, Ursula K., ‘World Making’, in Dreams Must Explain Themselves and Other Essays, 1972–2004 (London: Gateway, 2018) Sverrir Jakobsson, ed., Images of the North: Histories, Identities, Ideas (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009) White, Kenneth, On the Atlantic Edge: A Geopoetics Project (Dingwall: Sandstone, 2006)

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Oisín Plumb

‘Beyond the Range of Human Exploration’ Cormac and the ‘North’ in the Seventh Century

Vita Sancti Columbae (The Life of St Columba) has good grounds to be regarded as the richest source of written evidence for society, politics, and the Church north of the Forth and Clyde in the early medieval period. This work was written by Adomnán, the ninth abbot of Iona, probably in the closing years of the 690s. The text asserts the sanctity of Columba, Iona’s first abbot, who died in 597.1 It includes anecdotes set in the Old Irish-speaking southern Hebrides and Argyll (which, along with territory in north-eastern Ireland, formed the kingdom of Dalriada), the Pictish territories, and Ireland. Amongst the varied accounts of miracles attributed to Columba are anecdotes outlining the voyages of Cormac Uí Liatháin — ‘a holy man who sought with great labour not less than three times a desert in the ocean, and yet found none’.2 The accounts of Cormac are the earliest surviving narratives of ocean voyages by Irish clergy and were to be followed by a large body of Irish voyage tales (known as immrama) in later centuries.3 In the first voyage described by Adomnán, Cormac sets out from Erris, County Mayo, but finds no suitable location due to the presence in the boat of a monk who had not obtained his abbot’s consent to join the voyage. The eventual (though not necessarily intended) destinations of the second and third voyages are Orkney, and a location in the northern ocean ‘beyond the range of human exploration’.4 Orkney, and the ocean beyond it, has been associated with a remote and hostile ‘Northernness’ since antiquity. Peter Davidson argues that for the classical world, even the name Orcades would have provided succour to these associations, due to its similarity to both Orcus and Hades — names for the realm of the dead.5 Christianity brought a new significance to this ‘northernness’, associating the remotest fringes of the world with Christ’s instruction to make ‘disciples of all nations’.6 The voyages of

1 Sharpe, Life of St Columba, pp. 51–53. 2 Adomnán, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson, i.6 (pp. 28–31). 3 Sharpe, Life of St Columba, p. 343 n. 327. 4 Adomnán, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson, i.6 (pp. 28–31), and ii.42 (pp. 166–71). 5 Scully, ‘The Third Voyage of Cormac’, pp. 214–15; Davidson, The Idea of North, p. 31; Scully, ‘At World’s End’. 6 Matthew 28. 19, New Jerusalem Bible. Oisín Plumb, Lecturer, Institute for Northern Studies, University of the Highlands and Islands. [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 37–51 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120785

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Cormac engage with these literary themes in their depiction of his travels to Orkney and beyond. However, these anecdotes were composed and transmitted in a society familiar with Orkney as an easily reachable location, whose contemporary political and ecclesiastical concerns impacted the dynamics of church and state power throughout Northern Britain. This paper will examine the way in which the voyages of Cormac engage with ‘the North’ as a tangible location, while maintaining the literary themes characterizing ‘northernness’ that would have been recognized by the text’s original audience. In order to do so, it is first necessary to consider the provenance of the accounts. The terminology used in the numbering of the three voyages of Cormac indicate that they are derived from an earlier work. The second and third voyages presented by Adomnán are stated to be Cormac’s second and third voyages. However, in the account of the first voyage presented, it is implied that there had been earlier ones. ‘Hodie iterum Cormac desertum reperire cupiens enauigare incipit, ab illa regione quae, ultra Modam fluium sita, Eirros domno dicitur. Nec tamen etiam hac uice quod quaerit inueniet’ (Today again Cormac, desiring to find a desert, begins his voyage from the district that is called Eirros domno, lying beyond the river Moy. But this time also he will not find what he seeks).7 This notion is reinforced by Adomnán’s ambiguous statement that Cormac had sought a place of hermitage in the ocean ‘tribus non minus’ (not less than three times).8 A further indication that Adomnán or his source drew on a more extensive collection of material on Cormac comes from a fourth reference to the saint. Here, Cormac travels from Ireland to Hinba9 along with Comgell mocu Aridi, Cainnech mocu Dalon, and Brénden mocu Alti — all four are stated to be founders of monasteries. In the anecdote, Brénden sees a ball of fire shining from Columba’s head and reports this to Comgell and Cainnech. Cormac has no role in the tale, leading Richard Sharpe to suggest that some element of it may have been lost.10 Given the manipulation that has occurred, it is difficult to say with certainty whether or not Adomnán’s work presents the voyages of Cormac in their original order. Nonetheless, in their surviving order they form a logical sequence, where the distance travelled by Cormac appears to increase on each occasion: an indeterminate distance from County Mayo in the first, Orkney in the second, and ‘beyond the range of human exploration’ in the third. Dan Tipp and Jonathan Wooding argue that this sequence is completed by ‘Cormac’s realization of his fate to be a monastic leader’ in his final appearance in Adomnán’s work.11 A further indication that the voyages of Cormac were not first composed by Adomnán is the use of the phrase, ‘cum ultra dorsum moraretur Brittanniae’ (while he was beyond the spine of Britain), at the beginning of the account of Cormac’s second

7 Adomnán, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson, i.6 (pp. 30–31). 8 Adomnán, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson, i.6 (pp. 28–31 n. 30). 9 Hinba was an island with a dependent monastery of Iona. Although its exact location is unknown, it is likely to have been another Inner-Hebridean foundation. Sharpe argues for a location to the south of Iona, as the passage describing Cormac and his three companions’ journey to Hinba does not mention them landing in Iona first: Sharpe, Life of St Columba, pp. 306–08. 10 Adomnán, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson, iii.17 (pp. 206–07); Sharpe, Life of St Columba, p. 368 n. 386. 11 Tipp and Wooding, ‘Adomnán’s Voyaging Saint’, p. 245.

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voyage.12 James Fraser suggests that this is one of several anecdotes within Vita Sancti Columbae whose use of terminology referring to the territory of the Picts as being across ‘dorsum Brittanniae’ (the spine of Britain) suggests a common origin.13 He suggests that this group of anecdotes is notable for its lack of overly-dramatic miracles and the absence of mass conversions of significant numbers of Picts. This contrasts starkly with accounts set amongst the Picts where Adomnán uses the phrase ‘prouincia Pictorum’ (Pictish provinces) or similar, in which dramatic miracles and large-scale conversions occur frequently. Fraser argues that the latter category was composed by Adomnán himself, making use of a Pictish source, in contrast to the former which he suggests may have been derived from an earlier Liber de uirtutibus sancti Columbae (Book on the Miraculous Powers of St Columba), written by Cumméne, a previous abbot of Iona, around 640. This is known to have been a source used by Adomnán, but today survives only in one small fragment.14 The contrast in themes in the two categories of anecdotes is striking, and the argument for a common origin for the ‘Spine of Britain’ cluster is convincing. However, as will be seen, the contemporary resonance of the political and ecclesiastical relations between Orkney, the Pictish kingdom, and Iona, as depicted in the account, may argue for their composition much closer to Adomnán’s own time. To place Adomnán’s portrayal of Cormac’s journeys in context, some consideration of his understanding of geography is in order. Adomnán has been shown to have made extensive use of the works of Isidore of Seville, written in the earlier years of the seventh century. There is some evidence that Adomnán’s conception of the layout of the earth’s lands was moulded by the descriptions of the continents in Isidore’s De natura rerum and Etymologiae and maps contained within these works. Thomas O’Loughlin has argued that the itinerary of the protagonist depicted in the earlier of Adomnán’s two full-length extant works, De locis sanctis (On the Holy Places), does not make sense when viewed with a modern understanding of geography, but can be plotted comfortably using Isidore’s maps.15 This work is presented as an account of the travels of the Gaulish Bishop Arculf and his travels in Jerusalem, its hinterland, and Constantinople. However, it relied heavily on literary sources, to an extent that has led to the very existence of its protagonist being questioned.16 O’Loughlin further contends that Adomnán emulates Isidore’s practice of distinguishing between the use of oceanus to describe the great ocean surrounding earth’s lands and mare to describe other seas.17 Isidore’s text and the associated maps portray the earth’s land surface

12 Adomnán, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson, ii.42 (pp. 166–67). 13 This phrase refers to a feature within the Grampian Mountains. However, there is not universal agreement on its precise location: Dunshea, ‘Druim Alban, Dorsum Britanniae — “the Spine of Britain”’. 14 Following Fraser, this work will henceforth be referred to as De uirtutibus. Fraser, ‘Adomnán, Cumméne Ailbe, and the Picts’, especially pp. 184–87 and 192; Cumméne, De uirtutibus, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson. 15 O’Loughlin, Adomnán and the Holy Places, pp. 152–53. 16 O’Loughlin, Adomnán and the Holy Places, pp. 50–64. 17 O’Loughlin, Adomnán and the Holy Places, p. 151.

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as circular in shape, divided into three parts: Asia takes up the entire eastern half of the land area, with Europe and Africa each assigned a quarter in the north-west and south-west respectively. The continents are separated by a ‘T’-shaped Mediterranean Sea. O’Loughlin argues that Adomnán himself was the first to develop the exegetical statements of Jerome and other earlier scholars on the centrality of Jerusalem, and state that Jerusalem was to be found at the geographical centre of the earth’s landmass. This notion was developed in later medieval maps, such as the Hereford Mappa Mundi.18 Adomnán’s access to Isidore’s work, as well as the writings of Augustine, suggests it is plausible, though not certain, that he would have envisaged the earth’s landmass as lying on a globe between the Tropic of Cancer and the Arctic Circle.19 The British Isles lay at the fringes of the earth’s inhabited lands and included both territory regarded as the extreme western outpost of humanity (western Ireland) and its extreme north (often represented by Orkney). O’Loughlin suggests that the Prophecy of Maucte in Vita Sancti Columbae consciously associates the last times of the earth with its last places:20 ‘In nouissimís […] saeculi temporibus filius nasciturus est cuius nomen Columba per omnes insularum ociani prouincias deuulgabitur notum, nouissimaque orbis tempora clare inlustrabit’ (In the last years of the world a son will be born, whose name Columba will become famous through all the provinces of the islands of Ocean, and will brightly illumine the latest years of the earth).21 Even the abbot of Iona himself then, did not dispute the contention that his community was ‘living in the remotest corner of the world’ — as would be stated by the Northumbrian scholar Bede three decades later.22 Although this was used as a slight by Iona’s detractors, it was a position embraced by the Hebridean foundation itself. Indeed, given the closeness of the abbot’s relationship with secular and ecclesiastical powers in Northumbria (he described Aldfrith, the Northumbrian king as his friend and gifted him a copy of De locis sanctis), it is possible that Adomnán himself was responsible for promoting these notions — emphasizing his status as a visitor from the farthest reaches of Christendom on his visits to the kingdom.23 It would have been a small step for more critical observers such as Bede to recast Iona’s peripheral location as being demonstrative of distance from Rome and the centre of the Christian world, rather than a pivotal place in the world’s narrative of evangelization. Adomnán would have been familiar with the notion that the north was a place associated with the strange and menacing, which had appeared since antiquity in

18 O’Loughlin, ‘The View from Iona’, p. 110. 19 O’Loughlin, Adomnán and the Holy Places, pp. 120 and 248; Stevens, ‘The Figure of the Earth in Isidore’s “De natura rerum”’; Nothaft, ‘Augustine and the Shape of the Earth’; Eckenrode, ‘Venerable Bede as a Scientist’; Ferrari, ‘Augustine’s Cosmography’. 20 O’Loughlin, Adomnán and the Holy Places, p. 165. 21 Adomnán, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson, Preface 2 (pp. 4–5). 22 Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. by McClure and Collins, v.15 (p. 262). 23 Adomnán, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson, ii.46 (pp. 178–79); Sharpe, Life of St Columba, p. 54.

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Greek tragedies and classical geographies.24 Biblical references to the North as a place of evil include the assertion in Isaiah that Lucifer intended to ‘sit in the mountain of the covenant, in the regions of the North’ and two separate statements in Jeremiah that evil will come from the North.25 Classical writers, including Pliny, Tacitus, and Eutropius, showed significant interest in Orkney. Diarmuid Scully argues that reaching and conquering Orkney was seen to demonstrate ‘authority over the final habitable northern frontiers of the oikoumenê’.26 Tipp and Wooding argue that this significance was carried over into medieval Irish cosmography, as reflected in the destination of Cormac’s second voyage.27 Scully argues that the ultimate lack of success in Cormac’s third search for a place of hermitage was ‘precisely because of those seas’ extreme northern location’ beyond the archipelago. However, he suggests that to Adomnán, Orkney’s status as the most northerly inhabited location may have been ‘poetically rather than literally true’.28 It seems highly unlikely that Adomnán could have failed to be aware of the existence of more northerly inhabited places. Scholars have often been hesitant to suggest a firm date for the coming of Christianity to Shetland. Suggested dates are usually vague and often range from the early seventh to the early eighth centuries — a range that would leave open the possibility that Shetland was not Christian in Adomnán’s time.29 Assuming that the Church had become established in Shetland by the time of Adomnán, it is highly unlikely that the existence of a Christian society in Shetland with a close association with the Pictish cultural sphere would have been unknown to him, particularly given his attempts to emphasize the domination of the Pictish kingship over Orkney. On the other hand, if there had been a vestigial non-Christian presence in Shetland, it is equally unlikely that Adomnán would have been unaware of it. In any case, it seems inconceivable that Shetland could have survived as a non-Christian archipelago with strong Pictish links at the close of the seventh century, without inviting comment from any extant Irish sources. Even if it had been politically expedient for Columbans with a close association with the Pictish kingship to ignore the continued existence of such a place, the ammunition that this would have provided to those critical of the Columban church would have been powerful. A lack of ‘noteworthy’ kings or chiefdoms of interest to Irish sources does not sufficiently explain a lack of comment on Shetland from these more critical observers — the opportunity to portray a ‘lawless’ pagan society would have been too great to ignore.30 One 24 It is notable that according to some classical writers, including Hecataeus and Pindar, there lay beyond the inhospitable north the land of the ‘Hyperboreans’, where the land was fertile and war and sickness were absent: Davidson, The Idea of North, pp. 25–27; Sneddon, ‘Adomnán of Iona’s Vita Sancti Columba’, p. 219; Sandin, ‘Scythia or Elysium?’; Webb, ‘Inter imperium sine fine’; Avdagic, ‘The North in Antiquity’. 25 Sneddon, ‘Adomnán of Iona’s Vita Sancti Columba’, p. 220; Isaiah 14. 12–13; Jeremiah 1. 14 and 4. 6. 26 Scully, ‘The Atlantic Archipelago from Antiquity to Bede’, pp. 24–25. 27 Tipp and Wooding, ‘Adomnán’s Voyaging Saint’, p. 242. 28 Scully, ‘The Third Voyage of Cormac’, pp. 214 and 226–27; Scully, ‘At World’s End’, p. 164. 29 Cant, ‘The Church in Orkney and Shetland’; Cant, ‘The Medieval Church in Shetland’, p. 159. 30 Alex Woolf discusses the lack of references to named kings and chiefdoms within the sources in the north-western Highlands and Shetland in Woolf, From Pictland to Alba, pp. 12–13.

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possibility is that the realm of the territory of the Orcadum regulo was perceived to have encompassed Shetland. Whatever territorial extent was envisaged for the realm of the northern under-king in Cormac’s second voyage, it is clear from Adomnán’s words that the boundaries of human exploration had been pushed by Cormac’s third. This is made plain by Columba’s entreaty to his monks: ‘Fratres, tota intentione pro Cormaco orate, qui nunc humanae discursionis limitem inmoderate nauigando excessit’ (Brothers, pray with your whole might for Cormac, who now in his voyage has far exceeded the bounds of human travel).31 Dan Tipp and Jonathan Wooding have compared Cormac’s role in Adomnán’s Vita Sancti Columbae to that of Arculf in Adomnán’s earlier work De locis sanctis.32 Arculf ’s role in this earlier work has been described as that of an ‘expert eye-witness’, adding legitimacy to Adomnán’s discussion of the places described and their significance to the Incarnation and spread of Christ’s message.33 The comparison between Arculf and Cormac is apt. De locis sanctis is composed of three books: book 1 covers Jerusalem, book 2 covers the surrounding areas of Palestine and Egypt, book 3 covers Constantinople. O’Loughlin argues that these three areas reflect the ‘three-stage process’ of evangelization outlined to the apostles by Jesus: ‘you will receive the power of the Holy Spirit which will come on you, and then you will be my witnesses not only in Jerusalem but throughout Judaea and Samaria, and indeed to earth’s remotest end’. O’Loughlin argues that Adomnán would have seen these three zones ( Jerusalem, the area which had already received the Old Testament, and the Gentiles) as concentric circles, reflecting Jerusalem’s centrality on the earth’s landmass.34 It is tempting to draw a comparison with the locations of the three voyages of Cormac: north-western Mayo, Orkney, and the northern ocean ‘beyond the range of human exploration’ — reflecting zones of increasing extremity at the earth’s fringes. Nathalie Stalmans and Thomas CharlesEdwards argue that Cormac’s departure from north-western Mayo in the first voyage had significance as the area where Patrick had lived as a slave, and was likely to have been considered by Patrick as part of what he himself described as ‘exteras partes, ubi nemo ultra erat’ (the outermost parts beyond which there is nothing).35 Patrick consciously associated his missionary work with fulfilment of scripture, himself quoting Matthew 24. 14: ‘Praedicabitur hoc euangelium regni in uniuerso mundo in testimonium omnibus gentibus et tunc ueniet finis’ (This gospel of the Kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world as a testimony to all peoples and then the end will come).36 Stalmans and Charles-Edwards argue that, as the end of time had not yet come, some within the church may have concluded that more distant lands awaited discovery and evangelization, and that for Cormac, Erris, as the west

31 Adomnán, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson, ii.42 (pp. 168–69). 32 Tipp and Wooding, ‘Adomnán’s Voyaging Saint’, pp. 237–38 and 251–52. 33 O’Loughlin, Adomnán and the Holy Places, pp. 50–64. 34 Acts 1. 8, New Jerusalem Bible; O’Loughlin, Adomnán and the Holy Places, p. 156. 35 Patrick, Confessio, ed. by Bieler, p. 86; Patrick, Confessio, trans. by De Paor, p. 106. 36 Patrick, Confessio, ed. by Bieler, p. 80; Patrick, Confessio, trans. by De Paor, p. 104.

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of the known world, would have been considered a suitable starting point.37 Whether Erris was chosen by Cormac as a starting point, or by a later writer, it therefore has some significance in the surviving sequence of Cormac’s voyages — the first sets out from the far west of Christendom, already converted by Patrick, the second arrives at the north of the inhabited world, the third goes beyond any human exploration. The second and third voyages of Cormac therefore very consciously present two northern extremities: the northern extreme of human civilization, and the northern extreme of nature. However, to Adomnán and his contemporaries in Northern Britain, much more than to most of his literary sources dealing with ‘the north’, Orkney and the seas beyond it were tangible places rather than abstract literary ideas. This is particularly evident in his account of Cormac’s second voyage. Alio in tempore Cormacus, Christi miles, de quo in primo huius opusculi libello breuiter aliqua commemorauimus pauca, etiam secunda uice conatus est herimum in ociano quaerere. Qui postquam a terrís per infinitum ocianum plenís enauigauit uelís, hisdem diebus sanctus Columba, cum ultra dorsum moraretur Brittanniae, Brudeo regi praesente Orcadum regulo commendauit, dicens: ‘Aliqui ex nostrís nuper emigrauerunt, desertum in pilago intransmeabili inuenire obtantes. Qui si forte post longos circuitus Orcadas deuenerint insulas, huic regulo cuius obsedes in manu tua sunt deligenter commenda, ne aliquid aduersi intra terminos eius contra eos fiat’. Hoc uero sanctus ita dicebat quia in spiritu praecognouit quod post aliquot menses idem Cormaccus esset ad Orcadas uenturus. Quod ita postea euenit. Et propter supradictam sancti uiri commendationem de morte in Orcadibus liberatus est uicina. (At another time, Cormac, a soldier of Christ, of whom we have briefly related some few things in the first book of this work, attempted for the second time to seek a desert place in the ocean. After he had sailed away from the land, with full sails, over the limitless ocean, in those same days Saint Columba, while he was beyond the spine of Britain, charged king Brude, in the presence of the subject king of the Orcades, saying: ‘Some of our people have recently gone out desiring to find a desert place in the sea that cannot be crossed. Earnestly charge this king, whose hostages are in your hand, that, if after long wanderings our people chance to land in the islands of the Orcades, nothing untoward shall happen to them within his territories’. The saint spoke thus because he foreknew in the spirit that after some months this Cormac would come to the Orcades. And it did afterwards so happen. And because of the aforesaid commendation of the holy man, Cormac was delivered from imminent death in the Orcades.)38

37 Stalmans and Charles-Edwards, ‘Meath, Saints of (act. c. 400 – c. 900)’; Tipp and Wooding, ‘Adomnán’s Voyaging Saint’, p. 242. 38 Adomnán, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson, ii.42 (pp. 166–67).

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Although set a century prior to Adomnán’s own time, two themes that would have had contemporary resonance are apparent here: Orkney is to be considered territorially Pictish and ecclesiastically Columban. Adomnán is known to have reflected contemporary events in his portrayal of the age of Columba.39 His readers would have understood the implications of the narrative. Indeed, the surviving evidence points to the political and ecclesiastical status of Orkney being an issue of some significance at the time Adomnán compiled his work. An entry in the Annals of Ulster records that in 682 ‘Orcades delete sunt la Bruide’ (The Orkneys were destroyed by Bruide).40 The protagonist here was Bridei son of Beli, king of Fortriu — the pre-eminent Pictish kingdom. It has been argued that this ‘destruction’ reflects the increasing power of the kings of Fortriu at this time, and that it may, along with a siege of Dunnottar recorded in the annals the previous year, represent a strengthening of Bridei’s northern power in the years prior to the consolidation of his kingdom’s southern hegemony at the Battle of Nechtansmere in 685. William Thomson argues that a closer political union between Orkney and the Pictish kingship may have begun at this time.41 The fact that the Annals of Ulster record a battle in Orkney in 709, in which the unidentified ‘Artablair’s son’ died, may suggest that the grip of Fortriu on Orkney may not have been as firm at the time Vita Sancti Columbae was composed as the account of Cormac’s second voyage would imply.42 The Church, too in Orkney may have faced some uncertainty at the time Adomnán was composing Vita Sancti Columbae. The years following the composition of the text saw increasing Northumbrian engagement with the Pictish Church. This appears to have to some extent come at the expense of Ionan influence. A dramatic manifestation of this is an ‘expulsion’ of the Iona community by Nechtan mac Der-Ilei, king of the Picts in 717.43 This event has often been linked with Nechtan’s switch from the ‘Irish’ to the ‘Roman’ system for the calculation of Easter, which coincided with a developing close association between the Pictish king and the Northumbrian twin monasteries of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow.44 The most striking indication that Orkney itself saw significant interaction with Northumbria is the similarity between the eagle on a symbol stone from the Knowe of Burrian and one depicted in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 197B, likely to be a Northumbrian manuscript of late seventh- or early

39 An example is the portrayal in Vita Columbae of the exile of a deposed nobleman named Tarain, which strongly echoes the deposition and exile of the Pictish King Tarain in Adomnán’s own day. See Fraser, From Caledonia to Pictland, pp. 5–7. 40 The Annals of Ulster, ed. and trans. by Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, 682.4 (pp. 146–47). 41 Thomson, The New History of Orkney, p. 9; Fraser, From Caledonia to Pictland, pp. 290, 342, and 345. 42 Thomson, The New History of Orkney, p. 10; The Annals of Ulster, ed. and trans. by Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, 709.4 (pp. 166–67). 43 ‘Expulsio familie Ię trans Dorsum Brittanię a Nectano rege’ (Expulsion of the community of Í beyond Dorsum Brittaniae by king Nechtan). The Annals of Ulster, ed. and trans. by Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, 717.4 (pp. 172–73). 44 It is worth noting that Iona had itself begun to use the ‘Roman’ system of Easter calculation the year before the ‘expulsion’. Fraser, From Caledonia to Pictland, pp. 279–82.

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eighth-century date, suggesting a common exemplar.45 It has further been suggested that the significant number of dedications to St Peter throughout Orkney may derive from an assertion of loyalty to Rome associated with these links.46 Alternatively, Kenneth Veitch has suggested that it is possible that ‘a pro-Roman faction’ of the Columban church had already achieved a widespread change to Roman practice amongst the Picts prior to Nechtan’s association with Northumbria. Veitch suggests that Curetán, bishop of Rosemarkie and associate of Adomnán, was a significant figure in this faction, and it is notable that he has been associated with an Orcadian foundation in Papay.47 Whatever the truth in this, it is clear that Adomnán’s portrayal of an Orcadian under-king’s adherence to the orders of Columba (delivered through the king of the Picts) was as much a statement of the ecclesiastical position of Orkney as it was a declaration of its political status. The account of Cormac’s second voyage perfectly reflects the political and ecclesiastical circumstances of Orkney that Iona would wish to assert at the time that Adomnán was composing the Vita Sancti Columbae. The local ruler is under the power of the king of the Picts, who, in turn, must do the bidding of Columba, the first abbot of Iona. There is no doubt that Orkney and its ruler owe fealty to both. However, this neat fit presents a problem. As has been discussed, the anecdotes bear the hallmarks of two separate lost collections: a collection of the voyages of Cormac, and the trans dorsum Brittanniae miracles — identified by James Fraser as being part of Cumméne’s De uirtutibus. If Fraser is correct in this assumption, then these anecdotes date from the composition of Cumméne’s work in around 640. Could the account of Cormac in Orkney have been written at this earlier time? It is much harder to discern the political status of Orkney in this period. The single extant reference to Orkney in the chronicles in the decades prior to this refers to an event in Columba’s own time — a campaign in Orkney by Áedán mac Gabráin, the king of Dalriada, in 580: ‘Fecht Orc la hAedhan mc Gabrain’ (The expedition to Orc by Aedan son of Gabrán).48 This could plausibly reflect an attack on the area by Áedán, although it has also been suggested that he may have been assisting a Pictish ruler in subjugating a ‘rebellious province’.49 The one thing that can be said with certainty about the content of Cumméne’s work is that it contained a prophesy by Columba which had not been heeded by Áedán’s successors: ‘Indubitanter crede Ó Aidane quoniam nullus aduersariorum tuorum tibi poterit resistere, donec prius fraudulentiam agas in me et in posteros meos. Propterea ergo tú filiis commenda, ut et ipsi filiis et nepotibus et posterís suís commendent, ne per consilia mala eorum sceptrum regni huius de manibus suís perdant. In

45 Thomson, The New History of Orkney, pp. 17–18; Alexander, Insular Manuscripts, p. 44; Verey, ‘Lindisfarne or Rath Maelsigi?’. 46 Thomson, The New History of Orkney, pp. 19–20; Lamb, ‘Carolingian Orkney and its Transformation’. 47 Veitch, ‘The Columban Church in Northern Britain’, pp. 637–38; Lamb, ‘Carolingian Orkney and its Transformation’, p. 262. 48 The Annals of Ulster, ed. and trans. by Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill, 580.2 (pp. 90–91). 49 Thomson, The New History of Orkney, p. 9.

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quocumque enim tempore malum aduersum me aut aduersus cognatos meos qui sunt in Hibernia fecerint, flagillum quod causa tui ab angelo sustenui per manum dei super eos in magnum flagitium uertetur; et cor uirorum auferetur ab eís, et inimici eorum uehimenter super eos confortabuntur’. Hoc autem uaticinium temporibus nostrís conpletum est in bello Roth, Domnallo Brecco nepot Aidani sine causa uastante prouinciam Domnail nepotis Ainmuireg. Et a die illa usque hodie adhuc in procliuo sunt ab extraneís: quod suspiria doloris pectori incutit. (‘Believe, O Áidán, and doubt not, that none of your opponents will be able to stand against you until first you practise deceit against me, and against my successors. For this reason therefore do you charge your sons that they also shall charge their sons and grandsons and descendants, not through evil counsels to lose their sceptre of this kingdom from their hands. For at whatever time they shall do evil to me, or to my kindred who are in Ireland, the scourge that I have endured from an angel on your account will be turned by the hand of God to a great disgrace upon them. And the heart of men will be taken from them; and their enemies will be strongly heartened against them’. This prophecy has been fulfilled in our times, in the battle of Roth, when Domnall Brecc, Áidán’s grandson, without cause wasted the province of Domnall, Ainmuire’s grandson. And they are from that day to this still held down by strangers; which fills the breast with sighs of grief.)50 Given Cumméne’s overt statement that Áedán’s kindred, the Cenél nGabráin, had not heeded Columba’s advice, it is certainly possible that Cumméne would have composed or adapted an anecdote in which any Dalriadan claims to supremacy over Orkney were soundly quashed. However, the evidence for this is circumstantial and a far stronger case can be made for composition closer to Adomnán’s own time. Nonetheless, the phrasing used in the numbering of Cormac’s voyages, as well as the terminology used to describe Columba’s sojourn in Pictish territory, does suggest that Adomnán preserves a substantial amount of material that was not his own. It does seem plausible that the trans dorsum Brittanniae accounts represent a collection that was compiled near to Adomnán’s own time by a different author. If this earlier collection itself made use of an existing collection of voyages of Cormac, it may have heavily amended the content of the second voyage in order to reflect contemporary Pictish affairs. Alternatively, the compiler of the trans dorsum Brittanniae collection may have themselves composed the voyage tales (from which Adomnán selectively chose three). Regardless of how the narrative of Cormac’s second voyage came to be shaped, its surviving form as presented by Adomnán contained an important message for his readership. Although set in a place that cosmologically was regarded as the edge of the inhabited world, the author of the account in its final form skilfully incorporated political and ecclesiastical realities into the anecdote that would have resonated with readers. The inclusion of these realities did not detract from the 50 Cumméne, De uirtutibus, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson.

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cosmological significance of the location visited by Cormac. Instead, it emphasized the tangible and profound significance of Iona’s place in Christian history. The third voyage of Cormac is presented by Adomnán straight after the second. Cum idem Cormacus tertia in ociano mari fatigaretur uice, prope usque ad mortem periclitari coepit. Nam cum eius nauis a terrís per xiiii. aestei temporis dies totidemque noctes plenís uelís austro flante uento ad septemtrionalis plagam caeli directo excurreret cursu, eiusmodi nauigatio ultra humani excursus modum et inremeabilis uidebatur. Vnde contigit ut post decimam eiusdem quarti et decimi horam diei, quidam pene insustentabiles undique et ualde formidabiles consurgerent terrores. Quaedam quippe usque in id temporis inuisae mare obtegentes occurrerant tetrae et infestae nimis bestiolae, quae horribili impetu carinam et latera pupimque et proram ita forti feriebant percusura, ut pellicium tectum nauis penetrales putarentur penetrare posse. Quae, ut hí qui inerant ibidem postea narrarunt, prope magnitudine ranarum aculeís permolestae non tamen uolatiles sed natatiles erant; sed et remorum infestabant palmulas. Quibus uisís inter cetera monstra, quae non huius est temporis enarrare, Cormaccus cum nautís comitibus, ualde turbati et pertimescentes, deum qui est in angustís pius et oportunus auxiliator inlacrimati precantur. (While Cormac was labouring for the third time in the sea of Ocean, he came into dangers that nearly caused his death. When his ship, blown by the south wind, had driven with full sails in a straight course from land towards the region of the northern sky, for fourteen summer days and as many nights, such a voyage appeared to be beyond the range of human exploration, and one from which there could be no return. And so it happened, after the tenth hour of the fourteenth day, that there arose all around them almost overwhelming and very dreadful objects of terror; for they were met by loathsome and exceedingly dangerous small creatures covering the sea, such as had never been seen before that time; and these struck with terrible impact the bottom and sides, the stern and prow, with so strong a thrust that they were thought able to pierce and penetrate the skin-covering of the ship. As those that were present there related afterwards, these creatures were about the size of frogs, very injurious by reason of their stings, but they did not fly, they swam. And moreover they damaged the blades of the oars. Seeing these with the other prodigies, which this is not the time to recount, Cormac and his fellow-sailors were in great alarm and terror, and with tears prayed to God, who is a true and ready helper in times of need.)51 The anecdote goes on to describe how through the distant intercessionary prayers of Columba, Cormac’s boat is brought out of danger by the changing of the wind. Discussion of the third voyage has tended to coalesce into two camps — the first emphasizing the literary and cosmological significance of the text and its portrayals

51 Adomnán, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson, ii.42 (pp. 168–69).

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of the Northern fringes of the earth; the second, playing ‘hunt the monster’, in an attempt to unmask the true identity of the animals described within the account, with the inference that it is ultimately derived from eyewitness testimony.52 As a literary account, the anecdote paints a vivid picture of the hostile north. However, the description of the bestiolae does suggest that they are viewed by Adomnán or his source as unusual, but entirely earthly, animals. Cormac’s boat is saved from the creatures through the prayers of Columba and his brethren from many miles away. On account of these prayers, the boat is brought out of danger by a change of wind enacted by God. It is notable in this anecdote that the behaviour of the bestiolae themselves does not alter. This stands in some contrast to the account of the water beast in the River Ness, which is part of the Prouincia Pictorum cluster of anecdotes. The Ness beast is directly commanded by Columba (invoking the name of God as opposed to praying for his intercession) to relent, and as a consequence, Lugne mocu Min is saved from being devoured because of the animal’s change of behaviour.53 Furthermore, the detailed description of the deadly loathsome little creatures starkly contrasts with the ‘vague terminology’ used to describe the Ness beast, which Jacqueline Borsje argues served to increase the ‘sense of horror’ as well as emphasize the miraculous.54 The ‘other prodigies, which this is not the time to recount’, may have fulfilled a similar narrative function in the account of Cormac’s third voyage. However, amongst the horror and hostility of the cold northern seas, the undoubtedly peculiar ‘deadly loathsome little creatures’ are nonetheless tangible and describable. As might be expected, there have been several attempts to identify the bestiolae. Suggestions have included jellyfish, squid, eels, mosquitoes, and even dolphins.55 However, none of the candidates offer a persuasive identity for the animal without some amount of text corruption having to be accepted. Even if the narrative is ultimately derived from eyewitness testimony this is unsurprising, as the account may have passed through two or more earlier texts before its inclusion by Adomnán. Whether or not the anecdote truly derives from an eyewitness account, Adomnán’s meticulous description suggests that, however deadly or loathsome, he believed the creatures to have been tangible physical beasts entirely of this world. In the form that they have survived, the voyages of Cormac skilfully intertwine themes of ‘Northernness’ with contemporary political and ecclesiastical realities (and possibly exploratory accounts) to create a narrative with both cosmological and political resonance. Aided by the intercessionary prayers of Columba, Cormac had journeyed to the fringes of the world and Christ’s message had at last been spread to the earth’s remotest end. The depiction of the third voyage demonstrates that, although

52 Sneddon, ‘Adomnán of Iona's Vita Sancti Columba’, pp. 217–22; Sharpe, Life of St Columba, p. 343, nn. 326–27. 53 Adomnán, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson, ii.27 (pp. 132–35). 54 Borsje, ‘The Monster in the River Ness in Vita Sancti Columbae’, pp. 33–34. 55 Lethbridge, Herdsmen & Hermits, p. 73; Fowler, Adamnani Vita S. Columbae, p. 117 n. 1; Woods, ‘Four Notes on Adomnán’s Vita Columbae’, pp. 52–62; Sneddon, ‘Adomnán of Iona's Vita Sancti Columba’, p. 217; the plausible suggestion that the creatures could be eels was made to me by Adrian Plumb, who pointed to the capability of elvers to amass in large groups and climb up surfaces during migration.

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strange and hostile, the far northern ocean was considered to be a place that it was possible to explore. However, it is the second voyage which most evidently places the voyages in a context that many northern readers would recognize — grounding Columban operations in the realpolitik of the day. In doing so, the anecdote may betray that the voyages in their final form were composed nearer to Adomnán’s own time than has often been supposed. The presentation of the anecdotes in Vita Sancti Columbae suggests it likely that this was not Adomnán himself. However, it is evident that the accounts were composed by someone with a similar level of interest in both Columban and Pictish political affairs. Curetán is one plausible candidate. However, there are likely to have been many more within the Columban familia capable of composing the accounts. The localized political and ecclesiastical concerns of the Pictish kingdom and Columban church within the accounts could only have been bolstered by the great part they were seen to play in Christian history. The Columban church was conscious of its role in affairs of church and state amongst the Picts, but also of its global significance ministering to the edge of the earth.

Works Cited Primary Sources Adomnán, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) The Annals of Ulster (to AD 1131), i, ed. and trans. by Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1983) Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. by Judith McClure and Rodger Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994; repr. 2008) Cumméne, De uirtutibus, in Adomnán’s ‘Life of Columba’, ed. by Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Ogilvie Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 188–91 Patrick, Confessio, in Libri epistolarum Sancti Patricii Episcopi, ed. by Ludwig Bieler (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1993), pp. 56–91 ———, Confessio, in Saint Patrick’s World, trans. by Liam De Paor (Dublin: Four Courts, 1996), pp. 96–108 Secondary Works Alexander, Jonathan James Graham, Insular Manuscripts: 6th to the 9th Century, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles, 1 (London: Harvey Miller, 1978) Avdagic, Mirela, ‘The North in Antiquity: Between Maps and Myths’, in Visions of North in Premodern Europe, ed. by Dolly Jørgensen and Virginia Langum, Cursor Mundi, 31 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 59–80 Borsje, Jacqueline, ‘The Monster in the River Ness in Vita Sancti Columbae: A Study of a Miracle’, Peritia, 8 (1994), 27–34 Cant, Ronald G., ‘The Church in Orkney and Shetland and its Relations with Norway and Scotland in the Middle Ages’, Northern Scotland, 1 (1972), 1–18

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———, ‘The Medieval Church in Shetland: Organisation and Buildings’, in Shetland’s Northern Links: Language and History, ed. by Doreen J. Waugh (Edinburgh: Scottish Society for Northern Studies, 1996), pp. 159–73 Davidson, Peter, The Idea of North (London: Reaktion, 2005) Dunshea, Philip M., ‘Druim Alban, Dorsum Britanniae – “the Spine of Britain”’, The Scottish Historical Review, 92.2 (2013), 275–89 Eckenrode, Thomas R., ‘Venerable Bede as a Scientist’, The American Benedictine Review, 22.1 (1971), 486–507 Ferrari, Leo, ‘Augustine’s Cosmography’, Augustinian Studies, 27.2 (1996), 129–77 Fowler, Joseph T., Adamnani Vita S. Columbae (Oxford: Clarendon, 1894) Fraser, James, ‘Adomnán, Cumméne Ailbe, and the Picts’, Peritia, 17–18 (2003–04), 183–98 ———, From Caledonia to Pictland: Scotland to 795, The New Edinburgh History of Scotland, 1 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) Lamb, Raymond G., ‘Carolingian Orkney and its Transformation’, in The Viking Age in Caithness, Orkney and the North Atlantic, ed. by Colleen Batey, Judith Jesch, and Christopher Morris (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), pp. 260–71 Lethbridge, Thomas C., Herdsmen & Hermits, Celtic Seafarers in the Northern Seas (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1950) Nothaft, Carl P. E., ‘Augustine and the Shape of the Earth: A Critique of Leo Ferrari’, Augustinian Studies, 42.1 (2011), 33–48 O’Loughlin, Thomas, ‘The View from Iona: Adomnán’s Mental Maps’, Peritia, 10 (1996), 98–122 ———, Adomnán and the Holy Places (London: T&T Clark, 2007) Sandin, Pär, ‘Scythia or Elysium? The Land of the Hyperboreans in Early Greek Literature’, in Visions of North in Premodern Europe, ed. by Dolly Jørgensen and Virginia Langum, Cursor Mundi, 31 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 13–33 Scully, Diarmuid, ‘At World’s End: Scotland and Ireland in the Graeco-Roman Imagination’, in Ireland (Ulster) Scotland: Concepts, Contexts, Comparisons, ed. by Edna Longley, Eamonn Hughes, and Des O’Rawe (Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2003), pp. 164–70 ———, ‘The Third Voyage of Cormac in Adomnán’s Vita Columbae: Analogues and Context’, in Text Image, Interpretation: Studies in Anglo-Saxon Literature and its Insular Context in Honour of Eamonn Ó Carragáin, ed. by Alastair Minnis and Jane Roberts, Studies in the Early Middle Ages, 18 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), pp. 209–30 Scully, Jeremiah, A., ‘The Atlantic Archipelago from Antiquity to Bede: The Transformation of an Image’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University College Cork, 2000) Sharpe, Richard, Life of St Columba (London: Penguin, 1995) Sneddon, Duncan, ‘Adomnán of Iona’s Vita Sancti Columbae: A Literary Analysis’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2018) Stalmans, Nathalie, and Thomas M. Charles-Edwards, ‘Meath, Saints of (act. c. 400 – c. 900)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (rev. 2007) [accessed 9 April 2018] Stevens, Wesley M., ‘The Figure of the Earth in Isidore’s “De natura rerum”’, Isis, 71.2 (1980), 268–77

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Thomson, William P. L., The New History of Orkney (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2008) Tipp, Dan, and Jonathan M. Wooding, ‘Adomnán’s Voyaging Saint: The Cult of Cormac ua Liatháin’, in Adomnán of Iona: Theologian, Lawmaker, Peacemaker, ed. by Jonathan M. Wooding (Dublin: Four Courts, 2010), pp. 237–52 Veitch, Kenneth, ‘The Columban Church in Northern Britain, 664–717, a Reassessment’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, 127 (1997), 627–47 Verey, Christopher D., ‘Lindisfarne or Rath Maelsigi? The Evidence of the Texts’, in Northumbria’s Golden Age, ed. by Jane Hawkes and Susan Mills (Thrupp: Sutton, 1999), pp. 327–35 Webb, Lewis, ‘Inter imperium sine fine: Thule and Hyperborea in Roman Literature’, in Visions of North in Premodern Europe, ed. by Dolly Jørgensen and Virginia Langum, Cursor Mundi, 31 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 34–58 Woods, David, ‘Four Notes on Adomnán’s Vita Columbae’, Peritia, 16 (2002), 40–67 Woolf, Alex, From Pictland to Alba, The New Edinburgh History of Scotland, 2 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007)

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Marged Haycock

The Old North in Medieval Wales

The long ride north from Wales is not without its perils, as the fourteenth-century poet Iolo Goch warned one of his most distinguished patrons, John Trefor, bishop of St Asaph in north-east Wales. In 1404, John threw in his lot with the Owain Glyndŵr rebellion, but before that change of allegiance, he had been a trusted ‘civil servant’ bishop,1 a diplomatic envoy for King Richard II in Spain as well as in Scotland. In a poem composed just before a mission John undertook to Scotland in 1397, Iolo Goch, an old man by now, himself well-used to life on the road, sets out to reassure the bishop about his impending journey to Scotland; indeed he casts his piece as a lorica, a protective prayer against evil doings and danger, so that John may go north ‘safely, day and night’.2 As elsewhere by this period, the names of the two northern British — that is formerly Welsh-speaking — kingdoms that had become Anglian Northumbria, are imprecisely used: Brynaich (Bernicia) and Deifr (Deira) indiscriminately are the men of Scotland and the northern English.3 Just as St Patrick was able to rid Ireland of vermin, ‘so’, he says, ‘will you be able to put all the Scots to flight and turn them into stones’, adding that the clearance of the horde, now called Picts (Ffichtiaid), will be effected as far as the Isle of Wight. The bishop need not be afraid of venturing to Prydyn — the term means Scotland here rather than Pictland — for the poem will protect him against fire, thunder, and flood, against horse-fatigue, against brigands, and against the ‘deceit of the Scots’. And it did: Bishop John came back safely, and turned his coat to champion the rebel cause in 1404, singing now a very different tune

This chapter is a condensed version of the Second Anderson Memorial Lecture, published as ‘Early Welsh Poets Look North’, in Beyond the Gododdin: Dark Age Scotland in Medieval Wales, ed. by Alex Woolf, St John’s House Papers, 13 (St Andrews: The Committee for Dark Age Studies, University of St. Andrews, 2013), pp. 7–39 abbreviated henceforth as EWPLN, and adapted here by kind permission. 1 Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 213. 2 Gwaith Iolo Goch, ed. by Johnston, pp. 78–80; Iolo Goch: Poems, trans. by Johnston, pp. 74–78. 3 Medieval forms are rendered in the main text here in modern Welsh orthography, unless otherwise stated. Marged Haycock, Emeritus Professor of Welsh, Aberystwyth University [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 53–70 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120786

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as he sought allies for Owain Glyndŵr in Scotland and in France. Inevitably he paid the price as the uprising foundered, and in 1408 he was banished from St Asaph to St Andrews.4 He was not the only one to flee. Owain Glyndŵr’s chancellor, Gruffudd Yonge, formerly bishop of Bangor, went northwards too, ‘having to content himself with the position […] of bishop of Ross’5 before being parked as titular bishop of Hippo, an episcopal equivalent of the Chiltern Hundreds. This chapter will continue to look north from the Welsh perspective, but through the eyes of some of Iolo Goch’s literary predecessors. These include the named and dated Welsh Beirdd y Tywysogion (Poets of the Princes) of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, some prose writers (including chroniclers and translators), and the anonymous authors of the hengerdd (old poetry), a term commonly used for Welsh verse composed before c. 1100.6 The poetry materials are mostly found in late manuscripts known, since Skene’s edition of 1868, as The Four Ancient Books of Wales,7 with the Hendregadredd manuscript c. 1300 as an honorary Fifth.8 Three matters will be raised here: the perceived geography of what is now Scotland and northern England, often referred to as yr Hen Ogledd (the Old North) by Welsh scholars;9 secondly, the various functions of that North in the Welsh imagination; and finally, and only briefly, the potential bearing of these first two matters on a major unresolved question in Welsh scholarship — whether or not the long series of heroic elegies, The Gododdin, and the praise poems to Urien of Rheged, his son Owain, and Gwallog, were composed in the old Brittonic kingdoms of southern Scotland and northern England in the sixth and early seventh centuries.10 Geography first, leaving the flickering images of Iolo Goch’s camera obscura c. 1400, and saving battle sites for later on. The Island of Britain, Ynys Prydain, projected by the Welsh literati from at least the ninth century as a sovereign whole, appears occasionally as a three-in-one entity — an island, yet itself composed of three virtual islands, Wales, England and northern Scotland,11 matching the broad lines of Matthew Paris’s map (London, British Library MS Cotton Claudius D.VI, fol. 12v c. 1250) or the Hereford Mappa mundi (1290 × 1310).12 Thus a hopeful Welsh princeling, Hywel ap Goronwy, is

4 Williams, The Welsh Church, p. 225. 5 Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 214. 6 On the problems of such periodization, see Legendary Poems, ed. and trans. by Haycock, pp. 25–27. 7 Skene, The Four Ancient Books of Wales. They are the Black Book of Carmarthen (c. 1250), the Book of Aneirin (c. 1250), the Book of Taliesin (c. 1325–50), and the Red Book of Hergest (c. 1400). 8 Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, pp. 65–83 and 193–268. 9 The term gained currency from the late 1960s: ‘the old North’ is used by J. E. Caerwyn Williams, Poems of Taliesin, p. xlvii, but neither this nor the Welsh phrase was used by Ifor Williams in the original Welsh edition in 1960. Elsewhere, Ifor Williams used Gogledd Coll (the Lost North), Canu Aneirin, ed. by Williams, p. xci. The term ‘British North’ used in the first edition of the triads in 1961 (Trioedd, ed. and trans. by Bromwich, 1st edn, p. cxxvii) is replaced by yr Hen Ogledd and ‘Old North’ in subsequent editions: Trioedd, p. civ. 10 See Woolf, ed., Beyond the Gododdin, and most recently, Sims-Williams, ‘Dating’. 11 Culhwch ac Olwen, ed. by Bromwich and Evans, ll. 282, 368, and 1057, following Jackson, ‘Rhai sylwadau’, pp. 15–17. For ynys ‘realm’, see EWPLN, pp. 19–20 n. 11 and n. 13. 12 See the British Library’s Online Gallery; Harvey, Mappa Mundi, p. 52.



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praised by his poet c. 1100 as ‘the best king in the west’ with the three traditional ‘islands’ under his sway, as well as the three further offshore islands.13 The dimensions of Britain had been of interest since the classical writers on through Gildas, Bede, and beyond: nine hundred miles from tip to tip in some Welsh law-texts, not the eight hundred of the Latin tradition.14 For the northern extremity, a few sources use ‘the Promontory of Blathaon’ (Pen(rhyn) Blathaon),15 the personal name perhaps based on a Cambricization or adaptation of an Irish first element and possibly influenced by blaidd ‘wolf’ and/ or balaon ‘pine-martens’.16 King Arthur’s sharp-eyed lookout in the tale Culhwch ac Olwen could spy from Cornwall ‘a fly rising in the morning’ on Pen Blathaon.17 The Welsh chroniclers, too, used the phrase, reporting the attack in 1114 by King Henry I on Gwynedd and Powys, intended ‘to exterminate all the Britons completely, so that the Brittonic name should never more be remembered’. The enormity of the danger, and what was in the balance, is underlined by the fact that Henry is said to have gathered a host from the whole island, ‘from Penwith in Cornwall to Blathaon Promontory in the North’.18 A second name, Pentir Gafran, is used once in an extent-of-Britain topos in a twelfth-century poem,19 and in a gloss on ‘the shore of Caithness’ in a thirteenth-century Cambro-Latin tract on the dimensions of Britain.20 More vaguely, the northern end of Britain is referred to as the tâl ‘end’ or terfyn ‘limit’ of Britain. Some names are difficult to place: ‘Gwyddno’s Port in the North’ in the geographical triads, for example,21 and Dinsol, surely a northerly location contrasted with Land’s End in the tale ‘Culhwch ac Olwen’.22 Welsh sources refer to relatively few northern seats of power: they include Pen(rhyn) Rhionydd, likely to be near Ptolemy’s Rerigonion at or near Stranraer, Galloway, on Loch Ryan, itself mentioned in verse;23 it may be ventured further that this may be Adamnán’s caput regionis.24 Others are Eidyn or Din Eidyn (Edinburgh);25 and Dumbarton Rock (Allt Clud, (Din, Caer) Alclud,

13 Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, i, 6, l. 20. In the fifteenth century, a magnate could still be mourned as ‘upholder of the Three Islands’: Gwaith Siôn Ceri, ed. by Lake, p. 142, l. 72. 14 Owen, ‘Royal Propaganda’, pp. 250 and 229–32. 15 Llyfr Iorwerth, ed. by Wiliam, p. 59; Brut Dingestow, ed. by Lewis, p. 292; Trioedd, ed. and trans. by Bromwich, p. 251. 16 Further details in EWPLN, pp. 8–9 and 20–21. 17 Culhwch ac Olwen, ed. by Bromwich and Evans, l. 262. 18 Brut y Tywysogyon (Peniarth MS 20), ed. by Jones, col. 59a ‘hyt ym Mhenryn Blathaon’. 19 Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, v, 6, ll. 111–12. 20 Roberts, ‘Pen Penwaedd a Phentir Gafran’, p. 279; for details on Gafran, and Welsh forms for Caithness, see EWPLN, pp. 21–22. 21 Trioedd, ed. and trans. by Bromwich, pp. 247, 255, and 391–92. 22 Culhwch ac Olwen, ed. by Bromwich and Evans, l. 107; see further EWPLN, pp. 9 and 22. 23 Trioedd, ed. and trans. by Bromwich, pp. 1–2, following Watson, Celtic Place-Names of Scotland, pp. 34–35. On Rheon and similar forms, see Legendary Poems, ed. and trans. by Haycock, pp. 288–89 and 300–01, and Prophecies, ed. by Haycock, pp. 39–40. 24 Adomnán’s Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Anderson and Anderson, p. 55 and pp. xxxii–iii; the editors suggest rather Dunollie or Dunadd. 25 There are surprisingly few occurrences outside The Gododdin, its associated poems (the gorchanau), and the cognomens of characters such as Clydno Eidyn. It is not mentioned at all in the Poets of the Princes corpus. Some triad texts (Trioedd, ed. and trans. by Bromwich, pp. 75–80, and 396–97)

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uncertainly identified with Caer Brython in the Historia Brittonum)26 — the most cited northern stronghold of all — as well as Carlisle (Caerliwelydd)27 and Caer Wair (if Durham or elsewhere in the North),28 and York (Efrawg) which clearly had a particular resonance for aspirational sentiments, as we shall see. The seas and inlets, Merin Rheged ‘the sea of Rheged’,29 and Gweryd, the Firth of Forth,30 are infrequently mentioned, although Mor Udd (North Sea) is more common.31 Lakes are sparse, with the exception of Loch Lomond, Llyn Llumonwy, featured prominently in the Historia Brittonum32 and in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, and used by poets and translators. Rivers are rare. Derwennydd, another name found in these Latin texts, may or may not be northern in the single Poetry of the Princes reference;33 the ‘Derwennydd Falls’ of the ‘Pais Dinogad’ poem found with the Gododdin elegies in the Book of Aneirin, are certainly on the Cumbrian Derwent.34 Iddon or Yddon is the persistent form of a possibly northern river in poetry, imagined by the twelfth-century poet, Cynddelw, to lie on the Welsh

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suggest that Eidyn may have been reinterpreted as a personal name (as many northern places were to be in later Welsh tradition), or at least may have influenced a name such as Hedyn (or Heiddyn), discussed in Canu Aneirin, ed. by Ifor Williams, p. 298. Nennius, ed. and trans. by Morris, p. 80. Cair Brithon, sometimes assumed to correspond to Dùn Breatann, Dumbarton, is not used elsewhere in Welsh sources. On the relationship between Bede’s Irish form Alcluith and the Welsh forms, see further EWPLN, pp. 23–24, where it is noted that a petrified form with earlier -l- rather than -ll- was in use in sources from the twelfth century onwards suggesting dependence on written sources (and perhaps the influence of the Irish form), with no contact with oral Welsh forms, if any, which had developed to -ll-. Carlisle and York (Cair Ligualid and Cair Ebrauc) are in the Historia Brittonum city list: Nennius, ed. and trans. by Morris, p. 80. On problematic Caer Weir, see discussion in EWPLN, pp. 24–25. See below, p. 58. Armes Prydein, ed. by Williams, l. 174 ‘o Wawl hyt Weryt’ (from the Wall to the Firth of Forth). A story in the law-books asserting the time-hallowed privileges of the men of Arfon tells how the men of Gwynedd in North Wales under Rhun, son of early sixth-century King Maelgwn, made a hosting ‘hyt y glann Gweryt yn y Gogled’ (as far as the Gweryd in the North) where it was decided which of the Gwynedd forces should be in the van in crossing through the Forth: Owen, ‘Royal Propaganda’, pp. 238–45 and 252–54. The twelfth-century poet, Cynddelw, imagines his princely patron’s influence extending ‘hyd Weryd’ (as far as the Forth): Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, iv, poem 4, l. 252. The late twelfth-century poet, Prydydd y Moch boasts that his ‘Vyn tafawd yn urawd ar Urython | O Uor Ut hyd Uor Iwerdon’ (tongue adjudges the Britons, from the North Sea to the Irish Sea), Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, v, poem 4, ll. 25–26, and the same extent topos is used elsewhere. Mor Udd is used for all the eastern English coastal waters including the English Channel. Nennius, ed. and trans. by Morris, p. 81 stagnum Lumonoy, lacus Lummonu. Prydydd y Moch imagines Llywelyn ab Iorwerth of Gwynedd routing the English beyond the loch: Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, v, poem 22, l. 18 (the manuscript reading Llynn llwmynnwy indicates some scribal uncertainty c. 1300 as to the form). Further references in EWPLN, p. 26. Iorwerth Fychan compares the radiance of his love to the waves of Derwennydd Ford, Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, poem 30, l. 36. The possibilities are discussed in EWPLN, pp. 26–27. Gruffydd, ‘Where Was Rhaeadr Derwennydd?’, pp. 261–66.

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side of Elfed, the old Brittonic kingdom around Leeds.35 On both counts, therefore, it is difficult to square with the form and position of the Cumbrian Eden (Itouna recte Itunā), not mentioned in a single certain reference in the Welsh sources.36 Although an unlocated Erechwydd is mentioned very often in hengerdd (but not once by the Poets of the Princes), there is nothing but the meaning of the name guiding us towards a place or region ‘in front of the fresh/running water’.37 Hadrian’s Wall is simply Gwawl, the Wall, as in the Historia Brittonum.38 The mountain range Bannog (‘hilly’) we can place fairly certainly in the Carron Basin from a reference in the Life of St Cadog, but it is unlikely that such a precise location was imagined in the ninth- or tenth-century stanzas about Llywarch Hen, or in Meilyr Brydydd’s talk in the early twelfth century of King Gruffudd ap Cynan’s fame reaching ‘beyond Bannog’.39 The northern names, then, are rather sparse, indicating a limited knowledge of the geography of the Old North among the medieval poets in Wales. One might hope that their references to the regions and lost kingdoms of the north, sparse as they are, might provide clues about their location and extent, but this seems not the case. They refer to a northern region Manaw, generally venturing only to use it in runs of names where it hardly mattered whether it was the Isle of Man or the area around Stirling.40 The information in Historia Brittonum chapter 62 that Cunedda and his sons came down to Wales ‘de regione quae vocatur Manau Guotodin’ is taken up in hagiography, but the phrase Manaw Gododdin is not used in poetry. Lleuddiniawn with its -iawn formation invariably attached to personal names, means ‘Lleuddin’s people or tribe’, and has been identified with Lothian, the Leudonia of the First Life of Kentigern.41 The single poem reference, in the mid-twelfth century, positions its ‘habitation’ merely as ‘beyond [the River] Lliw’, itself ambiguous and uncertain.42 Although in late hengerdd and in prose tales, Pictland, or a generalized far north and its inhabitants, was Prydyn — frequently and alarmingly confused by the copyists 35 Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, iv, poem 4, ll. 249–52. Further details, EWPLN, pp. 27–28. 36 The bold emendation of kywym don > rywin Idon ‘the plentiful wine of Eden’, Poems of Taliesin, ed. by Williams, poem 2, l. 21, has been challenged by Isaac, ‘Gweith Gwen Ystrat’, pp. 65–66; for another suggestion, see Haycock, Drink, p. 14. 37 Apart from Armes Prydein, ed. by Williams, l. 175 ‘llettawt y pennaeth tros erechwyd’ (their dominion [the Welsh and their allies] shall extend over Erechwydd), all other mentions are in the context of Urien Rheged and family (Poems of Taliesin, ed. by Williams, poem 3, ll. 18–19, and poem 6, l. 13; and Saga Poetry, ed. and trans. by Rowland, pp. 420 and 424–25). On the problem of Echwydd, see EWPLN, pp. 29–30. 38 Armes Prydein, ed. by Williams, l. 174, and n. on p. 66. 39 Vitae sanctorum, ed. and trans. by Wade-Evans, pp. 82 and 100; Watson, Celtic Place-Names of Scotland, p. 196; Saga Poetry, ed. and trans. by Rowland, pp. 415 and 540; Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, i, poem 3, l. 64. 40 Although Armes Prydein, ed. by Williams, l. 72 ‘O Vynaw hyt Lydaw yn eu llaw yt vyd’ (from Manaw to Brittany it will be in their hands) is surely a reference to the North British region rather than Man. For poetry references to the island, see EWPLN, pp. 30–31. 41 Watson, Celtic Place-Names, p. 103, and further EWPLN, pp. 31–32. 42 Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, poem 9, l. 155, ‘tra Lliw Lleuddinyawn dreuyt’.

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with Prydain (Britain) — Prydyn is not used by the court poets.43 Deira and Bernicia (Deifr and Brynaich) were to have an extremely long and productive life, still being used for the English as late as the sixteenth century; and the old British name, Elfed near Leeds — mentioned in key passages in Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica and the Historia Brittonum — was used a few times.44 There is no kingdom of Strathclyde (Ystrad Clud)45 mentioned as such by the poets, only the Clyde fortress, and its region and inhabitants (Cludwys) who are regarded as a polity of some sort.46 The region of Gododdin around Edinburgh figures not once in the poetry of the princes.47 Ignorance as to the location of the kingdom of Rheged is indicated by a Welsh translator of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae who saw no problem in conflating his knowledge of the connection between Urien and Rheged with the Galfridean location of Urien’s kingdom in distant Moray.48 In the previous century, the poet-prince, Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd, affected to turn his horse north, riding hard by day and night to ‘the land of Rheged’, to get to Carlisle, Caer Liwelydd. Much of this famous boasting poem has to do with the girls he pursues, and Hywel plays on names in the way noted by Gerald of Wales. In fact one play on the regional name, Tegeingl (< Deceangli), also a girl’s name, is quoted by Gerald to illustrate the Welsh love of puns; Lliwelydd, too, was used as female name, so the prince’s aim is perhaps metaphorical as he rides north to Lliwelydd’s stronghold, just as he yearns for the ‘land of Tegeingl, fairest in the realm’.49 Moreover in prophetic poetry, Rheged is cited as the locale of the poet Myrddin, who is mentioned here in Prince Hywel’s poem, not as a wild man but as one who sang the praises of women. It has long been argued that the conjunction here of Rheged and Carlisle clinches the location of the kingdom, that it is the key witness, along with the connection made with the name of Dùn Raigit in Galloway;50 the context, however, must make us a little cautious. Safer is the identification of Llwyfennydd, the area persistently associated with Urien Rheged, with the area around the River Lyvennet, a tributary of the River Eden.51 Whatever the origin of the name of the kingdom, Rheged seems to prompt late

43 Although very common in prophecy, e.g. Armes Prydein, ed. by Williams, ll. 10, 67, and 105; Prophecies, ed. and trans. by Haycock, p. 93, and elsewhere, see EWPLN, p. 32. 44 EWPLN, p. 33. 45 The annal entry for 946 ‘Et Strat Clut vastata est a Saxonibus’ is the only reference to Ystrad Clud, ‘the valley of the Clyde’, in the Welsh sources: Nennius, ed. and trans. by Morris, p. 91. 46 See above, p. 55, on Alclud. 47 Although Dafydd Benfras, famously, wished to praise Llywelyn ab Iorwerth c. 1223 in the manner of the poet Aneirin ‘the day he sang The Gododdin’, Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, vi, poem 25, l. 6. 48 Bruts from the Red Book of Hergest, ed. by Rhŷs and Evans, p. 191, l. 30 ‘Mureif y wlad a elwir o enw arall Rheged’; but see Trioedd, ed. and trans. by Bromwich, p. 511, for the suggestion that Geoffrey’s Mureif represents the name Monreith in Wigtonshire rather than Moray. 49 Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, ii, poem 6, l. 35; Gerald of Wales, ‘Journey through Wales’ and ‘Description of Wales’, trans. by Thorpe, p. 243; and further EWPLN, p. 33. 50 Watson, Celtic Place-Names, p. 156. 51 Poems of Taliesin, ed. by Williams, poems 4, l. 21; 7.19; 8.27; 9.10, and 10.8.

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hengerdd poets to talk of gifts, wealth, the share-out of booty and food and drink, possibly playing on a perceived etymological link with ced ‘gift’.52 Another aspiring lover in the twelfth century who imagined the ride north was the poet Gwalchmai. His extravagant boasting poem imagines him coursing up to the ‘homesteads of Lleuddiniawn beyond the River Lliw’, bounding on his mettlesome steed to York: ‘I’m called Gwalchmai, enemy of Edwin and the Angles’. He carries the fame of his royal patron Owain king of Gwynedd, ‘the blessed ruler of Britain’, whose reach enables him, in the poet’s imagination, to claim hostages even from Dumbarton.53 The ‘ride north’ motif was styled by R. Geraint Gruffydd as ‘symbolizing the imaginative ties which still bound medieval Wales to those long-lost British kingdoms’,54 and it is to unpicking that bond that we shall turn next. But this section on names must finish with the simplest, and most potent of all the names: the North, y Gogledd.55 For the medieval Welsh, their poets, triad-makers, and chroniclers, the Gogledd was never North Wales, but the north of their own rightful realm of Britain, a magnetic North powerfully charging the imagination and the imagined past. What were the components of that North, and what were their functions? The tenacity of the idea of the Island of Britain has already been noted, the sense of its former ownership by the Britons, conveyed in terms such as Unbeiniaeth Prydain (‘the overlordship or sovereignty of Britain’),56 and innumerable references by the poets to ‘the rightful ruler of Britain’. This is expressed also in terms of the totality of the Brittonic cultural realm, manifest in Gildas, and in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum, and seemingly being fuelled as land and power were lost to the English, and then to the Normans. This old whole is Arthur’s realm in the twelfth-century tale, Culhwch ac Olwen, as it was to be — for different motives — writ large on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s grand canvas. It may have been in the mind of Lord Rhys ap Gruffudd when he sent out his invitations to what might be called the first ‘eisteddfod’, in Cardigan in 1176, proclaimed a year in advance throughout Wales and England and Scotland, though the inclusion of Ireland and other lands implies even wider cultural aspirations.57 The North of that whole comes to be the main focus: ‘May you possess the North’, is the spur for Taliesin’s legendary patron, Elffin.58 ‘[My lady’s] fame runs swiftly to the land of the North’, says the fourteenth-century poet

52 Saga Poetry, ed. and trans. by Rowland, p. 427 ‘gordyfnassei Reget rodi’ (the men of Rheged had been accustomed to dispense); Red Book Poetry, ed. by Evans, cols 1049.10 and 1053.26–27, etc. 53 Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, i, poem 9. 54 Gruffydd, ‘In Search of Elmet’, p. 78. 55 North (also Nordd) for the north of England appears first in the chronicles in the mid-twelfth century: see Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. nordd. 56 Noted in law-texts as the title of a poem sung before battle or when sharing out spoils, see Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, s.v. unbennaeth. 57 See Williams, ‘Yr Arglwydd Rhys’. 58 Legendary Poems, ed. and trans. by Haycock, poem 12, l. 22.

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Rhisierdyn,59 and many others before and after him. Genealogies from the late tenth century onwards posit northern origins for Gwynedd and Ceredigion rulers, through Cunedda and his sons who are credited in the Historia Brittonum with having come down from Manaw Gododdin to flush out the Irish settlers in Wales. And northern connections were forged for the Welsh saints, by their pedigrees and their exploits. Thus St Cadog, having been active in Ireland, Cornwall, and Brittany, having gone three times to Jerusalem and seven times to Rome, announces his journey — ‘for the sake of prayer’ — to St Andrews, with seven years’ evangelizing on the return trip.60 Triads as well as other sources continue the journey theme: for example, how seven and a half men of King Elidir Mwynfawr’s household were carried down on horseback from Benllech ‘in the North’ to its twin, Benllech in Anglesey. Elidir himself is presented as having married the daughter of the Gwynedd king, Maelgwn, and comes by sea with all his kitchen staff, counsellor, swineherd, etc. onboard, and his cook (‘and he was the half man’!) swimming behind.61 The north–south community was underlined by geographical doublets, real or imagined: for example, a dialogue poem which is an antiquarian listing of northern events and characters, has one of the characters refer to the River Tawe in Wales, and the other character saying — ‘no, not that one, but the further one, by the shores of the sea, a fierce ebbing’, a sort of prompt to open up the programme in the correct Old North application.62 Clud, Aeron, Elfed, Argoed, Llanfor, Lliw, Coed Llwyfain, and other places in Wales were similarly handily ambiguous for poets. The North was made near in one sense, then, yet it was far enough away to contain the exotic. In the triads and poetry, it is portrayed as the locus of fabulous wealth, the ‘family silver’, the land of rich potentates styled hael (generous) and mwynfawr (having treasure) (such as Elidir and Morgan), as well as the miraculous Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain — which included the hamper which turned food for one into food for a hundred, the horn of Brân which served any drink desired, the chariot of Morgan ready for any destination wished for.63 The North was a locus for inspiration, as developed intensively in the Lailoken/Myrddin material whereby prophecies about Welsh events through to the twelfth century and beyond are validated from the Caledonian forest.64 ‘I speak to you from Rheged’, says Myrddin as he relays his insider knowledge of the struggle for the lordship of 59 Gwaith Sefnyn, Rhisierdyn ac Eraill, ed. by Jones and Rheinallt, poem 5, l. 29; another patron’s fame is audible ‘hyd y Gogledd’ (as far as the North), poem 10, l. 18. There are also poetic references from the tenth-century Armes Prydein onwards to the southern Britons of Cornwall and Brittany, but these are far fewer than to the North. 60 Vitae sanctorum, ed. and trans. by Wade-Evans, pp. 80–82. 61 Trioedd, ed. and trans. by Bromwich, p. 115. 62 Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin, p. 72 ‘Nid [y] Tawue nessaw a lawaraw urthid | namwin [y] Tawue eithaw | erir mor terruin treiaw’, and Saga Poetry, ed. and trans. by Rowland, p. 461, following Canu Llywarch Hen, ed. by Ifor William, p. 95, rather than Roberts, ‘Rhai Cerddi Ymddiddan’, p. 317. 63 Trioedd, ed. and trans. by Bromwich, p. 258. 64 Coed Celyddon (cf. Historia Brittonum chapter 56 Cat Coid Celidon, the seventh of Arthur’s battles) is mentioned only in Myrddin prophecies and once by Prydydd y Moch (Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, v, poem 23, l. 162).

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the North — ygnadaeth y Gogledd — and as he reflects on his own tortured past apparently blighted by the slaying of his sister’s son as well as by incessant warring between the British factions. Not surprisingly, the North was monstrous too, peopled with giants, and cannibals eating their father’s hearts, as in Culhwch ac Olwen.65 The last and most dreadful of the tasks set in that story is to get hold of the warm blood of the Black Witch who lives in a cave in the North, ‘in the highlands of Hell’.66 Arthur’s adventures with the witch are also mentioned in a poem where he tackles further monsters in the North. ‘In the mountain of Edinburgh’, we learn, ‘he fought with dog-heads’,67 the Cynbyn, the Cynocephali of fable, placed by the classical writers and Isidore of Seville in the East, in India, in Ethiopia on the Ebstorf map, and in Scandinavia on the Hereford Mappa mundi. The legendary Taliesin figure deals with the dog-heads, too, as he reels off some of his fantastic transformations: ‘I was a speckled snake on the hill, a viper in the lake, a billhook [in the hands of] the Cynocephali, and a stout hunting lance’.68 We may pause here to look more closely at the very long poem where this occurs — Cad Goddau (‘The Battle of the Trees’) recounted by the metamorphic Taliesin.69 The locale is again the North, and the events fantastic. The poem takes its title from its central event, where thirty-four trees and shrubs and other more weedy plants are transformed into a motley battle-array by the magicians Gwydion and Math. The author was perhaps drawing on a pre-existing catalogue of plant names, like those in the Welsh law-texts and the Old Irish tree-list. Part of the intention, no doubt, was to convey the prodigious learning of the Taliesin character that we see being inflated in other poems by the drawing in of international book-learning — whether Orosius, and Isidore, or the widely circulating trivia known as the Ioca monachorum. Here, in this poem, there is another intention too: the guying and parodying of the conventions of heroic warband praise, the central idea perhaps deriving from the metaphorical use in such poetry of warriors as ‘trees’ and ‘columns’ of battle, of armies as ‘forests’ (as cited in modern discussions of Birnam Wood in Macbeth), and the fact that some Welsh personal names were derived from, or were homophones of, tree and plant names: for instance, Afan, Celyn, Gwern, Gwernabwy, Maeldderw, Eithinyn, Grugyn, Gwair, the last five also mentioned in The Gododdin. Thus we see the tree battalion lumbering into line, some keener for the fray than others: the birch has difficulty in getting his armour on because of his size; the alder was first into the attack — ‘a want gysefin’ (who thrust first), one of the hackneyed phrases of heroic praise; the privet is ‘the bull of battle’; elm slashes the centre, the wing, and the rear of the enemy army; the raspberry bush, amazingly, exhibits the extreme daring prized in the heroic ideal as he dispenses with his protective palisade. It is not just 65 See Rodway, ‘Affectionate Cannibalism’, pp. 58–59. 66 Culhwch ac Olwen, ed. by Bromwich and Evans, l. 653. 67 Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin, ed. by Jarman, poem 31, l. 44, discussed by Sims-Williams, ‘Early Welsh Arthurian Poems’, p. 42. On dog-heads in general, see Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural, pp. 94–106. 68 Legendary Poems, ed. and trans. by Haycock, poem 5, ll. 207–09. 69 Legendary Poems, ed. and trans. by Haycock, pp. 167–239.

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the metaphors and phrasing of heroic verse which are being sent up; older verbal forms and word order may also be used to strike an archaic note. This portion of the poem includes a name for cherry (siryan) which seems to come from Old English, and this, together with other features, suggests a date later than the tenth century, probably quite considerably later. Cad Goddau is a useful reminder that poets could manipulate pre-existing material in inventive and creative ways. It has a further significance for the North because the battle is said to be situated at Kaer Nefenhir, the ‘fortress of Nefenhyr’. Nefenhyr/Newenhyr is a character glimpsed fleetingly in other texts, most tellingly of all in Prydydd y Moch’s fine poem to Llywelyn the Great c. 1215 when the Welsh prince had just re-won extensive lands from King John. Not surprisingly, and remembering also his 1209 campaign in the north of England with his father-in-law King John, Llywelyn is cast as ‘the lord of Britain’, a second Cadwallon, his praise running to Carlisle and beyond; his opponents will flee like madmen to the Caledonian wood, he is invested with the valour of the northern heroes, and has ‘the tumult of Newenhyr’.70 John Lloyd-Jones suggested that Newenhyr is in origin *Novantorix,71 but I would take it here not as ‘an enemy king’, but rather ‘the king of the Novantae tribe’, and that Kaer Nefenhir, his fortress, was perhaps in west Galloway. Is it possible that we have in play here the name of the region Goddau, mentioned twice together with Rheged in the so-called ‘historical’ poems attributed to Taliesin?72 That name, Goddau, would mean ‘shrubs’ or ‘shrubby-land’ (compare Shrewsbury for the idea); a battle in the region would be Cad Goddau, literally ‘battle of the shrubs’, a good starting point for an inventive poet, especially if he were familiar with the names of old battles, many of them containing the words for forests and woods. Could it even be that our unknown poet actually knew those two ‘historical’ Urien poems which talk of Rheged and Goddau ‘yn ymddullu’/‘yn ymddullyaw’ (drawing up into ranks)? The legendary Taliesin figure flaunts his northern connections elsewhere, along with his travels to the Otherworld and Ireland. In a famous transformation passage he claims to have been for a year and a half in the shape of a speckled white cockerel ruling over the hens of Edinburgh — the first Cock of the North.73 He then becomes a grain of barley undergoing the malting and brewing process, the motif which surfaces in the ballads which inspired Robert Burns’s John Barleycorn.74 ‘I draughted wine in the great hall of Uffin, in the seas [? of drink] of Gododdin’, he claims, using a collocation very similar to that found at the beginning of several Gododdin stanzas and elsewhere.75 ‘I am an old wanderer, my speech is happy | and beyond Dygen |

Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, v, poem 23. Lloyd-Jones, ‘Nefenhyr’, pp. 35–37. Compare *Carantorix > Cerenhyr (Cerennyr). Poems of Taliesin, ed. by Williams, poem 6, l. 4, and poem 7, l. 44. ‘Bum keilyawc brithwyn | ar ieir yn Eidin’: Legendary Poems, ed. and trans. by Haycock, poem 4, ll. 237–38. 74 Legendary Poems, ed. and trans. by Haycock, pp. 164–65. 75 ‘Neur dier[y]ueis win (ms irin) | ymordei Vffin | ymorthoed Gododin’: Legendary Poems, ed. and trans. by Haycock, poem 14, ll. 35–36, discussed pp. 381–82.

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mine is the praising of Urien’.76 This is unequivocally seen from Welsh soil, with the common phrase ‘beyond Dygen’77 referring to land way beyond the mountains north-east of Welshpool near the present border, and the rhyming words hen, llawen, Urien matching those of the closing tag in the putative historical Taliesin poems. To these various functions of the North discussed above we have to add, of course, the North as theatre of war, partly flattened out in the poetic memory as conflict with the English, but also as a theatre of conflict between the Britons themselves, with irrevocable consequences, a theme imaginatively developed particularly in two important sources: the early englyn cycle about Urien Rheged dated by Jenny Rowland to the late eighth to mid-ninth century,78 and the account in the Historia Brittonum of the slaying of Urien at the instigation of one Morgant, a jealous fellow-Briton — an account which itself may have been influenced by poetic treatments.79 Much later sources allude to conflicting Britons in the north-west, too, with the sons of Eliffer ranged against Gwenddolau and his allies in 573 at the Battle of Arfderydd (Arthuret), just north of Carlisle, an event which attracted much literary interest.80 Somewhere in this web of Myrddin material, complicated by the likely influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini,81 is Áedán mac Gabráin, d. 607. This well-documented figure is the Gael most mentioned in the Welsh sources. He appears as the ravager of Rhydderch’s court at Dumbarton, and in a late prophecy — presumably because of his alliance with Myrddin’s patron, Gwenddolau — as a promised deliverer, almost an honorary Briton, and links were made between him and Welsh dynasties.82 His grandson’s death at Strathcarron in 642 at the hands of the grandson of Nwython of Strathclyde is the subject of a verse found with The Gododdin: this was the last stand for his Dálriadic line, and Dyfnwal Frych’s head, like Urien’s, is gnawed by ravens.83 There is no conclusive backing for either faction. Elsewhere too, some neutralizing of opposing northern factions is visible: the introduction of Urien’s mysterious assassin,

76 ‘Wyf kerdenhin hen, | wyf kyfreu lawen, | a thraw y Dygen | meu molawt Vryen’: Legendary Poems, ed. and trans. by Haycock, poem 14, ll. 39–42. 77 Perhaps another name for Breiddin or one of its peaks or a nearby stream, often mentioned as a boundary: e.g. Saga Poetry, ed. and trans. by Rowland, p. 446; and frequently in the work of the Poets of the Princes. 78 Saga Poetry, ed. and trans. by Rowland, pp. 388–89. 79 Rowland is cautious, noting that the account of Urien in the Historia Brittonum ‘may be coloured by saga’, and that ‘both would seem to be affected by the same type of story and [favourable] opinion of Urien’, Saga Poetry, pp. 91–92; Sims-Williams, ‘The Death of Urien’, p. 25, concurs, suggesting further that the ‘story of Urien’s death at the hands of a fellow Briton is a parallel story [to that of Vortimer in Kent], with a comparable message, set in the north’. 80 Details in Saga Poetry, ed. and trans. by Rowland, pp. 109–14; Trioedd, ed. and trans. by Bromwich, pp. 219–21. Geoffrey of Monmouth aligns Rhydderch Hael of Dumbarton with the faction opposing Gwenddolau; Myrddin certainly goes in fear of Rhydderch in the poems attached to his name: Vita Merlini, ed. and trans. by Basil Clarke, pp. 213–14. 81 See Padel, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’. 82 Trioedd, ed. and trans. by Bromwich, pp. 272–74. In ‘Peirian Vaban’, ed. by Jarman, p. 104, Aeddan is styled as enemy of Rhydderch, one clodleu ‘of bright fame’, with arms, who will come with a host over the broad sea, with a host ‘from Manaw and the islands’. 83 Canu Aneirin, ed. by Williams, ll. 966–77, discussed p. xli.

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Llofan, may be a distancing mechanism to play down the dissent between the northern rulers, as Jenny Rowland suggests;84 she notes, too, how later court poets are happy to compare their patrons with members of opposing northern dynasties — as though they could be both Achilles and Hector. Other adjustments were undoubtedly made in literary texts: in the case of Urien’s cousin, Llywarch Hen, his sons’ exploits have been transplanted bodily down to the Welsh borders. In the case of the third great englyn cycle, Canu Heledd, the fortunes of seventh-century Powys have been recast, not reflecting at all the pressures being exerted by Northumbria, and Powys’ alliances with Mercia, but rather telescoping and distorting events, and memorializing the lost lands in the light of subsequent Mercian dominance, with memories of those earlier alliances being sublimated in shadowy hints of a failed dynastic marriage.85 Returning briefly to northern battles, we may note how they were used as glorious precedents, or events which could be avenged: so Llywelyn the Great’s victory at Chester in 1215 avenges the death of Cadwallon at the Battle of Canysgawl (near Heavenfield) six centuries earlier in 634.86 They could also validate privileges and precedence among the Welsh in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the claim of fourteen special fiscal and legal rights for the men of Arfon was backed by imagined sixth-century events on the Forth,87 while the Privileges of the Men of Powys, listed in a twelfth-century poem, were derived from those bestowed on the Powys warband at the battles of Chester (615) and Meigen.88 As for Catraeth, Catterick, the sixth-century defeat central to The Gododdin, there are only two references in court poetry, one in the prince-poet Owain Cyfeiliog’s noisy praise of his feasting warband in 1155;89 the other in a later, quiet and poignant elegy for Rhodri ab Owain whose own career was blighted by excessive internecine tribulations: Catraeth there is a great misfortune, a great mistake, a lesson that ‘no man can rule his own fate’.90 Interest has long focused on examining the northern ‘candidates for sixth-century honours’, as Ifor Williams called them, the materials that may have been composed in the Old North rather than at a distance: some portion of The Gododdin; eight poems to Urien Rheged; an elegy for his son Owain; two poems to Gwallog; and from the seventh century, a praise-poem to Cadwallon of Gwynedd who was active in the North.91 The elegy for Cunedda has been put forward for honours in the fifth,

Saga Poetry, ed. and trans. by Rowland, pp. 114–18. Saga Poetry, ed. and trans. by Rowland, pp. 139–45. Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, vi, poem 18, l. 28. See above, p. 56 n. 30. Owen, ‘Royal Propaganda’, pp. 238–45 and 252–54; ‘Breintiau Gwŷr Powys’, ed. by Charles-Edwards and Jones. Further on the location of Meigen, EWPLN, pp. 16–17. 89 Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, ii, poem 14, l. 123; a triad c. 1350 refers to the warband of Mynyddog at Catraeth, Trioedd, ed. and trans. by Bromwich, p. 70. 90 Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, i, poem, l. 22. The tone recalls the praise of Cadwallon of Gwynedd, in which the ruler Gwallog is implicated: ‘digones gwychyr Gwallawc | eilywed Gattraeth fawr vygedawc’ (brave Gwallog caused the great, renowned loss of Catraeth), ‘Canu Cadwallon’, ed. by Gruffydd, p. 29. 91 Perhaps from the North, according to Woolf, ‘Caedualla Rex Brettonum’. 84 85 86 87 88

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even the fourth century.92 Several considerations arise with regard to the material discussed above. Firstly, and very obviously, poems with a northern background could — and were, with flair and imagination, as we saw in the case of Cad Goddau — being composed in Wales. Secondly, an impartial investigation cannot attach diagnostic significance to northern place names that are referred to in later sources, from Armes Prydain and the Urien/Llywarch englynion onwards (Eidin/Eiddyn, Dumbarton, Carlisle, Erechwydd, Rheged, Bannog, Gafran, etc.), nor (especially) to those that could have been known via sources such as the Historia Brittonum, Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica, and early annals (Manaw Gododdin, Elfed, Brewyn, Derwennydd, Catterick, etc.). There is perhaps good reason to be cautious of vague or transparent place names (including names in the Poems of Taliesin such as Argoed, Arfynydd, Coed Baidd, Pencoed, Bre Trwyn, Garth Merin, Rhos Terra, etc.). Names formed from gwyn /gwen (‘white, fair’), such as Gwensteri, Gwen Ystrad, Ygwen, Llech Wen, Clydwyn (all in Poems of Taliesin), and Maen Gwyngwn, and Gwynasedd (in The Gododdin) may relate to a conventional description of the type seen in gwenwlad Erechwydd,93 gwendud Glud,94 and personal names such as Gwen, Gwyn, Gwenddolau, Gwenddydd, Gwenabwy, mab Gwengad, etc.); synonymous lleu (and compounds such as lleudud, lleufre)95 may be included in this class. The description of Urien as ‘gold-king of the North’, and the mentions of ‘Gwynedd and Gogledd’, ‘the heroism of the Gogledd’, and so on in The Gododdin are possibly suspect.96 Thirdly, The Gododdin is very thin on place names: Bryn Hyddwn and Maen Gwyngwn (mentioned above) both contain personal names found in other sources;97 which leaves us with Rhyd Benclwyd, Eleirch Fre, and Buddugre (the name of two regions in Wales),98 the mysterious region, Uffin, and ‘tra merin Iuddeu’ (beyond the sea of Iuddau) perhaps the upper Forth, as found in the Historia Brittonum, chapter 65.99 This paucity cannot be conclusive either way, only suggestive. In The Gododdin, after all, we are dealing with a powerful literary construction worked up around simple themes and devices: heroic defeat, the polarities of the feasting-hall and the battle; and a name, Catraeth, happily rhyming with the 3rd preterite of the verbs ‘to rear’, ‘to go’, ‘to do’ (maeth, aeth, gwnaeth), with the adjective ffraeth ‘ready,

92 Koch, ‘Marwnad Cunedda’, and Cunedda, Cynan, ed. and trans. by Koch; for a different view, see the edition in Legendary Poems, ed. and trans. by Haycock, pp. 488–90, and Sims-Williams, ‘Dating’, pp. 182–83, 193, and 197–201. 93 Prophecies, ed. and trans. by Haycock, poem 3, l. 62. 94 Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, vi, poem 20, l. 43. 95 Compare Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd’s lleudir Goglet ‘the light-filled/open land of the North’, Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, ed. by Gruffydd, ii, poem 6, l. 3; Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin, ed. by Jarman, poem 18, l. 118 ‘Bet unpen o Pridein yn lleutir Guynassed’ (the grave of the ruler of Britain in the light-filled land of Gwynasedd). 96 Poems of Taliesin, ed. by Williams, poem 3, l. 26; also found in Red Book Poetry, ed. by Evans, col. 584, ll. 3–4 eurdein (recte eurde[yr]n) Gogled; Canu Aneirin, ed. by Williams, 43, 553, and cf. l. 1459. 97 The latter identified as ‘the stone of the Venicones’ by Koch, The Gododdin of Aneirin, p. 167. 98 One in Maelienydd, one in Iâl: see Lloyd-Jones, Geirfa, s.n. 99 On Iudeu, see Saga Poetry, ed. and trans. by Rowland, pp. 130–31, 134, 137, and references.

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prepared’, and the abstract noun hiraeth ‘longing, sense of loss’. A capsule, really, of the story. Men’s names are absolutely central, of course, and as with the warband poems of the twelfth-century court poets, the perceived etymology is often key to the way the heroes are described. An expanding and inclusive imperative may be at work, bringing in names such as Aeddan, and the men of Gwynedd. Fourthly, we have seen a number of Northern place names being used aspirationally: in a patently late prophecy, Cadwaladr, a promised deliverer, is imagined as carrying suffering ‘tra Merin Reget’ (beyond the sea of Rheged), and that he, ‘the gift-lord shall rule in Elfed’,100 and such usage might explain Gwallog’s posturing, not only as mighty ‘from the fortress of the Clyde to Caer Garadog’, but also his status as ‘judge over Elfed’.101 Similar hyperbole may have generated llyw Catraeth (‘the ruler of Catraeth’) for Urien. We can see from the englyn cycle about him, and from the Historia Brittonum, that Urien was viewed as the key player in the northern resurgence: manufactured praise poems to him therefore cannot be ruled out, nor indeed the assigning to his service of Taliesin, one of the Brittonic poets synchronized with him — not said categorically in the Historia Brittonum to be northern, and thus open for appropriation even by the Breton learned class in the eleventh century.102 Urien’s son, Owain, appears to have been the focus of increasing interest from the ninth century onwards, and his elegy could perhaps be challenged on metrical grounds.103 Certainly, the later poets could turn out elegies for the long dead and buried, the legendary even — Owain’s elegy lies cheek-by-jowl with one for the story character, Dylan son of Wave, another for the Irish Cú Roí mac Dáiri, one for Hercules, one for Alexander the Great, and another for the nodal ancestor Cunedda, clearly assimilated to the legendary Taliesin repertoire. This last elegy has some giveaway late forms, including an almost certainly late 3rd sg. preterite form in -awdd, as well as a trotting out of well-known Caer Liwelydd (Carlisle) and Caer Wair, mention of the men of Bernicia, and so forth.104 As we were reminded by Iolo Goch, travelling North requires us to buckle on St Curig’s Breastplate, and to arm ourselves as well as we can against elfshot and horse-fatigue. To discern what poems were indeed composed in the north, we need weapons selected from the armouries of philology, metrics and diction, toponomy, history, and genealogy — unblunted by bias or wishful thinking. And we must wrest what we can from later literary sources. In concentrating, as we have done here, on material running from the late eighth to the thirteenth centuries, we can at least grasp some idea of what the North was for those authors in Wales — a virtual realm

100 Prophecies, ed. and trans. by Haycock, poem 8, ll. 79–80. 101 Poems of Taliesin, ed. by Williams, poem 12, ll. 48 and 21. 102 Fleuriot, ‘Sur quatre textes bretons en latin’; Koch, ‘De sancto Iudicaelo rege historia’. The significance for the Gododdin of a gloss guotodinou in the Angers Bede (c. 897), innom ir guotodinou on ethesiarum (glossed elsewhere in Old Irish as iarthuaiscerddach ‘(winds) of the north-west’), is unclear: see Lambert, ‘Les commentaires celtiques’, p. 126. I owe this reference to Stefan Schumacher. 103 Its closest counterpart is the Mynydd Carn fragment, perhaps part of an elegy for Caradog ap Gruffudd slain in battle in 1082: Jones, ‘The Mynydd Carn “Prophecy”’. 104 See n. 92 above.

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of ‘beyond and before’, and like the old common Germanic homeland, a shareable, adaptable, and expandable resource, and one worthy of study in itself.

Works Cited Primary Sources Adomnán, Life of Columba, ed. and trans. by Alan Orr Anderson and Marjorie Orr Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991) Armes Prydein: The Prophecy of Britain from the Book of Taliesin, ed. by Ifor Williams, trans. by Rachel Bromwich, Mediaeval and Modern Welsh Series, 6 (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1972) ‘Breintiau Gwŷr Powys: The Liberties of the Men of Powys’, ed. and trans. by Thomas M. Charles-Edwards and Nerys Ann Jones, in The Welsh King and his Court, ed. by Thomas M. Charles-Edwards, Morfydd E. Owen, and Paul Russell (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 191–223 Brut Dingestow, ed. by Henry Lewis (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1942) Brut y Tywysogyon (Peniarth MS 20), ed. by Thomas Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1941) Canu Aneirin, ed. by Ifor Williams (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1938) ‘Canu Cadwallon ap Cadfan’, ed. by R. Geraint Gruffydd, in Astudiaethau ar yr Hengerdd: Studies in Old Welsh Poetry Presented to Sir Idris Foster, ed. by Rachel Bromwich and Brinley R. Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1978), pp. 25–43 Culhwch ac Olwen: An Edition and Study of the Oldest Arthurian Tale, ed. by Rachel Bromwich and D. Simon Evans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992) ‘Cunedda’, ‘Cynan’, ‘Cadwallon’, ‘Cynddylan’: Four Welsh Poems and Britain 383–655, ed. and trans. by John T. Koch (Aberystwyth: University of Wales Centre of Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, 2013) Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, general ed. R. Geraint Gruffydd, 6 vols (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991–96) Early Welsh Saga Poetry: A Study and Edition of the ‘Englynion’, ed. and trans. by Jenny Rowland (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990) The Four Ancient Books of Wales, ed. by Watson Forbes Skene, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1868) Geoffrey of Monmouth, Life of Merlin: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vita Merlini, ed. and trans. by Basil Clarke (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1973) ———, The History of the Kings of Britain, ‘De gestis Britonum’ (Historia regum Britanniae), ed. by Michael D. Reeve, trans. by Neil Wright, Arthurian Studies, 69 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007) Gerald of Wales, ‘The Journey through Wales’ and ‘The Description of Wales’, trans. by Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) The Gododdin of Aneirin, ed. and trans. by John T. Koch (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996) Gwaith Iolo Goch, ed. by Dafydd R. Johnston (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988)

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Gwaith Sefnyn, Rhisierdyn ac Eraill, ed. by Nerys Ann Jones and Erwain Haf Rheinallt (Aberystwyth: University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, 1995) Gwaith Siôn Ceri, ed. by A. Cynfael Lake, Cyfres Beirdd yr Uchelwyr (Aberystwyth: University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, 1996) Iolo Goch: Poems, trans. by Dafydd Johnston (Llandysul: Gomer, 1993) Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, ed. and trans. by Marged Haycock, 2nd edn (Aberystwyth: CMCS Publications, 2015) Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin, ed. by Alfred O. H. Jarman (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1982) Llyfr Iorwerth, ed. by Aled Rhys Wiliam (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1960) Nennius, British History and the Welsh Annals, ed. and trans. by John Morris (London: Phillimore, 1980) ‘Peirian Vaban’, ed. by A. O. H. Jarman, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 14 (1950–52), 104–08 The Poems of Taliesin, ed. by Ifor Williams, English version by J. E. Caerwyn Williams, Mediaeval and Modern Welsh Series, 3 (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1968) Poetry from the Red Book of Hergest, ed. by J. Gwenogvryn Evans (Llanbedrog: privately printed, 1911) Prophecies from the Book of Taliesin, ed. and trans. by Marged Haycock (Aberystwyth: CMCS Publications, 2013) The Text of ‘The Bruts’ from the Red Book of Hergest, ed. by John Rhŷs and J. Gwenogvryn Evans (Oxford: privately printed, 1890) Trioedd Ynys Prydein, ed. and trans. by Rachel Bromwich, 3rd edn (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014; 1st edn 1961) Vitae sanctorum Britanniae et genealogiae, ed. and trans. by Arthur W. Wade-Evans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1944) Secondary Works Bartlett, Robert, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) Breeze, Andrew, ‘Seventh-Century Northumbria and a Poem to Cadwallon’, Northern History, 38 (2001), 145–52 Davies, Rees R., The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) Fleuriot, Léon, ‘Sur quatre textes bretons en latin, le liber vetustissimus de Geoffroy de Monmouth et le séjour de Taliesin en Bretagne’, Études Celtiques, 18 (1981), 207–13 Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru: A Dictionary of the Welsh Language [accessed 10 May 2019] Gruffydd, R. Geraint, ‘Where Was Rhaeadr Derwennydd (Canu Aneirin, Line 114)?’, in Celtic Language, Celtic Culture: A Festschrift for Eric P. Hamp, ed. by A. T. E. Matonis and Daniel F. Melia (Van Nuys: Ford & Bailie, 1990), pp. 261–66 ———, ‘In Search of Elmet’, Studia Celtica, 28 (1994), 63–79 Harvey, Paul D. A., Mappa Mundi: The Hereford World Map, 2nd edn (Hereford: Hereford Cathedral, 2002)

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Haycock, Marged, Where Cider Ends There Ale Begins to Reign: Drink in Medieval Welsh Poetry (Cambridge: Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic, 2000) ———, ‘Early Welsh Poets Look North’, in Beyond the Gododdin: Dark Age Scotland in Medieval Wales, ed. by Alex Woolf, St John’s House Papers, 13 (St Andrews: The Committee for Dark Age Studies, University of St. Andrews, 2013), pp. 7–39 Huws, Daniel, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000) Isaac, Graham R., ‘Gweith Gwen Ystrat and the Northern Heroic Age of the Sixth Century’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 36 (1998), 61–70 Jackson, Kenneth, ‘Rhai sylwadau ar “Kulhwch ac Olwen”’, Ysgrifau Beirniadol, 12 (1982), 12–23 Jones, Nerys Ann, ‘The Mynydd Carn “Prophecy”: A Reassessment’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 38 (1999), 73–92 Jones, Thomas, ‘Teir ynys Prydein a’i their rac ynys’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 17 (1956–58), 268–69 Koch, John T., ‘Marwnad Cunedda a Diwedd y Brydain Rufeinig’, in Yr Hen Iaith: Studies in Early Welsh, ed. by Paul Russell (Aberystwyth: Celtic Studies Publications, 2003), pp. 171–97 ———, ‘De sancto Iudicaelo rege historia and its Implications for the Welsh Taliesin’, CSANA Yearbook, 3–4 (2005), 247–62 Lambert, Pierre-Yves, ‘Les commentaires celtiques à Bede le Venerable’, Études Celtiques, 20 (1983), 119–43 Lloyd-Jones, John, Geirfa Barddoniaeth Gynnar Gymraeg, 2 vols (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1931–63) ———, ‘Nefenhyr’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 14 (1950–52), 35–37 Oliver Padel, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Development of the Merlin Legend’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 51 (2006), 37–65 Owen, Morfydd E., ‘Royal Propaganda: Stories from the Law-Texts’, in The Welsh King and his Court, ed. by Thomas M. Charles-Edwards, Morfydd E. Owen, and Paul Russell (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 224–54 Roberts, Brynley F., ‘Rhai Cerddi Ymddiddan’, in Astudiaethau ar yr Hengerdd: Studies in Old Welsh Poetry Presented to Sir Idris Foster, ed. by Rachel Bromwich and Brinley R. Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales, 1978), pp. 281–325 ———, ‘Pen Penwaedd a Phentir Gafran’, Llên Cymru, 13 (1980–81), 278–81 Rodway, Simon, ‘Affectionate Cannibalism and the Blood Drinking Motif in Gaelic Literature’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 74 (2017), 47–66 Sims-Williams, Patrick, ‘Early Welsh Arthurian Poems’, in The Arthur of the Welsh, ed. by Rachel Bromwich, A. O. H. Jarman, and Brynley F. Roberts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), pp. 33–72 ———, ‘The Death of Urien’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 32 (1996), 25–56 ———, ‘Dating the Poems of Aneirin and Taliesin’, Zeitschrift für celtische Philologie, 63 (2016), 163–234 Watson, William J., The History of the Celtic Place-Names of Scotland (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Son, 1926) Williams, Glanmor, The Welsh Church from Conquest to Reformation (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1962)

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Williams, J. E. Caerwyn, ‘Yr Arglwydd Rhys ac “Eisteddfod” Aberteifi 1176’, in Yr Arglwydd Rhys, ed. by Nerys Ann Jones and Huw Pryce (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1996), pp. 94–128 Woolf, Alex, ‘Caedualla Rex Brettonum and the Passing of the Old North’, Northern History, 41 (2004), 1–20 Wmffre, Iwan, ‘Penrhyn Blathaon ac amgyffred yr hen Gymry o eithafion Gogledd Prydain’, Studia Celtica, 38 (2004), 59–68

John Moffatt

The Future Is East Ideological Mapping in the Vínland Sagas

Navigating the Vínland Sagas The so-called ‘Vínland Sagas’, which consist of Eiríks saga rauða (Erik the Red’s Saga) and Grœnlendinga saga (the Greenlanders’ Saga), have an image problem. They are the most widely studied and published-upon of the Íslendingasögur, the ‘sagas of Icelanders’ or ‘Icelandic family sagas’, but are perhaps among the least regarded for their literary merit.1 On the one hand, the intrinsic interest of their account of the first documented effort at colonization in the Americas has guaranteed them a wide audience in Europe and perhaps especially in North America. At the same time, however, unlike other sagas such as Brennu-Njáls saga or Egilssaga Skallagrímssonar, scholarly interest has focused on evaluating their historical and anthropological veracity, and not on examining how these texts situate their content and attribute significance to it.2 These sagas’ highly conventional approach to content and style may partly account for the lack of scholarly interest in exploring them beyond their historical dimensions. Like the other vernacular Old Icelandic narratives which make up the family saga genre, these prose texts celebrate prominent Icelanders of the millennial settlement age from the vantage point of the thirteenth century, some two to three centuries later. Their comparatively brief structures, combining elements of the chronicle and novelistic reimaginings of past events, including dialogue, feature a characteristically elliptical, ‘scaffolded’ approach3 to the development of character and plot, tantalizing but elusive allusions to pre-Christian belief and practice, an understated tone, a mixture of stark realism and the supernatural, and enough inconsistencies with each other and with other cognate texts to keep alive arguments

1 Cf. Magnus Magnusson and Herman Pálsson, ‘Introduction’, p. 10. 2 For a concise survey of the relevant scholarship, see Gísli Sigurðsson, ‘Introduction’, pp. ix–xxxviii. 3 Andersson, The Icelandic Family Saga, pp. 35 ff. John Moffatt, University of Saskatchewan. [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 71–93 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120787

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about orality and textuality in their transmission.4 The Vínland narratives’ perceived conventionality has perhaps led scholars to conclude that these sagas lack individual significance within the family saga genre, apart from their general subject matter. In fact, the Íslendingasögur offer a rich field of investigation to critics equipped with the techniques of contemporary and historical rhetorical analysis, and a close analysis of the Vínland sagas demonstrates the necessity of reading individual sagas not as exercises in genre definition, but as responses to specific rhetorical situations. The conventions of the saga form must be viewed as simply one of the constraints to consider in establishing the nature of a given saga as a motivated discourse.

Ideological Maps: The North as Rhetorical Space This paper explores the Vínland sagas as exercises in creating a conceptual map of Scandinavian exploration and expansion in the North Atlantic as an ethical space. Initially, environmental similarities and access to familiar resources which attracted the Norse adventurers position Greenland and the lands beyond within a larger Northern realm to be dominated by the endeavours of Icelanders acting in traditional ‘Viking’ mode. However, the doubtful future of the Greenland colony and the abandonment of the North American outposts force the saga writers to adopt a rhetorical position which distinguishes between Iceland as a viable Northern environment for settlement, and the lands beyond as irredeemable. To accomplish this goal, the Vínland sagas map the ‘non-viable’ North as what I will term a ‘subjunctive’ rhetorical space. As a largely believable yet undefined environment, these contingent parts of the known North serve as a stage on which the potential consequences of ethical alternatives can be explored. In such a space, protagonists whose character is generally held up as exemplary can be shown in a less than favourable light; in Greenland or Vínland, we see their potential to be compromised, but only in the context of environments which fail to provide the ethical ‘infrastructure’ necessary to realize the characters’ ethical potential. Such ideological mapping relies on an understanding of the texts’ rhetoric, that is, their strategies for instilling a world view in the audience whereby the characters’ actions, or failures to act, are normalized in the reader’s expectations. The analysis demonstrates how modern rhetorical theory, with its attention to ideology, provides vocabularies and methods useful to assessing how the sagas shift the nature of the audience’s identification with the narrative. Kenneth Burke’s emphasis on rhetoric as inducing changes in attitude is foundational to this reassessment of reading the sagas. The paper also applies elements of Maurice Charland’s ‘constitutive rhetoric’ to the interpretation of these sagas. Charland’s theory charts certain processes by which a community aligns its identity with a given narrative of its origin and destiny, thus providing an interpretive framework in which to explore how the Vínland sagas position their protagonists as exemplary ancestors for the immediate reading audience.



4 Cf. Gísli Sigurðsson, The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition, passim, and Byock, ‘The Sagas and the 21st Century’, passim.

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History and Rhetoric in Approaching the Vínland Sagas In examining the relationship between text and audience in Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga, with their accounts of the settlement of Greenland and the abortive expedition to the coast of North America, one must begin with the assumption that they speak to the age in which they were written. The sögumenn who set them down addressed thirteenth-century Icelanders, who may be considered to have felt some degree of incipient national pride in the achievements of their ancestors. However, that same audience would have been aware of not sharing the beliefs and attitudes of the age in which the narratives take place. This approach understands the texts as repositories of information, some of it historically accurate, some of it fictionalized in the process of transmission, and some of it fanciful, an act of alignment between the source materials and a sense of how they fit into genres involving journeys to strange foreign lands. Much scholarship has been devoted to sorting through the overlapping narratives of the two sagas, to determine what they actually tell us about the wheres and whens of the Norse exploration of North America, and to assess what the original audience may have known or believed about the accounts that had come down to them of the last westward push of Scandinavian adventurers in the North Atlantic. Attendant on these lines of inquiry is the question of veracity, of verifiable truth. The scholarship asks, ‘What is the relationship between what the sagas tell us happened in the lands beyond Greenland, and what actually happened? How do the verbal maps of the saga fit on top of actual geography? To what extent can we make a meaningful connection between archaeological findings such as those at l’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland and the accounts in these texts? Did the saga writers and their immediate audience consider these accounts factual, at least to some degree? Where would the compilers and readers place these sagas on a continuum between history and literature as we distinguish them today?’ While one hopes that at least some of these questions will someday be answered as new textual and archaeological evidence comes to light, there are other questions near to hand that can be addressed regarding what the existing texts say, independent of questions of their historical accuracy or status as representative of a genre. The questions that can be explored at somewhat closer range involve not the recovery of lost or missing data, but an assessment of what the narratives accomplish by configuring the material as they do. We are talking here of examining the rhetoric of the Vínland sagas. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle defined his subject matter as ‘the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion’,5 and the concept of persuasion pertains here in the assumption that the sögumenn had a point of view regarding significant historical figures, and particularly the Icelanders Þorfinnr Karlsefni and Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir, that they wished the narrative to uphold in the audience’s perception. Lloyd Bitzer (1968) argues that every rhetorical situation involves a speaker/writer who must engage an audience to take action to remedy what Bitzer calls a rhetorical exigence, ‘an imperfection marked by urgency […] a thing which 5 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i 1355b 26.

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is other than it should be’.6 Moreover, ‘an exigence is rhetorical when it is capable of positive modification and when positive modification requires discourse or can be assisted by discourse’.7 For the authors of ESR and GS, the exigence involves the reputation of Karlsefni and specifically of Guðríðr8 in the context of the narrative, where they do not appear in a particularly ideal light. Karlsefni, whose sobriquet means ‘a thorough man’ (in other words, ‘a man through and through’)9 or ‘having the makings of a man’10 is unable to persist in the settlement effort in the face of armed opposition from the indigenous people of the new land; Guðríðr is constrained by the situation from the full exercise of her Christian beliefs in Greenland and has a limited sphere of action in Vínland. The challenge for the authors is to tell the story as they knew or imagined it from whatever body of oral and written sources were available, and find a way for the story, with its innate conflict in values, to provide the means of persuasion to exonerate the protagonists from any perception of failure or moral compromise. Persuasion, however, is only one part of how the texts operate in rhetorical terms. Twentieth-century rhetorical theory, under the influence of American rhetorician and literary theorist Kenneth Burke, pursues the influence of a text on its audience through identification, which Burke considers the prime mover of rhetorical activity, as a precondition to persuasion. In A Rhetoric of Motives (1969), Burke writes that an act of persuasion may be for the purpose of causing the audience to identify itself with the speaker’s interests; and the speaker draws on identification of interests to establish rapport between himself and his audience. So, there is no chance of our keeping apart the meanings of persuasion, identification (‘consubstantiality’), and communication (the nature of rhetoric as ‘addressed’).11 Contemporary rhetorical criticism is concerned with how a text can be shown to cultivate a shared attitude in the rhetor (speaker/writer) and audience, to achieve the consubstantiality in their outlook that Burke sees as the basis of effective rhetorical communication.12 Burke, in A Grammar of Motives (1969), defined attitude as ‘the preparation for an act, which would make it a kind of symbolic act, or incipient act’.13 Thus, the rhetoric of a text is effective when the rhetor uses his or her material to create in the audience an overall perception of the subject which determines how the audience will likely act in response to any given information about the subject; a dominant attitude will even permit the ‘turning’ of seemingly contrary information to the service of the dominant attitude, in



6 Bitzer, ‘The Rhetorical Situation’, p. 6. 7 Bitzer, ‘The Rhetorical Situation’, p. 7. 8 In this study, Karlsefni represents traditional male values of leadership and courage that we may associate with traditional ‘Viking values’, which prove unsuccessful in Vínland. My analysis focuses on Guðríðr, whose actions are consistently constrained by ambiguities which invite the kind of rhetorical interpretation discussed below. 9 Cleasby and Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, p. 116. 10 Zoega, A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic, p. 237. 11 Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, p. 46. 12 Cf. Burke, Rhetoric, pp. 20–23. 13 Burke, A Grammar of Motives, p. 20.

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what Burke elsewhere calls ‘symbolic mergers’.14 Persuasion follows on identification, when the reader’s sense of sharing the text’s attitude is powerful enough not merely to facilitate acceptance of information as true and valid, but to motivate a level of self-persuasion where the reader is inclined to embrace and act upon the implications of the evidence.15 In both ESR and GS, attitude is a function of locality, specifically an ‘incipient act’ where the North, or a continuum of North and West, act as what Burke calls the rhetorical Scene,16 determining the ‘grammar’ of the protagonists’ motivation as the sagas portray them. This underlying grammar of North prompts the reader to respond to the lands beyond Iceland in uncertain, ambiguous terms, where signs of conventional religious, social, or even natural order that pertain in Iceland are withheld. The parameters of ethical behaviour become difficult to establish with any degree of certainty. The ‘Viking’ values of physical courage, prowess in warfare, and the pursuit of wealth ring hollow in the face of brute realities of distance, disease, hunger, and of a violence that with few exceptions is driven more by the environment than by forceful personalities or codes. The alternative Christian perspective in these texts is itself more of an attitude than a formal set of practices, defined more by its rejection of traditional Norse religion than by explicit observance or stated doctrine, and the further one goes into the landscapes beyond Iceland, the less effectual Christianity appears either as a defence against danger or evil, or as a testament to good character. Consequently, our expectations of what might constitute ethical behaviour become increasingly contingent or provisional.

The Subjunctive North At the same time, the North as portrayed in these sagas cannot simply be dismissed as a savage space that resists civilization. It is neither an inconceivable Other from which the mind that has accepted Christian and European values recoils, nor a boreal Heart of Darkness where ideological restraint finds no purchase. Rather, the North into which the protagonists venture is a subjunctive, adjacent space, a space of next steps where the social and ethical implications of settlement must be imagined and faced. I am using the term subjunctive here as public memory scholar Charles E. Scott uses it; in grammar, the subjunctive is ‘a mood of non-completion contrary to fact’,17 and Scott uses it to describe how the acts and artefacts on which publics call to create shared memories ‘‘‘betoken [ ] indeterminate” contingency, possibility, and mood […] This subjunctive quality of appearing suggests that what is public might

14 Burke, Attitudes toward History, pp. 328–29. 15 The enthymeme, or ‘rhetorical syllogism’, described by Aristotle in the Rhetoric 1356b 5, whereby a premise is suppressed in the expectation that the audience will supply it as ‘common sense’, plays a large part in the kind of self-persuasion referred to here. 16 In Burke’s ‘dramatistic’ methodology, analysis of an event begins by identifying its ‘pentadic’” constituent elements of Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, and Purpose, and identifying which relations between the elements have the clearest impact on its development and outcome. See A Grammar of Motives, pp. xv–xxiii. The present study is not working with the pentadic model in strict terms. 17 Scott, ‘The Appearance of Public Memory’, p. 154.

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be otherwise, is not only factual and might be found, as it were in might rather than is’.18 The Vínland sagas’ North is a subjunctive space in that it is a place of choices, where the favoured choice is understood through the potential consequences of its alternative. In this subjunctive space, the ethos promoted through the characters with whom we are encouraged to identify is immanent, rather than articulated in action; it resides in the construction of the choices which the characters face, and what potential futures are foreseeable through those options. As such, Burke’s emphasis on attitude as ‘incipient act’ is central to the sagas’ rhetoric, which predisposes the reader to respond to the characters’ often less-than-heroic decisions in a favourable way.

Frames of Acceptance: Situating Reversal How both sagas situate the failure of Norse adventurers to establish a foothold in North America has much to tell us about how the saga narratives create what Burke called a ‘comic frame of acceptance’ in Attitudes toward History,19 within which the protagonists’ motivation may be assessed and ultimately understood as necessary and desirable. Burke defines a frame of acceptance as ‘the more or less organized system of meanings by which a thinking man gauges the historical situation and adopts a role with relation to it’.20 As Joseph R. Gusfield has noted, Burke’s ‘frames of acceptance’, comic, tragic, or otherwise, are not ‘forms of passivity, but the terms of relationship’21 in the kinds of engagement which they prompt. Both sagas in question face the challenge of taking the clearly inglorious defeat of the Vínland adventurers and finding in it something which redeems Karlsefni and Guðríðr as idealized ancestral types worthy of celebration. The source material locates their actions in a narrative that has all the hallmarks of the ‘Viking’ tradition: venturing over the horizon in search of reputation and wealth; conflict, murder and outlawry, and a leaven of supernatural interference and sheer physical danger and hardship. At the same time, key characters such as Leifr Eiriksson and Guðríðr are presented as professed Christians, whose values will at least technically be at odds with elements of Norse tradition. The comic frame of acceptance emerges in how the text’s rhetoric contains and repudiates the Viking tradition, undermining its heroic potential at every turn, while at the same time contextualizing the characters’ often rather latent Christianity as doing its best under difficult circumstances. The hitherto unknown northern lands of Greenland and Vínland are ideologically mapped as existing beyond a line not to be crossed, and to be known only as a place to be avoided. By depicting traditional heroic decision-making and problem-solving as progressively not viable in the lands to the north and west, the texts reveal a clear motivation to see the decision to abandon Vínland not as a failure of ‘Viking’ resolve, but as a triumph

18 Scott, ‘The Appearance of Public Memory’, p. 154. 19 Burke, Attitudes, ‘Introduction’, np. 20 Burke, Attitudes, p. 5. 21 Gusfield, ‘Introduction’, p. 33.

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of ‘modern’ values, that is, values rooted in Christianity and favouring close cultural and economic ties with an emergent Western European mainstream waiting back in the east. If the traditional values have outlived their usefulness on a dangerous frontier, they are clearly no longer relevant in Iceland and points east. At the same time, if the Christianity of the Vínland adventurers is not particularly ‘muscular’, the contrast between the aggressive failure of Viking ways, and the understanding that the faith of Guðríðr in particular will flourish in Iceland (in Guðríðr’s future) points to the value of an attitude that recognizes when context and action align, and when they do not. Generating the comic frame involves a careful handling of ancestral reputations, to establish how the protagonists’ good ethos, the Aristotelian rhetorical appeal based in demonstrating good will, good character, and good judgement,22 resides not in sailing over the horizon to confront unknown dangers but in investing one’s credibility in the more promising task of building a secure society at home in Iceland where the ideological infrastructure is already in place. In effect, the sagas tell us that, while Karlsefni and Guðríðr were unquestionably brave in venturing first to Greenland and later to Vínland, the wisdom they displayed in ultimately returning home to Iceland is the greater virtue. Thus, Iceland is mapped as the last viable space in the North where the ethos of Christian Western Europe can function coherently.

Entelechy and the Rhetoric of Retrenchment Burke’s rhetorical theory makes extensive use of the Aristotelian concept of entelechy, which he defines in Language as Symbolic Action (1966) as ‘the notion that each being aims at the perfection natural to its kind’.23 As Burke goes on to explain, ‘There is a principle of perfection implicit in the nature of symbol systems; and in keeping with his nature as symbol-using animal, man is moved by this principle’.24 The Vínland sagas’ ‘symbol systems’, which operate on every level from patterns of human behaviour in matters of society and religion, through interaction with the supernatural, and even the fantastic as seen in the killing of Þorvaldr Eiríksson by an Einfœtingr (‘uniped’) in chapter 12 of ESR,25 operate on entelechial principles, distinguishing between environments in terms of what is possible there. The cultivation of conflicting attitudes toward Greenland and Vínland on one hand, and toward Iceland on the other, with the former two appearing as progressively less amenable to integration into an emergent mainstream, while the latter is already securely set in that direction, is inherently entelechial in nature. Distinct from teleology and perceptions of conscious purpose as they inform motivation, entelechy has been embraced by modern rhetoricians

22 Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by Roberts, i 1356b 1–8. 23 Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, p. 17. 24 Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, p. 17. 25 Eiríks saga rauða, ed. by Einar Ólafur Sveinsson and Matthías Þorðarson (hereafter abbreviated to ESR), p. 231.

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such as Burke due to its amenability to rhetorical activity. The attitude which, in Burke’s terms, a text ‘coaches’ in the audience26 is itself entelechial; how a situation, the constraining Scene, is constructed shapes the audience’s expectation of what is possible in it. The audience’s response to any individual act within the narrative is constrained to align with the larger attitude regarding what is good or bad, to the extent of assimilating acts or qualities which in other circumstances might appear as oppositely good or bad. In these sagas, establishing not only dangerous, remote Vínland but also morally and economically dubious Greenland as effectively futureless Norths predisposes an audience to question the value of even the most courageous actions which have those places as a setting, and casts the act of turning away from them as ethically sound, rather than as defeat.

Perspective by Incongruity: Seeing What Is by What Is Not We can approach the texts’ deployment of entelechy through Burke’s theory of ‘perspective by incongruity’ as explored in Permanence and Change (1935) and Attitudes toward History (1937). Arguing that incongruity ‘is the law of the universe’,27 Burke asserted that acts of interpretation are fundamentally driven by the need to transcend the inevitable unlikeness of things (‘a table is incongruous with a chair’). In the Vínland sagas, the ideological mapping of the ‘subjunctive’ North is predicated on reckoning with this inevitable ‘unlikeness’, in engaging with the ways in which Greenland and Vínland are not Iceland, and the reader is required to ‘navigate’ the meaning of the lack of ‘fit’ in the ethical potential inherent to each. This ideological navigation is fundamentally rhetorical. Rhetoric enters into the act of communication because the discursive context for that transcendence ‘coaches an attitude’ in the audience whereby unlikeness is generative (‘dramatistic’ in Burke’s terminology) rather than destructive. As Burke puts it, The metaphorical extension of perspective by incongruity involves casuistic stretching, since it interprets new situations by removing words from their ‘constitutional’ setting. It is not ‘demoralizing’, however, since it is done by the ‘transcendence’ of a new start […] It is designed to ‘remoralize’ by accurately naming a situation already demoralized by inaccuracy.28 Burke’s admittedly idiosyncratic critical vocabulary points to how a text relies on both the audience’s ‘constitutional’ (normalized, conventional) understanding of a word, act, or situation, and the audience’s capacity to ‘improvise’29 in seeing new possibilities for meaning brought out in an awareness of the incongruity of the elements. The ‘demoralizing inaccuracy’ of rhetorics which ignore incongruity may

26 Burke, Attitudes, p. 322. 27 Burke, Attitudes, p. 311. 28 Burke, Attitudes, p. 309. 29 Cf. Burke, Attitudes, p. 311.

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be ‘remoralized’ in creative interpretive acts to perceive incongruity not only as offering more than the sum of the parts, but insights into the agency of the audience in responding in an engaged manner. The repositioning of the retreat from Vínland as an ethical victory is one such act of remoralization. The texts’ rhetoric is motivated by a need to induce a particular attitude in the reader toward the protagonists’ decision to abandon the Vínland colony and reject Greenland. The reader must come to resist seeing the action as a desperate and fearful act of self-preservation, and instead seek evidence in the texts to ‘remoralize’ it as the culmination of a larger positive ethos-building process that has occurred across several generations in both sagas. Both texts pay close attention to incongruity in the characters’ motivations and actions with the territories in which they operate, to create a space for attributing an integrity of ethos to Karlsefni and Guðríðr, letting their potential to act serve as our ethical compass, without submitting their actual actions to much overt scrutiny. Ultimately, the incongruity informs our sense of the protagonists’ ethos more than their actual deeds do. In the Vínland sagas, perspective by incongruity unfolds in several contexts, the most important of which involves how Greenland and Vínland are ‘mapped’ into the saga narrative as the Scene in which the protagonists act. As indicated earlier, ethical behaviour is constrained in different ways depending on whether the characters are in Iceland, Greenland, or Vínland, mapping the ‘newer’ North as a contingent, subjunctive space.

Iceland as Normative North The normative, foundational narrative that Burke would call the ‘representative anecdote’30 in these sagas is the settlement in Iceland of Auðr the Deep-Minded, in the opening chapter of ESR, and her subsequent manumission of her slave Vífill, grandfather of Guðríðr, who is assured by his former owner that ‘kallaði hann þar gǫfgan mundu þykkja, sem hann væri’ (his worthiness would always be recognized, wherever he might be),31 a trait that seems to extend down his family line. Iceland is idealized in the Vínland sagas as a place which attracts settlers of good character who, like Auðr, choose it for sound reasons of personal security, independence, and prosperity. In these texts its Christianity is either imminent or established, and its relationship with the mainland and British Norse communities are constructive, as Auðr’s case suggests; ‘hon var skírð ok vel trúuð’ (she was baptized and a firm believer),32 raises crosses on her Icelandic estate, and holds a number of British bondsmen (ánauðgir) who are described as gǫfgir menn,33 which Keneva Kunz translates as ‘men of good family’.34 If we take Auðr’s profile as representative in

30 Burke, Grammar, p. 59. 31 ESR, p. 197. 32 ESR, p. 196. 33 ESR, p. 196. 34 The Vinland Sagas, trans. by Kunz, p. 26.

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Burke’s sense, establishing the dominant attitude towards security and prosperity in Iceland, the characterization of volatile characters like Eiríkr Rauði and even Guðríðr’s father Þorbjǫrn is immediately problematized, because while their violent or disruptive behaviour would be normalized in other sagas as part of larger, often tragic processes of feud and resolution, as in Brennu-Njáls Saga and Laxdœla Saga, here they appear more as malcontents who are perhaps best suited to the frontier. Eiríkr’s volatile temper sees him driven first from Norway ‘fyrir víga sakar’ (due to killings)35 and then from Iceland; Þorbjǫrn is described by a neighbour as ‘skapstórr ok þó metnaðarmaðr mikill’ (proud-minded and an ambitious man to boot)36 when, the son of a bondsman, he hypocritically rejects a potential suitor for Guðríðr on the grounds that he is a ‘þrælssonr’ (son of a slave).37 While the Icelandic text can simply mean that Þorbjǫrn was ‘proud-minded and ambitious’, his angry invocation of the semantic distinction between ‘bondsman’ and ‘slave’ may be what prompts Kunz to translate the descriptive phrase as ‘prone to take offence, and a man with no small sense of his own worth’.38

Greenland as Compromised North The Greenland where Eiríkr settles always seems a little less promising than Iceland, despite its resources. From Eiríkr’s decision to call it by a name that walks a line between euphemism and lying (Eiríkr argues that people are more likely to come to settle ‘ef landit héti vel’ (if the land were favourably named),39 to the chronic references to shipwreck, famine, and disease, throughout both sagas Greenland is characterized in terms which perhaps represent one of Old Icelandic literature’s most realistic takes on the harshness of the settlement experience, which also establishes Greenland as an inferior rhetorical scene for a narrative about self-realization. Small details reinforce an attitude towards Greenland as entelechially disadvantaged. While basic codes of behaviour and hospitality are maintained, the text contains undercurrents which serve as caveats: Guðríðr and her first husband Þorsteinn Eiríksson are invited to winter with a neighbour called Þorsteinn the Black, who describes himself in his invitation as ‘einþykkr’ (unsociable) and who states his lack of interest in Christianity, despite admitting its superiority.40 Elsewhere,41 Eiríkr welcomes Þorfinnr Karlsefni on his arrival in Greenland, then relies on his guest to supply food and drink.

ESR, p. 197. ESR, p. 204. ESR, p. 204. The Vinland Sagas, trans. by Kunz, p. 29. ESR, p. 201. Grœnlendinga Saga, ed. by Einar Ólafur Sveinsson and Matthías Þorðarson (hereafter abbreviated to GS), p. 258. 41 ESR, p. 220.

35 36 37 38 39 40

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The religious character of Greenland is fundamentally ambiguous. Moreover, the Vínland sagas consistently foreground Greenland as at best a marginally Christian society, settled before the conversion of Iceland, and thus, even ‘Þá var enn ung kristni á Grœnlandi’ (when Christianity was still young in Greenland),42 it seemed to be growing from a bad seed. Pre-Christian rites are still preserved and practised, and the leading citizen, Eiríkr, is described in ESR as one who ‘tók því máli seint’ (was slow to convert), while the church at his farm is ‘eigi allnær húsunum’ (not too near the house).43 In GS he dies unconverted.44 His son, the Christian but less than saintly Leifr, charged with converting Greenland by King Ólafr Tryggvason of Norway, accepts the commission while adding that he thought this ‘ørendi myndi torflutt á Grœnlandi’ (this mission would be a hard one to carry out in Greenland),45 a comment similar in tone to expressions of commitment to lost causes such as unrealistic marriage proposals (as Ormr explains to the ‘slave’s son’ Einar regarding the proposed and ultimately unsuccessful overture to Þorbjǫrn in the second chapter of ESR). Christian burial is a fraught matter, with reference being made to procedures for dealing with burial in unconsecrated ground.46 The unquiet dead, while they appear in other Islendingasögur, seem less surprising in these texts, part of an overall blurring of the line between life and death, between the natural and the supernatural. Moreover, they seem associated on some level with sensuality. In ESR, the dying Þorsteinn Eiríksson complains that his host’s dead wife is trying to get into bed with him.47 In GS, the equivalent figure merely tries to get out of her own bed, but Guðríðr is required48 to sit on Þorsteinn the Black’s lap in order to talk with the dead Þorsteinn Eiríksson, who tells her that her future lies in Christianity in Iceland, setting the virtuous Guðríðr on a different entelechial plane than her surroundings. The incongruity between the virtues of Guðríðr and to a lesser degree Karlsefni on one hand, and the ambivalent ethos of their Greenlandic contemporaries comes to a head in the scene in the fourth chapter of ESR with Þorbjǫrg ‘lítil-vǫlva’ (the little seeress), who calls on Guðríðr to help her in her rituals. Perhaps more significant than the stark opposition of Þorbjǫrg’s paganism and Guðríðr’s Christianity, is the element of compromise which normalizes the episode in the Greenlandic context; Guðríðr admits that she has acquired a thorough knowledge of the rites from her foster mother, but is unwilling to participate. ‘I have no intention of assisting’, she says, ‘því at ek em kristin kona’ (because I am a Christian woman).49 Þorbjǫrg, however, ironically if obliquely, calls on her virtue of charity to help others by assisting her, telling her that ‘Svá mætti verða, at þú yrðir mǫnnum at liði hér um, en þú værir þá kona ekki verri en áðr’ (that she could be of help to the people around her, and

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

GS, p. 257. ESR, p. 212. GS, p. 256. ESR, p. 211. ESR, pp. 216–17. ESR, p. 215. GS, p. 259. ESR, p. 208.

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that she herself would not be the worse woman for it).50 Guðríðr agrees, and is rewarded when Þorbjǫrg prophesies a happy future for her in Iceland, where her line of descendants will be ‘mikil ætt ok góð’ (a substantial and worthy kin).51 Virtue cannot unfold through conventional doctrinal channels in Greenland, and only the incongruity of the situations brings that realization into clear focus.

Vínland: A North beyond Mapping If Greenland, colonized on the basis of rumour and misrepresentation, is mapped as a space where conventional virtues and values exist in distorted or compromised form, threatening always to draw the virtuous into their entelechial orbit, the countries beyond are portrayed as a nightmare in ethical terms. Rich in resources, ostensibly available for exploitation, Vínland as a Scene seems from the beginning to be closed to inscription into the kind of narrative which Guðríðr’s prophesied future takes to a logical conclusion. Rather, it seems a place where any or all ethical action will be undermined in some way. Bjarni Herjolfsson seems repelled by the land,52 refusing to put ashore to take on timber or water, although the crew consider that they need both, and later refusing a second landing, simply pronouncing the land ‘ógagnvænligt’ (unprofitable).53 His crew criticizes him, and the sögumaðr leaves it up to the reader to decide if Bjarni is wise or merely timid. His ultimate vindication when the Vínland settlement is abandoned is an example of the textual entelechy whereby an act is ultimately understood in the context of the ‘perfected’ alternative to Bjarni’s caution. Leifr Eiríksson prefers to be an absentee landlord of the place called Leifsbuðir, his absence in some measure facilitating his sister Freydís’s murderous treachery in the eighth chapter of GS. Vínland is a natural setting for the eccentric Tyrkir who discovers grapes and returns to camp incoherently babbling,54 for the perverse Þorhallr, who may or may not engage Þorr’s support in delivering a meal of rotten beached whale,55 and for the dispute over women that breaks out in the twelfth chapter of ESR.56 The encounter with the indigenous peoples brings into focus the essential rhetorical incongruity of the northlands’ western frontier with the core values associated with Iceland. Painted in the broadest strokes, the Skrælingar are both objects of contempt and an insurmountable obstacle. The intruders from Greenland treat them as inscrutable inferiors, who can be cheated in trade,57 or killed as a matter

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

ESR, p. 208. ESR, p. 208. GS, p. 252. GS, p. 247. GS, p. 252. ESR, p. 224. ESR, p. 233. ESR, p. 228.

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of reflex.58 That they might have rights of any kind in their own country does not cross the minds of the visitors from the East, except perhaps in the description in ESR chapter 12 where the unnamed Markland captives whom Karlsefni takes back to Greenland, where, we are told, they are baptized and learn Norse, state that their country is ruled by two kings, Avaldamon and Avaldidida.59 It is worth noting that while these captives give their parents’ names (Vethildr and Óvægr), the text does not record their own names.

The Skrælingar as Distorting Mirror And yet, the opposition is less diametric than it is incongruous, and here again, the principle of incongruity leads us to the texts’ actual assessment of the problem of Vínland as a futureless ethical space. In many regards, if Greenland and Vínland serve as distorting mirrors for Icelandic values, the Skrælingar are the ultimate distorting mirror in which the problems of violence, ambiguous religious belief, and the reckless pursuit of wealth are writ large. The description of attempts at communication between the groups, each attempting to read the others’ symbolic acts (waving banners clockwise or counter-clockwise, displaying coloured shields) in ESR chapters 10 and 11, mirrored also in the disproportion inherent in the trade60 and the Skrælingar’s confusion at and contempt for Norse technology (as when in ESR, a Skræling, discovering that an iron axe which cuts wood will not cut stone, casts it away as useless (engu nýt)),61 at once equate the societies and then, in making one seem ridiculous, invites the possibility that the absurdities function as part of a continuum where they are judged against ‘normative’ beliefs and practices. The ongoing juxtaposition of the ‘promising’ and the ‘unpromising’ contributes to the reader’s awareness of ethical choice as inseparable from the texts’ rhetoric.

Freydís and Guðríðr: Incongruous Futures Taking the virtuous Guðríðr as a focal point, especially given the risk to her faith that the Greenlandic openness to compromise poses in the Þorbjǫrg episode, we can examine two contexts where her normative behaviour is used to demonstrate her own incongruity with the Vínland setting. The first context is the obvious contrast with Freydís Eiríksdottir, daughter of Eiríkr rauði, especially in GS where Freydís is portrayed as treacherous, a murderess and an inciter to murder, making her ruffian father seem a solid citizen by comparison. A different contrast plays out in ESR, however, where Freydís’s only appearance is the memorable scene in the eleventh chapter where,

58 59 60 61

GS, p. 256. ESR, p. 233. ESR, p. 228. ESR, p. 230.

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under attack from the Skrælingar, she berates her male companions for running away (which implicitly undermines the masculine virtues inherent in Karlsefni’s name), and frightens away the Skrælingar by baring her breast and striking it with the flat side of a sword.62 Even without the cultural or anthropological knowledge to fully contextualize the latter action in particular in either Norse or Indigenous North American culture, Freydís exemplifies a standard of behaviour very different from the chaste and reticent Guðríðr. One could argue that Freydís is the most effective member of the expedition, the one who scores a victory entirely on her own merits. The existence of traditions regarding her treachery as elucidated in GS makes it hard for readers of both texts to accept her in any positive light, however. At most, Freydís represents behaviour that can only serve a useful purpose in a space like Vínland where the conventional ethical compass does not function. As such, she ‘perfects’ the ethical ambiguity posed when Þorbjǫrg persuades Guðríðr to compromise her beliefs back in Greenland. Moreover, the contrast between Freydís and Guðríðr is another of the texts’ conflict of entelechies. Freydís, whether we are tempted see her as an echo of pre-Christian traditions of warrior women or simply as Eiríkr’s bad offspring, has no future once her role in the two narratives is played. She literally has no further role in ESR, and in GS the last reference to her is her brother Leifr’s prediction of a dark future for Freydís and her descendants. We are informed, in chapter 10, that ‘Nú leið þat svá fram, at engum þótti um þau vert þaðan, í frá, nema ills’ (from thenceforth, no one expected anything but evil of that family).63

Guðríðr and ‘Guðríðr’: The Empty Mirror A different incongruity appears in Guðríðr’s encounter in the seventh chapter of GS with the unnamed woman who visits her in her booth in Vínland, in a moment which can be understood as a turning point in the text’s deployment of incongruity and its frustration of codes. A woman with light chestnut-coloured (ljósjǫrp) hair and unusually large eyes, dressed in a form-fitting garment, enters the booth where Guðríðr nurses the infant Snorri, and asks her name: ‘Hvat heitir þú?’ Interestingly the text uses the verb mælti and segir to describe her question; the unknown woman speaks, rather than asks the question. Guðríðr’s response, ‘Ek heiti Guðríðr; eða hvert er þitt heiti?’ (My name is Guðríðr, what is your name?) meets with the echo-response, ‘Ek heiti Guðríðr’. The woman is invited to sit, but a loud noise signals violence outside and the woman disappears.64 In this understated scene, the full divergence between conventional Icelandic order and Vínland emerges. The text’s lack of explanation capitalizes on the reader’s instincts to fill in the blanks, based on what the texts have conditioned the audience to expect. One possible response is that the woman is an apparition, whose mani-

62 ESR, p. 229. 63 GS, p. 268. 64 GS, p. 263.

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festation is meant to communicate something to Guðríðr. However, as Bo Almqvist has indicated,65 there is no reason why we cannot accept the episode as naturalistic, given affinities between the text and other descriptions of Skrælingar, and above all, the highly naturalistic detail of someone who, addressed in a strange language, responds by repeating what has been said, in the hope that it is a greeting. In the context of establishing Vínland as futureless space, with Guðríðr as key witness and reference point, we can use the distorting mirror conceit to see this moment as the extreme of incongruity: the woman mirrors or reflects Guðríðr, but in a manner which reveals no information, which gives her back an empty reflection of herself from an unfamiliar, indeed alien face. The violence that occurs at this moment and the orientation of the rest of the narrative to the Norse withdrawal supports a rhetorical reading of this moment as completing the formation of an attitude that positions the Vínland enterprise as not only dangerous and unprofitable, but meaningless, an emptiness which begets further emptiness. Burke describes ambiguity which occurs in the interplay of identification and division as the ‘invitation to rhetoric’,66 arguing that we are goaded to persuasive discourse in the face of incongruities between the act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose which underlie all symbolic action. However, Burke’s theories of comic frames of acceptance, and the ‘comic corrective’ function of criticism as introduced in Attitudes toward History,67 both approach legitimate rhetorical activity as essentially comic, concerned with problem-solving and resolution. The lack of ‘fit’ between the virtues of Guðríðr in particular and the compromised, futureless ethical landscape of Greenland and Vínland establish the latter as essentially tragic in that they lead to the ‘dead-end’ of defeat and infamy in Vínland, or at best to obscure death in Greenland. Casting traditional elements of the heroic ethos such as violence and ambition in these negative terms allows the non-heroic material to fill the ethical void, ‘correcting’ (in the navigational sense) the sagas’ narrative orientation towards a larger comic pattern acceptable to an idealized Icelandic audience who now looked east to the European mainland and not to the western horizon for its pragmatic models of social behaviour and cultural identity in the North.

Entelechy, Incongruity, and Reading the Rhetoric of the Vínland Sagas It is important to understand how this paper approaches the application of rhetorical theory to the interpretation of the sagas. The purpose here is not to uncover what the sögumenn knew or did not know of the medieval rhetorical tradition derived from Cicero via Augustine, much less to anachronistically ascribe knowledge of

65 Almqvist, ‘My Name Is Guðríðr’, p. 27. 66 Burke, Rhetoric, p. 25. 67 Burke, Attitudes, pp. 166–75.

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the Aristotelian appeals to a European public which had not yet rediscovered the Greek tradition. If we are not assuming that the writers of these sagas were conscious of the impact or role of what is conceptualized here as ethos, entelechy, or ‘perspective by incongruity’, there is, nevertheless, something to be learned from evaluating the ‘fit’ of these rhetorical concepts to texts, including how one handles the essential incongruity involved in making such a match across centuries of time and tradition. In particular, there are lessons to learn about what we may assume regarding how these texts constructed an audience, and whether that act is different in substance or merely in detail from audience construction as modern rhetorical theory understands it.

The Vínland Sagas as Constitutive Rhetoric Thus far, this paper has largely operated ‘outside’ history; it has approached ‘coaching an attitude’ toward the subject matter and creating identification between rhetor and audience to facilitate the acceptance of a viewpoint in the broad context of how rhetors shape the audience’s acceptance of what a text presents as good, and rejection of what is considered bad. The processes described above can, however, operate in a specific historical context as well. Earlier scholars have noted certain implicitly rhetorical elements in these sagas, where a given act of persuasion is detectible in the storytelling. Of particular relevance is Ólafur Halldórsson’s argument that ESR in particular was written ‘to boost the lineage of Bishop Björn Gílsson, one of Karlsefni’s descendants, at a time when his canonization was sought’68 and Birgit Lindroth Wallace also notes that Haukr, the compiler of the Hauksbók which contains a version of ESR, was also a direct descendent of Karlsefni and Guðríðr.69 It is not difficult to locate the celebration of these individual reputations within a larger project aimed at boosting the overall status of Icelanders in the annals of Northern history, a project in which we can detect attitudes that align with a sense of nationality as we understand it today. In addition to locating the composition of these texts in a specific historical context, the motivation assigned by Halldórsson and Wallace creates an opportunity to read the Vínland sagas as exercises in what Canadian rhetorician Maurice Charland has called ‘Constitutive Rhetoric’, which, in Louis Althusser’s (1971) terms, ‘interpellates’ an audience, or calls on them as subjects, to be participants in a discourse predicated on their engagement in creating a narrative of the ancestors which their subsequent behaviour as subjects within the discourse must complete or perfect.70 We can use Charland’s work, which evolved in a very different context, to explore how the rhetoric of the texts as discussed earlier functions in a straightforward manner in

68 Halldórsson, ‘The Vínland Sagas’, pp. 39–51, cited in Wallace, ‘L’Anse aux Meadows and Vínland’, p. 209. 69 Wallace, ‘L’Anse aux Meadows and Vínland’, p. 209. 70 Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, p. 170, quoted in Charland, ‘Constitutive Rhetoric’, p. 138.

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support of the proto-nationalistic impulse inherent in the saga genre. That impulse involves showing the choices of the ancestors as foundational to the ethos of Iceland as a successful act of settlement in the North. The salvage and upkeep of ancestral reputation, and the deployment of those strategies in the creation of a sense of community through the telling of these stories, takes what we have been following Burke in calling ‘attitude’ and politicizes it further in approaching it as ideology, a consciousness of how and why things are, and what their influence may be. Narratives which describe the ancestors as participating in a shift in ideology, and coach the audience to endorse past decisions and actions by seeing themselves as the good result of those actions, inevitably represented a politicized historiography, regardless of the size of the audience. Charland follows Althusser in arguing that Ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all) or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’71 As Charland goes on to explain, ‘an interpellated subject participates in the discourse which addresses him’. Moreover, ‘interpellation has a significance to rhetoric, for the acknowledgement of an address entails an acceptance of an imputed self-understanding which can form the basis for an appeal’.72 Certainly, any effort to apply modern tools of interpretation, especially tools informed by modern political ideology, will speak with great immediacy to any twenty-first-century reader who hopes that the sagas can be demonstrated to do more than trade in questionable history within established or emerging generic conventions. Still, there is nothing in Althusser’s account as elucidated by Charland that is alien to a serious effort to explore or reconstruct these texts’ capacity to engage a medieval Icelandic audience capable of response, passive or active, to the ethical dilemmas posed in the narratives. Charland’s overall analysis in his 1987 article ‘Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois’ focuses on and derives conclusions from the study of communication practice in late twentieth-century Québécois political nationalism; at a glance, its politics may seem remote from the world of both the Icelandic colonists living around the beginning of the second millennium and their thirteenth-century descendants who recorded the traditions concerning them. However, we have already approached incongruity as generative, and Charland’s exploration of historically centred discourse of identity has much to teach about the instrumental function of historical narrative in the context of cultural memory. His article describes how a particular discourse of national identity positions its audience to articulate their self-perception in alignment with the discourse’s construction of an ancestral identity.

71 Charland, ‘Constitutive Rhetoric’, p. 138. 72 Charland, ‘Constitutive Rhetoric’, p. 138.

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The audience’s sense of agency is thus constrained by a rhetorically generated assumption of national purpose depicted as originating in the ancestors. Subsequent expressions of identity are called upon to demonstrate consistency/consubstantiality with the ancestral ethos as the discourse has created it. We need not see the sögumenn as nationalist politicians in the modern sense to apply what Charland identifies to their work. Their demonstrable concern with the profile of prominent Icelanders in a discourse where ethos is assumed to align with Christian values creates sufficient context to see how the sagas’ rhetoric is constitutive in ideological terms. Charland identifies three ‘ideological effects’ necessary to this Constitutive Rhetoric, which moves the audience to a) constitute a collective subject; b) posit a trans-historical subject; and c) promote the illusion of freedom to choose a destiny. These ideological effects summarize how motivated historical narratives interpellate the audience as a subject capable of response.73 1. Constitute a Collective Subject

Following Michael McGee (1975),74 Charland notes that nations exist ‘only in ideology’, and ‘that ideology arises in the very nature of narrative history’.75 A nation as a collective subject is ‘the protagonist of the historical drama, who experiences, suffers, and acts’.76 In Charland’s modern Canadian context, individual Québec Francophones derive identity in reflection of the collective subject of Francophones who have ‘experienced, suffered, and acted’ in North America since the early seventeenth century. In the context of the Vínland sagas, the collective subject is perhaps not yet an Icelandic nation that defines itself as distinct in essence from other Nordic societies. However, from the perspective of thirteenth-century Icelanders, the Íslendingasögur in general assert an experience peculiar to Norse-speaking people in migration west from the continental homelands. Moreover, the embrace of a Christian identity marks off a specific experience in which both non-Christian Norse settlers and foreigners such as the Skrælingar of Vínland are marginalized or otherwise excluded from the destiny/entelechy with which the saga writers invite readers to identify. By contrast, the figures of Þorfinnr Karlsefni and Guðríðr Þorbjarnardóttir become exempla of the ancestors as a collective subject whose prestige has come into the keeping of the present generation. 2. Posit a Trans-Historical Subject

That idea of being a keeper of a heritage informs the second ideological effect of constitutive rhetoric, which requires that rhetor and audience posit a trans-historical

73 74 75 76

Charland, ‘Constitutive Rhetoric’, pp. 139–41. McGee, ‘In Search of the People’, p. 246, quoted in Charland, ‘Constitutive Rhetoric’, p. 136. Charland, ‘Constitutive Rhetoric’, p. 139. Charland, ‘Constitutive Rhetoric’, p. 139.

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subject. The nation, whether imagined in modern terms or in an incipient ideological form, is implicit in the assumption that the modern subject, here the thirteenth-century Icelander as both rhetor and immediate audience, is the vehicle through which the potential meaning of the ancestors’ experience will be realized. In Charland’s context,77 the late twentieth-century Québécois are called upon to realize the potential of a coherent French-speaking North American culture to ascend to political fulfilment as a sovereign Québec state. In the Vínland sagas, contemporary Icelanders are interpellated to be the ordered Christian society which exemplary ancestors such as Karlsefni and Guðríðr returned to Iceland to embrace and build. The prestige that their stories lend to their biological descendants, if we follow Halldórsson and Wallace, is simply a reinforcement of the ideology in which ancestors and descendants, literal or not, become consubstantial. 3. Promote the Illusion of Freedom to Choose a Destiny

Finally, Charland states that the third ideological effect of constitutive rhetoric is to promote the illusion of freedom to choose a destiny.78 In his analysis, nationalist discourse in Québec insists that the ancestors of the Québécois, from the fall of New France in 1763 until the present collectively chose to survive, rejecting the option to assimilate into either the American or later British or Anglo-Canadian mainstream. Charland argues that nationalist rhetoric positions the citizen-audience as subject to see itself as making a choice to take survival to the next level (political independence) or to betray the whole project of survival. As Charland writes, ‘Freedom is illusory because the narrative is already spoken or written. Furthermore, because the narrative is a structure of understanding that produces totalizing interpretations, the subject is constrained to follow through, to act so as to maintain the narrative’s consistency’.79 In both Vínland sagas, the ‘illusion of freedom to choose’ functions in tandem with the positing of a trans-historical subject in the texts’ positioning of the narratives of Karlsefni and Guðríðr. In the saga narratives, the couple does the right thing because the alternatives are death and damnation; the later audience similarly has no real alternative to endorsing the faith and social order of the Vínland settlers in their homeward turn to an Iceland which has become the society in which the audience lives. However, the texts’ deployment of what I have been calling a ‘Viking’ ethos as a foil to the Christian one keeps the illusion of choice alive, in both the narrative and its implications. In fact, Charland’s rhetorical ‘illusion of choice’ becomes a choice between tragic and comic futures. Charland’s theory provides a platform for the exploration of the ideological dimensions of texts like the Vínland sagas, particularly if we seek to discern their capacity to shape how their audience remembered not only the past, but particularly past conflicts in the belief systems which motivated the founders of the original

77 Charland, ‘Constitutive Rhetoric’, p. 140. 78 Charland, ‘Constitutive Rhetoric’, pp. 140–41. 79 Charland, ‘Constitutive Rhetoric’, p. 141.

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audience’s community. If we accept that the sagas prompt the reader, medieval or modern, on at least some level to approve or disapprove of the actions or decisions of key characters, then we need to ask what identification is being built in the storytelling. If we assume that the reader is expected to be satisfied with the decisions made and the results that were made possible by the actions described, then the texts’ rhetoric has realized a comic frame of acceptance in the way the reader processes the narrative. The audience is called upon to both understand the ancestors as virtuous, and to see themselves as the custodians of the values which made the ancestors virtuous, in the context of an Icelandic community that was in a position to see itself as the respectable north-western outpost of Christian Europe.

Internal Audience in the Vínland Sagas: The Second Persona In further aligning Althusser’s ‘interpellation’ with the concerns of rhetoric, Charland follows earlier rhetorical theorists in situating the effects of constitutive rhetoric not in overt rational persuasion, but, as his term ‘ideological’ suggests, in the cultivation of an attitude which predisposes an audience to the acceptance of some behaviours and the rejection of others. A particular influence on Charland’s constitutive rhetoric is Edwin Black, whose work on audience construction is likewise applicable to the task of seeing the Vínland sagas as recruiting audiences in ideological terms. In ‘The Second Persona’ (1970), Black argues that, in addition to recognizing a distinction between the author and the authorial persona, readers should distinguish between the text’s acknowledgement of actual readers on one hand and its underlying address to an ideal reader on the other. This ideal reader, the ‘Second Persona’ of Black’s title, is the persuadable consciousness toward which the text’s rhetorical strategies are directed. As Black puts it, ‘The critic can see in the auditor implied by the discourse a model of what the rhetor would have his real auditor become’.80 We have already referred to Ólafur Halldórsson’s work on the original political context. Also, as Carol Clover has demonstrated in The Medieval Saga (1982),81 we can use our knowledge of medieval rhetorical practice as evinced in the structure of the sagas to reconstruct key expectations inherent in medieval literacy in Iceland regarding form. These approaches give us what today we would call the text’s original ‘demographic’. Identifying the Second Persona, however, involves looking for signs in the discourse that identify a reading/interpreting consciousness to whom the author addresses rhetorical activity, an audience who is, or can be, predisposed to act on the discourse, in this case, to accept the defeat of the Vínland experiment, and of Western expansion in general, as an ethical triumph capable of sustaining and enhancing the reputations of Karlsefni and Guðríðr and their descendants. Analysing the texts for evidence of adherence to a given doctrine, formal style of argumentation, or to generic convention assumes that the sagas’ rhetoric, now or

80 Black, ‘The Second Persona’, p. 113. 81 Clover, The Medieval Saga, passim.

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eight hundred years ago, operates primarily on the level of rational persuasion, on a case being made for a judgement on the characters’ behaviour. The Second Persona, however, should not be assumed to be the reasoning conscious or intelligence of a reader who can agree that the case is well organized and ‘adds up’ logically or morally. Rather, it is the consciousness in the text which can be made comfortable with the implications of actions, which will accept an act or decision in terms of what it makes possible. It brings us once again to entelechy. The distinction between entelechy and teleology is significant to Black’s theory, because the Second Persona which an author addresses in creating a text does not simply agree with/to the purpose of the discourse, but rather can be led to assent to what may potentially flow from the rhetoric. A Blackian reading of the Vínland sagas’ rhetorical influence involves examining how the audience is invited, or again, interpellated, to see the whole Vínland adventure as ethically unsound from its own Norwegian, Hebridean, and Icelandic prehistory onwards. Black’s theory provides a framework for the identification and examination of signals in the texts which orient the potential reader’s response around various assumptions which locate the acts and choices of characters within an ethical hierarchy. This hierarchy subordinates the ethos of the ‘Viking’ adventurer to ‘European’ values rooted in the fusion of Christian, broadly feudal, and conventionally mercantile imperatives.

Conclusion: Genre, Rhetoric, and Historiographical ProblemSolving A reading of these texts which approaches the kind of rhetorical audience construction under discussion here is that of Robert Kellogg, in ‘The Vínland Sagas: A Romance of Conversion’ (1999). Kellogg addressed the literary context for the texts, seeing both ESR and GS in the context of the romance genre, with a specific focus on the conventions of the conversion narrative. Kellogg makes a convincing argument for the sagas’ deployment of their ‘exotic’ setting and opposition of Christian and pre-Christian beliefs in their plots as a localized adaptation of the romance, which also affirms a Christian ethos as a basic characteristic of culture in Iceland as the authors of these two texts wished it to be seen.82 This paper does not take issue with Kellogg’s interpretation, which is valid from the standpoint of literary genre, and genre of course has rhetorical implications. Kellogg does not specifically address rhetoric as a context for his investigation, but his reasoning follows Halldórsson in noting the texts’ political, persuasive, or propagandistic dimensions.83 The current paper does, however, diverge from the course set by Halldórsson and Kellogg in exploring how the texts generate the preconditions for the overt literary, religious, or political persuasion which other scholars have traced. By examining how

82 Kellogg, ‘The Vínland Sagas’, pp. 31–38. 83 Cf. Kellogg, ‘The Vínland Sagas’, p. 31.

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the Vínland sagas serve as exercises in ideological mapping, we are concerned here with examining how the texts effectively contain and foreclose on the viability of the exploration of the unsettled North as an ethical pursuit so that the protagonists’ ultimate decision to abandon Vínland and Greenland is depicted as the only option thinkable to worthy, Christian Icelanders. Showing how these sagas thus configure ethos provides insights into the ideology of texts that are very much concerned with human behaviour and the problem of reconciling conflicts in historical understandings of virtue. Doing so reveals something of the mindset which marginalized and neglected the Greenland settlements and ultimately relegated Vínland to myth.

Works Cited Primary Sources Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. by W. Rhys Roberts (Mineola: Dover, 2004) ESR Eiríks saga Rauða, in Eyrrbyggja saga. Brands ðattr orva. Eiriks saga Rauða. Groenlendinga saga. Groenlendinga ðatr, ed. by Einar Ólafur Sveinsson and Matthías Þorðarson, Íslenzk Fornrit, 4 (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 1935), pp. 193–23 GS Grœnlendinga saga, in Eyrrbyggja saga. Brands ðattr orva. Eiriks saga Rauða. Groenlendinga saga. Groenlendinga ðatr, ed. by Einar Ólafur Sveinsson and Matthías Þorðarson, Íslenzk Fornrit, 4 (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 1935), pp. 239–69 The Vínland Sagas, trans. by Keneva Kunz (London: Penguin, 2008) Secondary Works Almqvist, Bo, ‘My Name Is Guðríðr; An Enigmatic Episode in Grœnlendinga saga’, in Approaches to Vínland, ed. by Andrew Wawn and Þórunn Sigurðardóttir (Reykjavík: Sigurðar Nordal Institute, 2001), pp. 15–30 Althusser, Louis, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971) Andersson, Theodore M., The Icelandic Family Saga: An Analytic Reading (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967) Bitzer, Lloyd F., ‘The Rhetorical Situation’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1 (1968), 1–14 Black, Edwin, ‘The Second Persona’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 56 (1970), 109–19 Burke, Kenneth, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966) ———, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969) ———, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969) ———, Attitudes toward History, 3rd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; original edn London: Editorial Publications, 1937) ———, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; original edn 1954) Byock, Jesse, ‘The Sagas and the Twenty-First Century’, in In Honor of Frantz Bäuml, ed. by Ursula Schaefer and Edda Spielman (Dresden: n.p., 2001), pp. 71–84

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Charland, Maurice, ‘Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 73 (1987), 133–50 Cleasby, Richard, and Gudbrand Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1874)/The Germanic Lexicon Project: [accessed 30 April 2017] Clover, Carol, The Medieval Saga (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) Gísli Sigurðsson, The Medieval Icelandic Saga and Oral Tradition, trans. by Nicholas Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) ———, ‘Introduction’, in The Vinland Sagas, trans. by Keneva Kunz (London: Penguin, 2008), pp. ix–xxxviii Gusfield, Joseph R., ‘Introduction’, in Kenneth Burke, On Symbols and Society, ed. by Joseph R. Gusfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 1–49 Kellogg, Robert, ‘The Vínland Sagas: A Romance of Conversion’, in Approaches to Vínland, ed. by Andrew Wawn and Þórunn Sigurðardóttir (Reykjavík: Sigurðar Nordal Institute, 2001), pp. 31–38 Magnus Magnusson and Herman Pálsson, ‘Introduction’, in The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America, trans. by Magnus Magnusson and Herman Pálsson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 7–43 McGee, Michael, ‘In Search of “The People”: A Rhetorical Alternative’, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 61 (1975), 235–49 Ólafur Halldórsson, ‘The Vinland Sagas’, in Approaches to Vínland, ed. by Andrew Wawn and Þórunn Sigurðardóttir (Reykjavík: Sigurðar Nordal Institute, 2001), pp. 39–51 Scott, Charles E., ‘The Appearance of Public Memory’, in Framing Public Memory, ed. by Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004), pp. 147–56 Wallace, Birgitta Lindroth, ‘L’Anse aux Meadows and Vínland: An Abandoned Experiment’, in Contact, Continuity and Collapse: The Norse Colonization of the North Atlantic, ed. by James H. Barrett (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 207–38 Zoëga, Geir T., A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910)

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Eduardo Ramos

Moulding One Another Grettir and the Landscape

The Íslendingasögur, or sagas of early Icelanders, have long been praised for the sense of realism that they evoke, in part because the majority of the action in the sagas usually takes place in Iceland itself. The fact that the setting for many of these sagas can be visited led audiences, for a long time, to view the landscape in which these stories unfold as nothing more than a backdrop onto which these tales were projected. At times the sagas themselves seem to pay scant attention to the striking stage on which they are set.1 In recent years, however, scholars have begun to point out that the landscape in the sagas is not a static setting and can take on an active role in the plot. One of the sagas to illustrate most vividly the importance of the landscape to both its plot and its characters is Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar. The Icelandic landscape had already undergone significant change between the recording of the sagas in the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries, and the setting of their action in the ninth through eleventh centuries.2 Among the changes to the landscape’s physical features were issues like deforestation, but the landscape also underwent cultural changes. The names of heroes past, like Grettir, now loom prominently on the landscape itself. As Christopher Tilley notes, ‘In a fundamental way names create landscape’.3 In Grettis saga, Grettir’s exploits reshape the landscape both physically and with his name, but, in the process, the brutal north recreates Grettir in its own image. Grettis saga is an anonymous work detailing the life and death of the Icelandic outlaw Grettir Ásmundarson. Internal evidence suggests that the saga as it survives was composed during the early fourteenth century,4 though the late nature of the



1 Barraclough, ‘Naming the Landscape’, p. 79. 2 Lethbridge and Hartman, ‘Inscribing Environmental Memory’, p. 384. 3 Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape, p. 18. 4 In an episode detailed below, the saga makes reference to an artefact associated with Grettir being found during the late thirteenth century, adding that those still alive could remember it. In the introduction to his edition of the saga, the late Guðni Jónson noted the general acceptance of an early fourteenth-century date for the saga. See Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 157 and p. lxx. Eduardo Ramos, Penn State University, is a medievalist specializing in the literature of the North Atlantic, with emphasis on points of cross-cultural contact. [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 95–111 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120788

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surviving manuscripts may suggest a somewhat later composition date. The narrative opens by recounting some of the deeds of Grettir’s ancestors over a century before his birth, but the majority of the action is set in the early eleventh century, shortly after Iceland’s legal adoption of Christianity. Since childhood, Grettir is presented as a troublesome and unruly person. He spends most of his life as an outlaw, mostly in Iceland but occasionally in Norway. Beyond the bounds of society, Grettir faces a number of fearsome creatures including trolls and the undead, and a curse renders the hero terrified of the dark. Throughout his life, Grettir moves from hiding place to hiding place across a punishing northern terrain until he is eventually killed on the island Drangey. Finally, the saga closes with an account of how Grettir’s brother travels to Constantinople to avenge his death. Though often identified as a tale of survival or as a narrative of the old heroic ethos clashing with the new Christian one,5 Grettis saga is just as much a story about transformation. Grettir’s actions alter the land physically, and the text names and identifies the land through narrative action, inscribing Grettir into Iceland’s history. However, Grettir himself is also transformed by his experiences in the rough, frigid north. The north depicted in Grettis saga is cold and brutal. Winters in Iceland and Norway are severe and stormy, and those who face them beyond their halls are likely to freeze to death. Northern seas are treacherous, often leaving sailors shipwrecked. The land is harsh and inhospitable so that even the greatest champions struggle to survive in it. Aside from these natural dangers, the north is haunted by deadly creatures. Trolls and undead beings are responsible for a number of killings in the saga so that even those people who remain in their farms during the winter are never truly safe. When the action of the saga shifts south after Grettir’s death, from Iceland and Norway to Constantinople, these deadly northern characteristics, from the weather to the hauntings, vanish. The northern environment is crucial to Grettir’s development as a character. Grettir demonstrates a natural and growing affinity to the northern landscape. Throughout the saga he tests himself against, and is shaped by, the lethal northern landscape. The term ‘landscape’ has been defined several different ways over the years, attesting to the complexities tied to it as a concept of study. While not a new definition in and of itself, Matthew Johnson identifies two important elements to consider when addressing landscape archaeology that lend themselves well to the study of saga landscapes: [First] the ‘land’ itself, however defined: the humanly created features that exist ‘objectively’ across space, and their natural context [… Second] how ‘the land’ is viewed—how we, and people in the past, came to apprehend and understand the landscape, and what those systems of apprehension and understanding are, the cognitive systems and process of perception. ‘Landscape’ is, in this second sense, a way of seeing, a way of thinking about the physical world. This particular way of thinking and seeing is […] what transforms the ‘land’ and its study into ‘land-scape’.6

5 The Saga of Grettir the Strong, ed. by Örnólfur Þorsson, and trans. by Scudder, p. xvii. 6 Johnson, ‘Ideas of Landscape’, pp. 3 and 4.

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Literary landscapes also operate in both these ways. There are the physical features of the space in which the narrative unfolds, and the ways in which characters and audiences perceive and understand those spaces. One of the fascinating aspects of Grettis saga is how it depicts Grettir transforming the landscape in both these critical ways.

Inscribing the Landscape While no other saga characters have given their name to quite as many sites as Grettir, and none take as active a role in shaping the landscape as he does, Iceland is nevertheless littered with place names tied to narratives. Etiological stories explaining landscape features are common in the sagas.7 Iceland was largely free of human habitation when the Scandinavian settlers arrived,8 so they found a landscape like a blank canvas on which to inscribe their foundation myths, which were eventually preserved in historical and literary texts like the sagas. The sagas are deeply rooted in the Icelandic landscape, and as Emily Lethbridge and Steven Hartman note, ‘Without an integrated and informed appreciation of this rootedness, it can be hard to understand certain aspects of the sagas on a narrative level’.9 The Íslendingasögur typically begin with a migration story culminating in a landnám, or land-taking, scene. While there was some good land to be had in Iceland, those who arrived late, like Grettir’s family, soon learned how inhospitable the far north could be. But successful land claims and bitter struggles alike gave way to legends preserved in Iceland’s landscapes and narratives. The case has been made that local knowledge of these foundation myths encouraged the transcriptions of saga manuscripts into the late Middle Ages.10 The sagas record surviving evidence of the landnám period that would have been familiar to their audiences, thereby attesting to the foundation myths that the sagas preserve. Pernille Hermann identifies this narrative design as establishing a ‘now/ then’ relationship between the narrative action and the saga audience. She states: Now/then relations create distinct time levels in the narratives, which, as in the case with genealogies, represent a device capable of constructing a significant connection between present and past. These relations illustrate how the founding function is not merely related to the circumstance that the texts are concerned with events in the past, for instance, the settlement (the narrated past), but also with attempts to link this event with later times (the narrated present).11

7 Clunies Ross, The Old Norse-Icelandic Saga, p. 72. 8 Íslendingabók and Landnámabók make reference to Christian papar being present in Iceland at the time of the settlement, though they do not appear to have been very numerous nor to have left major impact on Iceland’s place names. 9 Lethbridge and Hartman, ‘Inscribing Environmental Memory’, p. 386. 10 Agnes, ‘Cultural Memory and Gender in Iceland’, p. 383. 11 Hermann, ‘Representation of Memory in Saga Literature’, p. 76.

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Although Grettir post-dates the settlement period, and indeed perhaps because he does, Grettis saga identifies plenty of physical landscape evidence that would connect the hero with the saga’s audience reinforcing the ‘now/then’ relationship between the saga hero and the audience. The nature of the evidence surviving to the present lays out a narrative of its own. Grettir is known as inn sterki, the strong, and the saga presents no less than three boulders lifted by Grettir that the audience could still see. These stones, tied to Grettir’s name, establish that Grettir was an extraordinary figure beyond the capabilities of those in the audience and their contemporaries; after all, it would be centuries before Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones, would begin breaking the strength records recorded in some of the sagas. As Hermann notes, such exaggerated feats not only provide striking mnemonic images but also establish the reputation of the dead, since they cannot be recreated by the contemporary audience.12 By attaching names to the physical features of Iceland, the sagas transform the landscape into a cultural artefact. The landscape simultaneously marks the temporal distance between the narrative action and the audience while establishing a verifiable link between the two. As Hermann frames it, the narrator of a saga: addresses an audience, who […] is not involved in the events in the past, but is at a distance from the past. For this audience the past serves as a reference point for orientation, materializing itself physically and culturally as it does in their immediate surroundings. The material remains stressed by the narrator bring about a message of cultural persistence; what was constituted and achieved in the beginning of times, when this country was settled, still exists and still has an impact.13 Grettir’s moulding of the Icelandic landscape immortalizes him and connects him with the medieval saga audience. Despite the way in which saga heroes like Grettir inscribe themselves into the Icelandic landscape, there is not always a one-to-one correlation between the saga narrative and the physical locations associated with the heroes. Saga authors could take liberties with their depictions of the narrative landscape. Grettis saga, more than many other well-known Íslendingasögur, such as Egils saga and Brennu-Njáls saga, deals with the fantastic, the supernatural, and the exaggerated. Lethbridge marks an example of Grettis saga’s freedom with the narrative landscape: ‘The section in Grettis saga which tells of Grettir’s sojourn in the mythical and lush valley of Þórisdalur is one example of a possible liberty taken with the “real” landscapes that the author(s) and audiences of Grettis saga would have known’.14 While in Þórisdalur, ‘Grettir sagt,

12 Hermann, ‘Memory, Imagery, and Visuality’, p. 355; see also Hermann, ‘Representation of Memory in Saga Literature’, p. 77. 13 Hermann, ‘Representation of Memory in Saga Literature’, p. 80. 14 Lethbridge, ‘The Icelandic Sagas and Saga Landscapes’, p. 70.

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at fyrir dalnum hafi ráðit blendingr, þurs einn, sá er Þórir hét’15 (Grettir said that over the valley ruled a half man, a giant who is called Þórir).16 Grettir names the valley after the giant and stays there with him until he can no longer endure the boredom. Grettir then returns to the more realistic setting in which he is still hunted as an outlaw. Even sagas more grounded in the plausible than Grettis saga at times present narrative landscapes that are difficult to reconcile with the physical land. Ian Wyatt notes an example in the descriptions of the farms Hóll and Sæból in chapters 5 and 16 of Gísla saga Súrssonar. The former describes the relative position of the farms but makes no mention of the stream that Gísli later uses to hide his tracks when he goes off to murder his brother-in-law, while the latter places a stream between the farms without expanding on the positions of the farms themselves. On the surface this may make the geography of these farms seem problematic, but Wyatt points out that a literary reading of the saga’s geography need not be bound by Iceland’s actual physical features. The stream in question serves the narrative action of the text, and that is enough.17 Grettis saga, which covers a wider geographic range than does Gísla saga, pushes the narrative function of the landscape further. It was not only liberties on the part of the saga author that could create incongruences between the narrative landscape associated with a saga character and the physical landscape of Iceland. At times, as is the case with Grettir, there are places in Iceland named after heroes despite no surviving text linking the two. Lethbridge states: In cases where place-names that are associated with Íslendingasögur characters or events exist but are not mentioned in the texts of the sagas, it is not unlikely that the written transmission of these narratives was a stimulus for the place-names’ creation (although the possibility that they existed prior to the writing of any respective saga but were either deliberately not used, or not known of, cannot be discounted).18 In the case of a figure like Grettir, the saga stimulating more place names seems likelier. Grettis saga presents its eponymous hero as a larger than life figure that travels across the land leaving his mark on the landscape wherever he stops. It is quite possible that, as his legend grew, new stories about Grettir continued to spring up locally in which the outlaw further inscribed his legacy into the landscape.

The Merciless North In order to appreciate fully the extraordinary ways in which Grettir moulds the Icelandic landscape, and to understand why that change is inevitably reciprocal, it is important to carefully examine how the north is depicted in Grettis saga. The northern

15 16 17 18

Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 200. All translations from the saga are my own. Wyatt, ‘Narrative Functions of Landscape’, p. 276. Lethbridge, ‘The Icelandic Sagas and Saga Landscapes’, p. 68.

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regions of the saga are found in Norway and Iceland. Norway’s steep mountains and deep fjords are enchanting to behold but difficult to traverse. Iceland, geologically speaking, is a magnificent wonder. From its glacier-capped mountains to its active volcanoes, it presents a dense concentration of stunning natural phenomena. Anyone who ventures beyond Reykjavík can attest to Iceland’s deadly beauty: in an instant, a blizzard can envelop clear skies. Iceland’s haunting elegance is ruthless. The harsh qualities of this remote northern outpost were recognized abroad. Writing at the dawn of the thirteenth century, the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus praises Icelanders for their diligence in preserving history, a quality he attributes to the fact that ‘natiuam soli sterilitatem luxurie nutrimentis carentes’ (the barrenness of their native soil offers no support for self-indulgence).19 The winters were long and rough, and the seas one had to cross to reach it were often volatile. Northern storms were notorious for stranding sailors off course, if not outright wrecking their ships, as we see happen in Grettis saga, a text that persistently reminds its audience of the north’s ruthlessness. Characters in Grettis saga complain frequently about the cold, and several are killed by it in the harsh northern landscape. In fact, saga authors appear to be much more concerned with the deadly aspects of the north’s nature than with its beauty when describing the setting of their narratives. As Paul Schach pointed out in his early work on literary landscapes in the sagas: Frequently […] the setting consists not so much of objects to be visualized as of obstacles to be overcome. Snow, for instance, is never described as ‘white’ (nor, incidentally, does the simile ‘as white as snow’ occur in the Family Sagas), but as ‘hard’, ‘deep,’ ‘drifting,’ etc.20 In his dealings with this harsh setting, Grettir demonstrates a certain affinity to the north, allowing him to thrive in, and be moulded by, an environment that destroys other characters. Grettis saga does not present complaints about the harshness of the northern landscape as a sign of weakness; it is rather a matter of fact, as is made abundantly clear when Grettir’s ancestor, Ǫnundr tréfótr, arrives in Iceland. The saga depicts Ǫnundr as a successful sailor and warrior. He is the type of hero who does not allow a missing leg, lost in battle, to keep him from the action. Yet even he complains bitterly about the harsh northern features of his new home. While reflecting on all that he has given up to end up in Iceland, Ǫnundr recites a verse ending in ‘krǫpp eru kaup, ef hreppik | Kaldbak, en ek læt akra’21 (sharp are the bargains if I receive Kaldbak, but I lose cornfields). As a late settler, Ǫnundr missed out on the more favourable land to be had in Iceland. The name of where he sets his farmstead, Kaldbak, literally ‘cold-back’, highlights the cold, rough features of the rest of the land.

19 Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, ed. by Friis-Jensen, trans. by Fisher p. 6. 20 Schach, ‘Anticipatory Literary Setting’, p. 9. 21 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 22.

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The north not only presents a difficult land to live on, it also holds particular challenges for those at sea. When Grettir first sails abroad in chapter 17 of the saga, his ship leaks, and the drenched sailors complain bitterly against the cold. They find themselves lost in a thick fog and wreck their ship on the Norwegian coast. In a later voyage to Norway in chapter 38, Grettir and his crew find themselves caught in a blizzard and seek shelter. The merchants express fear over losing their lives to the cold if they do not find fire, and perhaps they would have died, if not for Grettir, who swims across large bodies of water in the middle of a winter storm without fear of hypothermia, to find fire for the crew. It is not an exaggeration on the part of the merchants to fear for their lives during the blizzard, since earlier in the saga a northern storm had already killed people. While Grettir is staying at the farm of Þorfinnr during his first trip to Norway, the farm is attacked by twelve Vikings. Grettir, relying on quick wit and physical prowess, successfully defends the farm, slaying most of the Vikings. However, two Vikings manage to escape into the winter night. The following morning, a party goes off in search of the escaped aggressors, and the saga tells us, ‘Þeir fundusk at áliðnum degi undir einum steini ok váru þá dauðir af kulda ok sárum’22 (They were found late in the day under a stone and were dead of coldness and their wounds). One would imagine that these Vikings, presented as infamous berserkir in the saga, would have been able to tend to their wounds since they had enough remaining strength to escape in the first place. However, lacking Grettir’s affinity to the ruthless northern landscape, exposure to the elements proved more than they could handle in their injured state. Grettis saga depicts a telling scene of Grettir’s youth that foreshadows the way the social misfit could be changed by, and mirror, the merciless north. Grettir and his father Ásmundr do not get along from early on because Ásmundr finds Grettir to be lazy, and Grettir refuses to do work he considers beneath him, like tending to geese. When forced to comply with his father’s demands, Grettir lashes out in a sociopathic manner by torturing the animals he tends to. Ásmundr eventually asks Grettir to tend to his horses, a task Grettir finds to his liking, saying, ‘Þetta er kalt verk ok karlmannligt’23 (That is cold and manly work). However, the pattern of unruly behaviour does not break here as one might expect. The weather grows cold while Grettir tends to the horses, and snow begins to fall. The saga says, ‘Grettir var lítt setr at klæðum, en maðr lítt harðnaðr; tók hann nú at kala’24 (Grettir was lightly clothed, and little grown; he now grew cold). Finding himself forced to endure the bitter cold by his father’s favourite mare, who never returned to the stables before nightfall, Grettir bitterly retaliates by flaying the mare’s back. Even after being offered a favourable task by Ásmundr, exposure to the harsh northern weather drives Grettir, even in his youth, to monstrous violence. As Grettir spends more time beyond the social sphere, his affinity to the harsh qualities of the north continues to develop, and he is more readily identified with the

22 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 70. 23 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 40. 24 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 40.

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monstrous creatures of the north. By the time he is an adult, Grettir has no problem swimming across an icy river in the middle of winter while carrying a woman and her child in one arm. The feat is so impressive that the saga says of the woman he carried, ‘Hon sagðisk eigi vita, hvárt hana hefði yfir flutt maðr eða troll’25 (She said she did not know whether she had been carried over by a man or a troll). Towards the final years of his life, the saga offers us the following description of Grettir as he travels north during the winter: ‘Grettir hafði kastat hetti sínum á ǫxl sér; svá gekk hann jafnan úti, hvárt sem var betra eða verra’26 (Grettir had cast his hood on his shoulders; as he always did outside, whether that was better or worse). The saga presents us with a figure who, despite being afraid of the dark, is utterly unafraid of the northern climate, arguably the most devastating force in the narrative. We learn that, by this late point in his life, Grettir has developed a reputation for being ókulvíss, insensitive to the cold.27 After a lifetime of engaging with the merciless northern landscape, Grettir is no longer concerned by being lightly clothed in the winter. He is at home in the north’s severe environment.

Moulding the North Grettir’s affinity to the rough northern climate allows him to, more or less comfortably, spend substantial time in the wilderness. It is important that Grettir can do so, since he is such a social misfit. Part of Grettir’s issue fitting into society is the fact that he constantly wishes to test his might, and society presents him with few opportunities to do so. By contrast, the landscape offers Grettir several opportunities to test himself. The time spent outdoors provides him with opportunities to mould Iceland’s landscape both physically and culturally. The first instance in which Grettir tests himself against the landscape is in chapter 16, when riding to the alþingi, the national assembly, before he was ever outlawed. On the ride to the assembly, the young Grettir comes across a formidable stone, and the saga states, ‘Þá hóf Grettir stein þann, er þar liggr í grasinu ok nú heitir Grettishaf ’28 (Then Grettir lifted up that stone which lay on the grass and is now called Grettir’s lift). Prior to Grettir’s interaction with this stone, there seems to have been nothing special about it. We can assume that it was a large stone, but there are plenty of large stones throughout Iceland. However, by having it be associated with his own strength, Grettir bestows a new meaning on this specific aspect of the landscape. Even if Grettir placed the stone back exactly where he lifted it from, thus implying no physical change in the landscape, the stone is now linked to this larger-than-life character, imbuing it with new cultural significance. Another great stone by the same name appears in chapter 30 of the saga. Grettir attempts to lift this one until some

25 26 27 28

Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 211. Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 224. Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 224. Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 48.

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enemies of his arrive and a battle breaks out. The stone bearing Grettir’s name serves to commemorate the site of the battle, at least within the world of the saga. Grettir’s impact on the landscape is not always immediate or intentional. In an encounter with his enemy Þorbjǫrn, Grettir throws a spear that loses its head in mid-air. Because they were fighting over marshland, the spearhead was not found during Grettir’s own lifetime. The saga says: Spjótit þat, sem Grettir hafði týnt, fannsk eigi fyrr en í þeira manna minnum, er nú lifa; þat spjót fannsk á ofanverðum dǫgum Sturlu lǫgmanns Þórðarsonar ok í þeiri mýri, er Þorbjǫrn fell, ok heitir þar nú Spjótsmýrr.29 (That spear which Grettir had lost was not found before the times that are remembered by those which live now. That spear was found during the latter days of Sturla Þórðarson the law-man, and in the marshland where Þorbjǫrn fell, and is now called Spjótsmýrr: Spear-marshland). The saga narrator says that the finding of this spear is taken as proof that this is where Þorbjǫrn died despite conflicting reports claiming that he died elsewhere. Again, we see how Grettir’s interaction with a landscape gives it a particular meaning that it would otherwise go without. The saga author is able to claim Grettir’s own deeds as evidence for the tale while simultaneously connecting him with the world of the saga’s audience and the significant figure of Sturla Þórðarson, a prominent chieftain and law-speaker of Iceland during the late thirteenth century. Because of how much time Grettir spends in the landscape and his status as a cultural icon, the saga author can continuously tie physical evidence to episodes in Grettir’s life. Chapter 50 of the saga begins by saying, ‘Grettir fór upp á Arnavatnsheiði ok gerði sér þar skála, sem enn sér merki’30 (Grettir went up on Arnavatnsheiðr and made a hut for himself there, remains of which are still seen). While Grettir was not the only Icelandic outlaw to make a hut for himself, the saga treats Grettir’s case as noteworthy. References are made to features in the landscape that were presumably recognizable to the saga’s original audience, whether they were the work of a historical Grettir or not. What is important is not how the physical landscape matches up to any historically accurate action, but rather the fact that the Grettir of the saga manipulated the landscape around himself so much that one expects to find traces of it still to the time of the saga’s composition. Grettir’s force, physically and narratively, was such that he could forever alter people’s perception of the land around them by inscribing himself in all that he came in contact with. Many of Grettir’s interactions with the landscape, when not motivated by survival, were the result of tests of strength. Grettis saga is not only concerned with Grettir’s symbolic impact on the world of the saga’s audience but also takes an interest in the ways in which Grettir physically alters the landscape he himself inhabits through deliberate action. While staying with Bjǫrn, a chieftain with influence in the region

29 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 157. 30 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 178.

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where the mountain Fagraskógafjall is located, one of Grettir’s outlaw outposts, the saga tells of how Grettir and his host placed stepping stones on a river, ‘er aldri síðan hefir ór rekit’31 (which have never since been driven off). The saga mentions that neither the swelling of the river, nor its freezing over were able to move these stones that Grettir and Bjǫrn had placed in the river. In this way Grettir can be seen as producing permanent change on the landscape, much as it produces on him; and while this deed is attributed to Grettir and Bjǫrn together, Grettis saga makes a point to mention that most people believed Grettir was the stronger of the two, despite what other sagas may claim. Through his extraordinary feats of strength and his survival efforts, the Grettir of the saga inscribes his tale in the Icelandic landscape. He shifts the physical features of Iceland in ways that will be witnessed by audiences of his tale for centuries to come. His legend grows so grand that, wherever he travels, his name remains tied to the land. However, that change goes both ways, and Grettir himself is transformed by the land he moulds.

Moulded by the North As we have seen, Grettir possesses a certain affinity with the natural world beyond the social sphere that allows him to thrive in the harsh northern landscape. Before Grettir is even introduced to the saga, however, his connection with the landscape is foreshadowed in the nicknames of his ancestors. The earliest of his ancestors named at the start of the saga is Ívarr beytill, perhaps better known today in the Anglophone world as Ivar Horse-cock.32 While Bernard Scudder’s translation captures the essence and humour of Ívarr’s nickname, particularly when contrasted with Grettir who is himself short-sworded in more than one sense, it obscures the name’s connection with the natural world. The Cleasby-Vigfusson Icelandic-English Dictionary identifies beytill with equisetum hiemale, a plant commonly known as ‘rough horsetail’,33 and in his Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic, Geir T. Zoëga identifies it, perhaps tentatively, with fescue-grass.34 Both of these identifications highlight the presence of an ancestral connection to the natural world, the affinity that Grettir inherits and develops further than anyone else in his time as an outlaw. Despite the fact that Ǫnundr tréfótr does complain about the harsh land he settles in Iceland, it is in his story that the family’s affinity to the landscape first becomes discernible. Ǫnundr is presented as a great Viking who fights in many battles and raids widely. In one conflict, Ǫnundr loses a leg and has to use a wooden one, giving him the nickname tréfótr, literally tree-leg or tree-foot. Despite having a wooden leg,

31 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 188. 32 The Saga of Grettir the Strong, ed. by Örnólfur Þorsson, and trans. by Scudder, p. 1. 33 Cleasby and Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, p. 62. 34 Zoëga, Dictionary of Old Icelandic, p. 51. I say the identification might be tentative because a question mark in parenthesis appears next to the definition.

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Ǫnundr continues to be a successful Viking and at times proves nimbler than men with both their legs still intact. The Icelandic word tré is cognate and synonymous with the English word tree. While the compound tréfótr means simply wooden leg, the presence of the element tré nevertheless reminds us that the wood for that leg came from a feature of the landscape. Ǫnundr tréfótr is literally shaped by elements of the landscape. And just as his ancestor owed his continued success to an aspect of the landscape, so too Grettir would owe his long survival as an outlaw to the landscape, though, ironically, it would be a piece of cursed driftwood that would ultimately lead to Grettir’s undoing. Many sagas illustrate military genius by having characters position their troops strategically on the battlegrounds, as in Heiðarvíga saga. Grettis saga goes beyond the military by drawing attention to the ways in which the landscape could influence a fight in a more naturalistic, or even animalistic, way. We see an example of this in the scene where Grettir fights a bear in Norway. Some men go out to hunt a bear that has been causing trouble one winter. When they find its lair, the saga provides a clear description of the site:

Þeir fundu þat í sjávarhǫmrum; var þar hamarklettr einn ok helliskúti framan í hamrinum, en einstigi til at ganga; bjarg var undir hellinum ok urð við sjóinn. Var þar víss bani, því er ofan hrapaði.35 (They found it in sea-crags; there was one crag and a jutting cave on the front of the crag, but a narrow path to walk up to it. There was a precipice under the cave and a heap of stones against the sea. There was certain death to whichever fell from above.) This description of the landscape at the bear’s lair sets the arena where Grettir and the bear would eventually meet in combat. The lethality of a fall from the cliff foreshadows the ending of Grettir’s fight, when both he and the bear would fall with Grettir landing on top. Grettir is guided in this fight as much by instinct as by strategy, highlighting how attuned he is to his surroundings. Whether or not this cave by a cliff has any direct correlation to the geography of Norway is unimportant. As a narrative function, it helps Grettir to slay a bear and makes his reputation grow. A striking feature in the landscape of Northern Europe, from the Scandinavian mainland to the Scottish Isles, and even Iceland, is the presence of burial mounds. Several sagas feature barrow-breaking scenes, and Grettir gets his during his first trip to Norway. This event also marks the first time that Grettir is significantly changed by his dealings in the northern landscape. Grettir is often described as having had all of the qualities that would make a man great during the heroic age, although living just after it. This is made explicitly clear during his escapade in the burial mound of Kárr inn gamli, the old. While walking one evening, Grettir ‘sá eld mikinn gjósa upp á nesi því, er niðr var frá bœ Auðunar’36 (saw a great fire burst up on this headland,

35 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 74. 36 Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 57.

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which was down from Auðunn’s farm). Merill Kaplan describes a typological way in which the chronology of the world of the sagas can be viewed.37 While the division she adapts is threefold, only two are of importance in this scene: the pre-conversion past and the post-conversion present in which Grettir lives. The fire that Grettir sees is an irruption, an interpolation of the heroic pagan past onto Grettir’s own Christian time. This irruption piques Grettir’s interest, and he finds himself unable to resist its lure. It is by way of the landscape that Grettir is made to come face to face with the heroic past for which he seems so much better suited. When Grettir breaks into the mound of Kárr inn gamli, he is crossing between worlds.38 The mound that he had spotted at a distance now serves as a literary gateway into the heroic, pre-conversion past. Although Kárr’s son Þorfinnr is still alive when Grettir breaks into the mound, the nickname inn gamli, the old, associates Kárr with the past. Furthermore, the conversion to Christianity in Iceland is still a recent event when the barrow breaking takes place. Kárr’s barrow provides the liminal space for Grettir to develop into a great hero in the northern fashion. He not only wrestles with a figure of the heroic past, but he defeats him. More important still is what Grettir takes with him from the burial mound, both figuratively and literally. After defeating Kárr inn gamli, Grettir takes the treasures in the barrow with him. The saga tells us that ‘Einn gripr var sá, er Gretti stóðu mest augu til; þat var eitt sax, svá gott vápn, at aldri kvazk hann sét hafa betra’39 (One valuable thing was seen, which Grettir’s eyes stood on most; it was a short sword, so good a weapon that he said he had never seen one better). This short sword becomes Grettir’s iconic weapon of choice, a temporally displaced artefact that Grettir acquires in the land beyond the social sphere. While Grettir’s fight with Kárr inn gamli marks his first major change acquired beyond the social sphere, it is his fight with Glámr that irreversibly seals the landscape into Grettir’s identity. Before his encounter with Grettir, a connection is established between Glámr and the northern landscape. Like Grettir, Glámr is not afraid to venture out in the middle of a blizzard, and again like Grettir, he is transformed by his time spent beyond the social sphere. However, unlike Grettir, when the saga has Glámr set out during a blizzard, he does not return alive. As Eleanor Barraclough points out: From the moment when Glámr’s mutilated body is found ‘ofarliga í dalnum’ (112) [‘high up in the valley’ (145)], the narrative associates him and his assailant with the inhospitable cliffs above the lower settlements, and this topographical distinction becomes key.40 Glámr was supposed to expel an evil force whose magnitude can be measured by the traces it leaves on the landscape, such as its enormous tracks, a trait it shares with Grettir himself who alters the landscape around him. Following his transformation

37 38 39 40

See Kaplan, Thou Fearful Guest, p. 49. Barraclough, ‘Inside Outlawry’, p. 370. Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 59. Barraclough, ‘Inside Outlawry’, p. 371.

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after death, Glámr inherits this link to the world of the outside, and it forms a part of his identity during his battle with Grettir. The fight between Grettir and Glámr begins inside a hall. Barraclough quotes William Sayer describing the hall as a ‘social and cultural microcosm’.41 It is the epitome of the social world, and the fight between Grettir and Glámr largely centres on Glámr trying to drag Grettir outside of this social haven. Barraclough points out that the interior of the hall, because of its physical dimensions, restricts the movements of Grettir’s enormous assailant, thus theoretically speaking, Grettir should have had an advantage while fighting indoors. Nevertheless, it is not until the fight is taken outside of the hall that Grettir is able to gain victory. In their fight, Grettir and Glámr bring the hall crashing down, symbolically damaging Grettir’s connection to the social sphere from then on.42 This transition is made more explicit by Glámr’s words to Grettir when he is defeated: ‘Þú munt verða útlægr gǫrr ok hljóta jafnan úti at búa einn samt’43 (You will be made to become an outlaw and to suffer to live outside alone). With this statement and the curse that he lays on him, Glámr declares Grettir a man of the outside world and sentences him to a life of survival in the brutal northern landscape that ended Glámr’s own life. Glámr’s curse forces Grettir to have even more constant contact with the natural world around him, truly transforming Grettir into a man of the landscape. This is depicted clearly during his stay at Fagraskógafjall, Grettir’s mountain hideout on the outskirts of society. Grettir is far enough to be distinct from the social sphere but close enough to still interact with it. A hole on the mountain allows Grettir to see what happens below while remaining hidden. The fact that Grettir is able to conceal himself so effectively and with such ease shows how much he himself has become a part of the landscape. Helen Damico describes Fagraskógafjall as an idyllic space within the world of Grettis saga.44 Grettir’s mountain hideout serves him as an efficient fortress while he dwells there. It is easily defensible and provides a good vantage point over the region. However, it is the details of the physical description of Fagraskógafjall that really show its importance to Grettir. Damico describes it as follows: There is a hole right through the mountain that commands a view of the main path below, and it is that bore hole that Grettir inhabits. The image is one which presents the hero as integral to his environment, for he completes it. He fills nature’s vacuum.45 Grettir now fits much better in this remote abode than he does within the social sphere. The saga shows how Grettir becomes a part of the landscape himself. Pushed into the world outside, he begins to adapt to the landscape in a way that he never could adapt to the social sphere.

41 42 43 44 45

Barraclough, ‘Inside Outlawry’, p. 372. Barraclough, ‘Inside Outlawry’, p. 373. Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 121. Damico, ‘Dystopic Conditions of the Mind’, p. 7. Damico, ‘Dystopic Conditions of the Mind’, p. 7.

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Grettir’s interactions with other people at this point in the narrative also illustrate how he has changed into a being of the outside. For the first time in the narrative, Grettir, the man who sought out Kárr inn gamli, the bear that was causing trouble in Norway, and Glámr, is being sought out by another. He is clearly transitioning from someone who seeks out and settles disturbances from the outside, associated with particular landscape features — whether a burial mound, a cave by the cliffs, or hills above a valley — to someone who is now himself a disturbance from the outside, associated with a particular landscape feature, at this point in Grettir’s transformation, the mountain Fagraskógafjall. While Grettir terrorizes the vicinity from his mountain hideout, a merchant named Gísli seeks him out so that he can put an end to Grettir’s bandit activity. As Barraclough argues, the narrative uses Gísli’s perspective to illustrate how much Grettir has changed, saying: The narrative focalization of the scene uses Gísli’s point of view to create association between Grettir and the surrounding topography for in Gísli’s eyes, Grettir’s defining feature is his mountainous abode that marks him out as an alien being closer to a troll than a man.46 Through his constant dealings with the outside and the peripheral, Grettir himself becomes an aspect of the external. By this point, in many ways, Grettir has become just another part of Fagraskógafjall. This is made still more explicit in the scene where Grettir chases Gísli from Fagraskógafjall. Gísli’s escape in this scene is closely tied to the terrain that he traverses. In contrast, Grettir’s movements across the same terrain are not remarked on in terms of the landscape that he covers. The saga does offer details about his chase, but from Grettir’s perspective the details are more concerned with the speed and manner of his chase rather than the topography. Grettir’s pursuit is, in a sense, ‘trackless’.47 Damico compares Grettir’s pursuit of Gísli to that of a bird of prey hunting game from atop a mountain.48 Whether Grettir is seen more as a troll by this point or as a bird of prey, what is clear is that he now resembles more a creature of the landscape than he does a man of society. Despite the critical placement of Fagraskógafjall in Grettir’s development beyond the social realm, Grettir is eventually forced to leave the mountain. Sometime after leaving, Grettir finds himself once again being pursued, and he stops by the farm of Guðmundr inn ríki, the powerful, to ask for help. Guðmundr points Grettir to the ultimate outlaw’s retreat, the island Drangey. He reaches Drangey on the advice of Guðmundr, who tells him: ‘Ey sú liggr á Skagafirði, er heitir Drangey; hon er svá gott vígi, at hvergi má komask upp á hana, nema stigar sé við látnir’49 (That island lies in Skagafjörður which is called Drangey; it is such a good stronghold that no one can come up it unless they use a ladder). Once again Grettir inhabits a landscape that

46 47 48 49

Barraclough, ‘Inside Outlawry’, p. 375. Barraclough, ‘Inside Outlawry’, p. 376. Damico, ‘Dystopic Conditions of the Mind’, p. 9. Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Jónsson, p. 218.

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mirrors his position in, or rather outside, society. An island is the final great symbol of Grettir’s life and the place where that life finally ends. For Grettir, Drangey represents the illusion of safety. It forms part of the landscape just outside of society and promises a degree of comfort. Just as the island is still within sight of society, however, so too is Grettir still subject to the social world. As Damico puts it: Drangey exemplifies the merging of the ironic with the idyllic landscape as it is defined in Grettis saga. Fertile, grassy, and teeming with seafowl and lambs […] Safe and secure […] Grettir perceives Drangey as his last place of refuge; in reality it becomes the altar on which he fattens himself for the kill.50 Grettir takes Drangey for a remote stronghold that he can easily defend from outsiders, but neither he nor the island were ever really beyond reach. Drangey has several layers of meaning in Grettis saga. More than any other place in the text, Drangey symbolizes the outlaw. Grettir travels widely across Iceland. He traverses striking landscape in Norway as well. Although Grettir’s affinity with the northern natural world grows stronger throughout the saga, it is not until he reaches Drangey that it all comes together. Hastrup points out, ‘Grettir roams about a lot as an outlaw before he gets to Drangey, but in the saga this island seems to provide the ultimate topographical fixation of the conceptual space inhabited by the outlaws’.51 Like the remote northern island, Grettir exists outside of the social sphere but not entirely beyond it. He is alone and to the side but just within reach. At Drangey, Grettir truly becomes one with his environment, and so it is no wonder that he refuses to ever leave, even when his life is threatened. Grettir’s landscape-associated foes all met their demise in the cold: the undead Kárr and Glámr were both faced around Yule, the bear in Norway awoke and ravaged over winter, and Grettir slays another two trolls over Yuletide. The coming of Grettir’s end is foretold in a similar fashion to that of the creatures he once defeated. It is in late autumn and under cover of darkness — the one thing, ironically, that frightens the mighty warrior — that Grettir is finally attacked in Drangey. Barraclough notes, ‘Such markers were earlier associated with malevolent forces from outside society, and by the time he reaches Drangey, it seems that Grettir has taken on many of the monstrous characteristics of those he fought’.52 Once banished to the outside, Grettir embodies more and more of the traits of his former external foes until their narrative becomes his own. Drangey is a reflection of what Grettir becomes. Given what a misfit Grettir was in society and how much of his life was spent in the physical terrain beyond social boundaries, it is only to be expected that Grettir would himself become a sort of island. Grettir was more a part of Drangey than he was a part of society, just like Glámr was a part of the valley and the Norwegian bear a part of its cliff.

50 Damico, ‘Dystopic Conditions of the Mind’, p. 3. 51 Hastrup, ‘Tracing Tradition’, p. 165. 52 Barraclough, ‘Inside Outlawry’, p. 378.

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Conclusion After Grettir’s death, the action of the saga moves to the south. The narrative is closed by the so-called Spesar þáttr. Margaret Clunies Ross describes this odd final episode as follows: Spesar þáttr belongs in the romance world and is probably influenced by the Tristram legend; it is set in Constantinople and speaks of hope and the continuity of life through its focus on Grettir’s brother and avenger, Þorsteinn, and his love affair with the lady Spes. The contrast is stark, but the bold juxtaposition of structures and modes works in terms of the literary dénouement of Grettis saga.53 We find that we are a far cry away from the vicious northern landscape in which Grettir inscribed his memory. Despite the romance influence, supernatural occurrences are largely absent, and the northern monsters faced by Grettir, like trolls and the undead, are altogether gone. The southern weather seems tame compared to the storms endured and overcome by Grettir, and the action is so distant from the saga’s audience that its memory is preserved solely in the words of the text. The landscape ceases to be a character when the narrative leaves the north. Still, Spesar þáttr illustrates how, without the northern landscape, Grettir would not be the grand hero that he is. For Grettir, the north presents a challenge against which to test himself, a place in which to inscribe himself, and a transformative force. His interactions with the landscape as described in the saga are twofold. Grettir never seems quite fit for the social world, but his brushes with the world beyond do not leave him unchanged. Each encounter that Grettir has with the creatures of the periphery lures him further out of society, and the longer that he spends in the landscape, the more that Grettir resembles it. Likewise, the longer Grettir is out in the landscape, the more that he changes it in turn. Through his feats, Grettir transforms Iceland’s surface, and through the introduced place names, its identity.54 Grettir’s impact on the landscape ranges from reshaping the world of the saga to changing the reception of the landscape to the present day. Though both Grettir and the landscape are thoroughly transformed by the end, ultimately it is difficult to say which of the two played a bigger role in moulding the other.

Works Cited Primary Sources Cleasby, Richard, and Guðbrandur Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1975) Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, Íslenzk Fornrit, 7 (Reykjavik: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2012)

53 Clunies Ross, The Old Norse-Icelandic Saga, p. 165. 54 Hastrup, ‘Tracing Tradition’, p. 172.

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The Saga of Grettir the Strong, ed. by Örnólfur Þorsson, and trans. by Bernard Scudder (New York: Penguin, 2005) Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, ed. by Karsten Friis-Jensen, trans. by Peter Fisher, Oxford Medieval Texts, 2 vols (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 2015) Zoëga, Geir T., A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (New York: Dover, 2004) Secondary Works Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir, ‘Cultural Memory and Gender in Iceland from Medieval to Early Modern Times’, Scandinavian Studies, 85.3 (2013), 378–99 Barraclough, Eleanor R., ‘Inside Outlawry in Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar and Gísla saga Súrssonar: Landscape in the Outlaw Sagas’, Scandinavian Studies, 82.4 (2010), 365–88 ———, ‘Naming the Landscape in the landnám Narratives of the Íslendingasögur and Landnámabók’, Saga-Book of the Viking Society, 36 (2012), 79–101 Clunies Ross, Margaret, The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Damico, Helen, ‘Dystopic Conditions of the Mind: Toward a Study of Landscape in Grettissaga’, In Geardagum, 7 (1986), 1–15 Hastrup, Kristen, ‘Tracing Tradition – An Anthropological Perspective on Grettis saga Ásmundarsonar’, in Island of Anthropology, ed. by Kristen Hastrup (Odense: Odense University Press, 1990), pp. 154–83 Hermann, Pernille, ‘Founding Narratives and the Representation of Memory in Saga Literature’, Arv Nordic Yearbook of Folklore, 66 (2010), 69–88 ———, ‘Memory, Imagery, and Visuality in Old Norse Literature’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 114.3 (2015), 17–340 Johnson, Matthew, Ideas of Landscape (Malden: Blackwell, 2007) Kaplan, Merill, Thou Fearful Guest: Addressing the Past in Four Tales in Flateyjarbók (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2011) Lethbridge, Emily, ‘The Icelandic Sagas and Saga Landscapes’, Gripla, 27 (2016), 51–92 Lethbridge, Emily, and Steven Hartman, ‘Inscribing Environmental Memory in the Icelandic Sagas and the Icelandic Saga Map’, PMLA, 131.2 (2016), 381–91 Schach, Paul, ‘The Anticipatory Literary Setting in the Old Icelandic Family Sagas’, Scandinavian Studies, 27.1 (1955), 1–13 Tilley, Christopher, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1994) Wyatt, Ian, ‘Narrative Functions of Landscape in the Old Icelandic Family Sagas’, in Land, Sea and Home, ed. by John Hines, Alan Lane, and Mark Redknap (Reykjavík: Árnastufnun, 2004), pp. 273–82

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Vittorio Mattioli

The Worlds in Grímnismál Norse and Medieval Christian Understandings of Space

The abodes and landscapes, in which gods are thought to reside, are a critical aspect of the study of religions and mythologies. Different cultures, in different times, deal with this in different ways. To the Ancient Greeks, the twelve Olympian gods resided in Mt Olympus, a real and tangible landscape of the Greek mainland, which, at the same time, had taken on great importance as a liminal space, connecting the gods with humans. Similarly, the Roman historian Tacitus (c. 56–c. 120 ad), describing the Semnones in Germania, says that their god came from a forest in Suebia: Vetustissimos se nobilissimosque Sueborum Semnones memorant; fides antiquitatis religione firmatur. Stato tempore in silvam auguriis patrum et prisca formidine sacram omnes eiusdem sanguinis populi legationibus coeunt caesoque publice homine celebrant barbari ritus horrenda primordia. Est et alia luco reverentia: nemo nisi vinculo ligatus ingreditur, ut minor et potestatem numinis prae se ferens. Si forte prolapsus est, attolli et insurgere haud licitum: per humum evolvuntur. Eoque omnis superstitio respicit, tamquam inde initia gentis, ibi regnator omnium deus, cetera subiecta atque parentia. Adicit auctoritatem fortuna Semnonum: centum pagi iis habitantur magnoque corpore efficitur ut se Sueborum caput credant.1 (The Semnones say that they are the most ancient and most noble of all the Suebi; and their religion confirms their belief in how ancient they are. At a fixed time, the representatives of the different tribes of all the Suebic peoples gather in a forest, sacred because of omens of their ancestors and ancient reverence, and with the public killing of a human, they start their horrendous and barbarous rite. They manifest a sacred respect for that forest in another way: no one is allowed to enter, unless they are tied with a rope, showing thus their inferiority and the great power of the divinity. If one happens to fall down, they are not allowed to get up or be helped up, but instead have to crawl on the ground and out of the forest. Every superstition they have refers back to

1 Tacitus, Germania, ed. by Barrile, chap. 39 (p. 46). Vittorio Mattioli, Ph.D. (St Andrews), [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 113–128 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120789

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Figure 6.1. ‘Finnur Magnússon’s cosmological map of Norse mythology’, after Magnússon, Eddalaeren og dens Oprindelse, iii (Copenhagen, 1825), p. 340.

T he Wo rld s i n Grímnismál

that place: the origins of their race stem from there, as does the god who rules as lord and master over everything. The prosperity of the Semnones confirms this: they live in a hundred districts and because of their high number, they believe themselves to be the most important tribe of the Suebi.) When it comes to the belief of the people of the North, the surviving sources show a relationship between the divine and landscapes. According to Stefan Brink: ‘Very often these myths are connected with certain physical features in the landscape, objects that, owing to their perpetual presence, make the mythical stories not only memorable but enable them to function as sanctions or witnesses to these myths’.2 Such physical features could connect mythological landscapes from an imaginary to a real world. However, to a modern mind, these landscapes are defined by otherness, their physical features being overshadowed by their absence from the real world. A large number of scholars in the field of cosmology have tried to put all the information of the Norse mythological worlds together, and create a visual representation of how the worlds of the gods were connected to each other. The first scholar to create such a uniform cosmological map was Finnur Magnússon in the nineteenth century (see Fig. 6.1).3 Finnur’s map and ideas were followed by E. V. Gordon, in his An Introduction to Old Norse,4 Branston in Gods of the North,5 and many others, up to more recent editions, such as Jesse Byock’s translation of the Prose Edda.6 An overview of Finnur’s influence on scholarship has been provided by Margaret Clunies Ross in ‘Images of Norse Cosmology’.7 This map is familiar to scholars studying Norse mythology, as well as those familiar with popular culture. Showing only slight alterations between the versions of each scholar, the map usually shows the universe as a series of disks, with Miðgarðr being the central one, topped by Ásgarðr and with Nifelheimr below. These disks are skewered by the world tree, Yggdrasill. A rainbow, being the bridge Bilrǫst (or Bifrǫst), connects Ásgarðr with Miðgarðr. All these images are pleasing to the eye, and — albeit somewhat awkwardly — manage to depict a great number of worlds in a single dimension of space. Finnur’s influence has been enduring in the way scholars, and popular culture, think of Norse cosmology and the abodes of the gods. But is that how the people in the North pictured their world? Was the North of Europe a disk skewered by a tree? Such images do not necessarily reflect the actual beliefs of the Norse-speaking peoples. What such universal cosmological maps fail to take into account is that there was never a single, unified pan-Scandinavian paganism. A merchant from Hedeby would not necessarily have had the same pantheon of deities, or worshipped the same gods within a similar one, as a raider from Uppsala. Even if their pantheon were exactly the same, the aspects of each god might have been — and probably were — different. In



2 Brink, ‘Myth and Ritual in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Landscape’, p. 34. 3 Andrén, Tracing Old Norse Cosmology, p. 29. 4 Gordon, An Introduction to Old Norse, p. 175. 5 Branston, Gods of the North, p. 73. 6 Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda, trans. by Byock, p. xxvi. 7 Clunies Ross, ‘Images of Norse Cosmology’, pp. 53–73.

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some cases, these differences were slight — in others, pronounced. Andrén, for instance, writes that paganism is a forn siðr ‘old way of life’, a shifting identity instead of a specific religion followed universally.8 James Palmer, following James O’Donnell’s writings,9 notes that paganism is ‘something more akin to an attitude than a belief system’.10 Moreover, the mythological sources themselves cannot be taken at face value as unproblematic representations of age-old pagan beliefs. The Elder Edda and the Snorra Edda survive in thirteenth-century manuscripts from Iceland, more than two hundred years after the Icelanders converted to Christianity. The Elder Edda are a collection of poems, written by unknown authors and probably from different regions and time periods. Even if every single poem in the collection is seen as having survived from a pre-Christian society relatively intact, which is highly unlikely in its own right, there is no knowledge of where, or when, each poem was composed. Vafþrúðnismál could have been composed in Eastern Denmark in the ninth century while Lokasenna could be the product of a tenth-century Norwegian poet. Their specific mythological beliefs might have been very different. The Prose Edda prove to be even more problematic. In fact, the author, Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241 ad), is known to have been a Christian and it is evident that he used the Elder Edda as a source for composition. Snorri took poems of the Elder Edda, possibly added some knowledge he had from other sources, unknown to modern scholarship, and, using his creativity, tried to put all the information together, creating a work that does not reflect the specific beliefs of anyone at any given time. As such, my proposal for improving our understanding of heathen Norse beliefs, is to ignore Snorri’s works as much as one is able to, and to study each of the mythological poems of the Elder Edda separately. Recent works, such as the DFG-Projekt Edda-Kommentar have shed new light on a number of Eddic poems, though the traditional practice of comparing the poems to each other can still be traced. The conclusions of this study will provide more discrete answers: the specific beliefs of whoever composed each poem and — possibly — the people from that region and time period. A useful test case is provided by the poem Grímnismál, which spends a good deal of its stanzas listing and describing the worlds of the gods, therefore making it the perfect start for a study of the mythological landscapes found in Eddic poetry. Moreover, Grímnismál has not been published by the DFG-Projekt Edda-Kommentar to date, and the most recent commentary of considerable length (other than my Ph.D. thesis), dates back to the early 1900s.11 Before the main part of this study starts, some things should be made clear. It is most important to define my usage of the word landscape, a word that takes a large number of meanings. A landscape, to my mind, is any visible feature in a land. By talking about the landscapes of the gods, I shall not focus on whether Þrúðheimr, Þórr’s abode, consisted of mountains or forest, but the most basic aspect of this

8 9 10 11

Andrén, ‘Behind Heathendom’, p. 108. O’Donnell, ‘The Demise of Paganism’, p. 52. Palmer, ‘Defining Paganism in the Carolingian World’, p. 409. Sijmons and Gering, Die Lieder der Edda.

T he Wo rld s i n Grímnismál

landscape: its location. The main interest is to try to come to an understanding of whether the cosmological landscape painted by Finnur and the other scholars after him agrees with what Grímnismál tells its audience and readers about the cosmological map that Northerners had painted. Following this, I shall focus on where the gods resided. This is somewhere that a human being cannot go by any natural means. The absence of a single word in English or Old Norse that can convey the exact meaning of this, without being heavily tinged with other connotations, is striking. The idea of scholars is that all these mythological beings resided in a heaven or different heavens, but this word is now completely Christian in the minds of most scholars. This place could be seen as being in different dimensions, or universes, from a more scientific perspective, or it could be a place that transcends the physical universe, or a world. Each of these definitions is problematic, as there is a need for a word about a realm that is not inflected by Abrahamic ideas but is also not heavily scientific. Turning to an unfamiliar language and culture that does not partake of this thought-nexus and looking into Hindu and Buddhist cosmology I found the following: the Sanskrit word loka takes a specialized meaning when it comes to cosmology. That meaning is ‘world, division of the universe (the two worlds = heaven and earth; the three = the same and the atmosphere or the lower regions; seven worlds are commonly spoken of); heaven; earth’, and is akin to what is being discussed here.12 As such, I shall use the word loka to define that notion. Following the traditional reading, Grímnismál starts in the world of humans (ignoring the prose introduction and conclusion), more specifically in the abode of King Geirrøðr (sts. 1–3). From there, Grímnir starts giving a list of the different worlds and the gods that reside in them (sts. 4–8, 11–17). Later on, a large list of river names is also given (sts. 21, 27–29). Moreover, a number of other mythological elements, mainly relating to Valhǫll and Yggdrasill are mentioned (sts. 9–10, 22–26, 31–35, 44) and lastly a description of the creation of the world from Ymir’s flesh (sts. 40–41).

The Worlds of Grímnismál In Grímnismál, thirteen place names of the lands in which gods or other mythological beings are said to reside are mentioned. In order of their appearance, these are, with their respective deity: 1. Þruðheimr — Þórr. 2. Ýdalir — Ullr. 3. Álfheimr — Freyr. 4. Bǫr/Valaskjálfr —? 5. Søkkvabekkr — Óðinn and Sága. 6. Glaðsheimr — Hroptr (Óðinn). 7. Þrymheimr — Scaði. 8. Breiðablik — Baldr. 9. Himinbjǫrg — Heimdallr. 10. Fólkvangr — Freyja. 11. Glitnir — forseti? 12. Nóatun — Niorþr. 13. Víðars land — Víðarr. Some of these, most notably Álfheimr, are thought to be both different and individual spatial entities, or lokas, at the same time. In 1931, Sigurd Agrell emended these places to twelve and assigned each, and its respective deity, to an astronomical sign and a month.13 Such conclusions can be easily dismissed. I shall avoid reading

12 Macdonell, A Practical Sanskrit Dictionary, p. 263. 13 Agrell, Semantik Mysteriereligion.

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too much into each stanza that is quoted.14 Instead, my focus will be on whether the information they give us is plausible and reasonable on its own. Firstly, heimr is the most common word used in the compound names given for these landscapes. Cleasby and Vigfússon write that heimr can mean ‘abode, village, land, [or] region’ instead of solely ‘world’.15 The Prologue to Grímnismál where Óðinn sits on Hliðskjálfr and sees over heima alla supports this view.16 Etymologically, heimr has Slavonic cognates with the meaning of ‘household, dwelling place’, and in both Sanskrit and Latin there are cognate words with an ultimate sense of lying, being in a place. More importantly, the closest translation to heimr is probably found in Greek οἰκουμένη, the translation of which is similarly problematic in English, but with the ultimate sense of ‘an inhabited region’.17 Lastly, it is worth noting that a number of place names in the inhabited world of the humans had the -heimr suffix. Þróndheimr in Norway and Álfheimr in the Swedish province of Bohuslän are examples of this. If heimr were used to define different lokas then surely it would not be found in place names around Scandinavia. Further support can be found by reading the following stanzas: 4. Land er heilagt | er ek liggja sé ásum ok álfum nær; en í Þrúðheimi | skal Þórr vera, unz um rjúfask regin.18 ([The] land is holy | which I see lying | near the ásir and the álfar. | But in Þrúðheimr | must Þórr be, | until the gods are torn apart.) 29. Kǫrmt ok Ǫrmt | ok Kerlaugar tvær, þær skal Þórr vaða dag hvern | er hann dœma ferr at aski Yggdrasils, þvíat ásbrú | brenn ǫll loga, heilǫg vǫtn hlóa.19 (Kǫrmt and Ǫrmt | and the two Kerlaugar, | Þórr must wade them | each day, | when he goes to judge | at the ash of Yggdrasill, | Because the bridge of the gods | burns with fire, | holy waters boil.) Þórr, who we know lives in Þrúðheimr, has to cross Kǫrmt, Ǫrmt, and the two Kerlaugar to reach the ash of Yggdrasill. This implies that wherever Þórr is coming from, which presumably is Þruðheimr, is divided from Yggdrasill by rivers. Similarly, in stanza 30:

14 Interpretations such as Agrell’s, which heavily rely on emendations to the text, have been proven to be quite unlikely since the 1930s. 15 Cleasby and Guðbrandur Vigfússon, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, p. 251. 16 ‘Oþinn ok Frigg sátu í Hliðskjálf ok sá um heima alla’ (Óðinn and Frigg sat in Hliðskjálf and saw around all worlds). Grímnismál, ed. by Vésteinn Ólason and Jonas Kristjánsson, p. 367. 17 Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, p. 1205. 18 Grímnismál, ed. by Vésteinn Ólason and Jonas Kristjánsson, pp. 368–69. 19 Grímnismál, ed. by Vésteinn Ólason and Jonas Kristjánsson, p. 374.

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30. Glaðr ok Gyllir, | Glær ok Skeiðbrimir, Silfrintoppr ok Sinir, Gísl ok Falhófnir, | Gulltoppr ok Léttfeti, þeim ríða æsir jóm dag hvern | er þeir dœma fara at aski Yggdrasils.20 (Glaðr and Gyllir, | Glær and Skeiðbrimir, | Silfrintoppr and Sinir, | Gísl and Falhófnir, | Gulltoppr and Léttfeti, | the gods ride those horses | each day | when they go to judge | at the ash of Yggdrasill.) While the gods have to ride these horses in order to reach the ash of Yggdrasill, the number of horses mentioned here is ten. While one could dismiss the number of horses as the need for fulfilling metre requirements, this stanza is longer than the usual ljóðaháttr. This leaves the possibility open that the number of horses mentioned is of importance. Looking at the number of beings mentioned in the list of heimir, one can see twelve names. These are: Þórr, Ullr, Freyr, Óðinn, Sága, Skaði, Baldr, Heimdallr, Freyja, forseti, Njǫrðr, and Víðar. However, by looking at stanza 11, one can see that Skaði is not a goddess, but rather a jǫtunn: 11. Þrymheimr heitir inn sétti | er Þjazi bjó, sá inn ámáttki jǫtunn; en nú Skaði byggvir, | skír brúðr goða, fornar tóptir fǫður.21 (The sixth is called Þrymheimr, | where Þjazi lived, | that, the mighty giant. | But now Skaði dwells in, | bright bride of the gods, | the ancient ruins of [her] father.) There is a problem with forseti too. In fact, forseti is only found in stanza 15 of Grímnismál and then mentioned by Snorri. He might have been influenced by the name of the god Fosite, mentioned in the Vita Sancti Willibrordi, in which the saint is said to have visited an island called Fositesland, named after the god whom the people that lived there worshipped.22 According to Rudolf Simek, there have been attempts to connect Fosite with a Nordic god named Forseti by trying to find a common base-form *Forsete or *Forsite, which would have been interpreted as Forseti in the north.23 Such connections seem unlikely, since there seem to be no similarities between the cults or the attributes of the two deities. The one place name that possibly refers to him is

20 Grímnismál, ed. by Vésteinn Ólason and Jonas Kristjánsson, p. 374. 21 Grímnismál, ed. by Vésteinn Ólason and Jonas Kristjánsson, p. 370. 22 Thiofrid, Vita Sancti Willibrordi, ed. by Pertz, chap. 12. ‘Quod in insula Fositeslant in magnae supersticionis loco fixit tentoria et animalia ibi pascentia in suorum distribuit cibaria et ob id apud regem accusatus’. Translation by Michael French: ‘That on the island Fositelant in a place of great superstition he set up tents and distributed grazing animals amongst his men as food. On account of this, he was accused before the king’. 23 Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology, p. 89.

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Forsetalundr, ‘grove of Forseti’, in Norway.24 However, just by taking the meaning of forseti as a noun, and the fact that it still survives in Modern Icelandic with its exact definition of ‘president’, Grímnismál gives the reader no reason to think of forseti as anything more than a title for someone which would mean ‘president, presider, [or] peace-maker’, not a name for a specific deity.25 By removing Skaði and forseti from the list of æsir, one ends up with ten, the same number of horses mentioned in stanza 30. The gods mentioned in the list of heimir have to ride the aforementioned horses to go from their respective regions to Yggdrasill. Further support of a unified world is found in the famous stanza 20: 20. Huginn ok Muninn | fljúga hverjan dag jǫrmungrund yfir; óumk ek of Hugin | at hann aptr né komit, þó sjámk meirr um Munin.26 (Huginn and Munin | fly each day | over the great ground. | I fear for Huginn | that he shall not come back, | though I fear more for Munin.) Huginn and Muninn, are said to fly ‘jǫrmungrund yfir’ (over the great ground). If they are indeed ravens, or some form of bird, and if, as most scholars seem to view them, they see what happens everywhere, it is evident that these birds fly over the same world, and not different lokas. It is evident that Grímnismál gives the reader and audience no reason to expect a bundle of worlds, one for each god or group of creatures, but instead a single, unified one.

The World of Grímnismál A question that is far more difficult to answer is whether this one mythological loka is divided from the world of human habitation or whether they are either connected, or one and the same. A number of factors could support such a view. Firstly, Yggdrasill appears to be the axis mundi; a view based not just on the information given in Grímnismál, but also on archaeological and non-Scandinavian literary material. Sacrifices performed around trees are known to have happened in different parts of the Germanic-speaking world, including the great trees at Uppsala and Lejre.27 Grímnismál stanza 31 reads: 31. Þrjár rœtr | standa á þrjá vega undan aski Yggdrasils; Hel býr undir einni, | annarri hrímþursar, 24 Sijmons and Gering, Die Lieder der Edda, p. 193. 25 I spend some time in my thesis discussing forseti and there are more sources that support there not being such a god. However, since this is of a secondary nature to this discussion, I shall refrain from presenting all of them. 26 Grímnismál, ed. by Vésteinn Ólason and Jonas Kristjánsson, p. 372. 27 Andrén, Tracing Old Norse Cosmology, p. 104.

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þríðju mennskir menn.28 (Three roots | stand in three directions | from under the ash of Yggdrasill. | Hel lives under one, | under another the hrímþursar, | under the third human men.) Mankind is said to reside underneath one of the roots of Yggdrasill, with Hel and the hrímþursar under the other two. This directly connects Yggdrasill and these other two places and could mean that they are part of the same world. However, the abodes of the gods themselves are directly connected to Yggdrasill too, as seen above. On its own, stanza 31 is not enough to prove that the world of human habitation and the mythological one were one loka. However, more support can be found in sts. 40–41: 40. Ór Ymis holdi | var jǫrð um skǫðuð en ór sveita sær, bjǫrg ór beinum, | baðmr ór hári en ór hausi himinn. (From the flesh of Ymir | was the earth shaped | but from blood the sea, | mountains from bones, | tree from hair | but from cranium sky.) 41. En ór hans brám | gerðu blíð regin Miðgarð manna sonum; en ór hans heila | váru þau in harðmóðgu ský ǫll um skǫpuð.29 (But from his brows | the blithe gods made | middle enclosure for sons of men. | But from his brains | they, all the hardminded clouds | were shaped.) There is no mention of two worlds having been created, and in reading this we are given no reason to expect more than one world. In fact, not only is jǫrð, ‘earth’, given in the singular, but the word used for miðgarðr, ‘middle enclosure’, itself points to it being part of a world. Furthermore, miðgarðr having been created by brows is peculiar. Instead, one can easily picture the brows being used to make an enclosure as part of the flesh, and it makes more sense than thinking of the brows and flesh as completely different lokas. As a last support towards the idea of the gods and men residing in the same loka, we have the list of river names in sts. 27–28: 27. Síð ok Víð, | Sœkin ok Eikin, Svǫl ok Gunnþró, Fjǫrm ok Fimbulþul, | Rín ok Rennandi, Gipul ok Gǫpul,

28 Grímnismál, ed. by Vésteinn Ólason and Jonas Kristjánsson, p. 374. 29 Grímnismál, ed. by Vésteinn Ólason and Jonas Kristjánsson, p. 376.

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Gǫmul ok Geirvimul, | þær hverfa um hodd goða, Þyn ok Vin, Þóll ok Hǫll, | Gráð ok Gunnþorin.30 (Síð and Víð, | Sœkin and Eikin, | Svǫl and Gunnþró, | Fjǫrm and Fimbulþul, | Rín and Rennandi, | Gipul and Gǫpul, | Gǫmul and Geirvimul, | they turn around the treasure of the gods, | Þyn and Vin, | Þóll and Hǫll, | Gráð and Gunnþorin.) 28. Vína heitir enn, | ǫnnur Vegsvinn, þriðja Þjóðnuma, Nyt ok Nǫt, | Nǫnn ok Hrǫnn, Slíð ok Hríð, Sylgr ok Ylgr, | Víð ok Ván, Vǫnd ok Strǫnd, Gjǫll ok Leiptr, | þær falla gumnum nær en falla til heljar heðan.31 (Yet, Vína is called, | another Vegsvinn, | a third Þjóðnuma, | Nyt and Nǫt, | Nǫnn and Hrǫnn, | Slíð and Hríð, | Sylgr and Ylgr, | Víð and Ván, | Vǫnd and Strǫnd, | Gjǫll and Leiptr, | they fall near to men | but fall to hell hence.) Of these, two are of the most importance in this discussion: Rín and Vína (also emended as Vín á). Rín is definitely the Rhein, while Vína would be the Dvina. Both are rivers found in the Northern European landscape, and are but a couple of examples of mythological toponyms in Grímnismál that also appear in the world of human habitation, the aforementioned Kǫrmt and Ǫrmt being another example, since two small islands off the coast of Norway are named as such. In an attempt to show that stanza 26 of Grímnismál is a Christian composition, Matthias Egeler has argued that all other rivers mentioned in Grímnismál are fictional and that they ‘are [all] invented names without any real cosmological significance or any indications of traditional roots’.32 This is a statement that presupposes that every single source on Scandinavian pre-Christian cosmology survives today. As Christopher Hale shows, a number of these river names show a connection to rivers and other place names found in the North, especially in Norway, but also in Sweden. Some of these could be the names of actual rivers, while some rivers may have once been named as such and then their names changed, having survived only in compound names.33 If Hale’s analysis is to be accepted, then not only is Egeler’s statement disproved, but the vast majority of the river names mentioned in these two stanzas could be referring to actual rivers in Scandinavia.

30 31 32 33

Grímnismál, ed. by Vésteinn Ólason and Jonas Kristjánsson, p. 373. Grímnismál, ed. by Vésteinn Ólason and Jonas Kristjánsson, p. 373. Egeler, 'Eikþyrnir and the Rivers of Paradise’, p. 32. Hale, ‘The River Names in Grímnismál 27–29’, p. 182.

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It should not be hard to accept on the evidence above that all gods resided in the same loka or that this world could have been the world of human habitation. The Greeks believed that too (at least some of them) so it is not a completely unique or alien idea. Furthermore, thinking of miðgarðr and its literal meaning, one could make an argument that men are enclosed there without being able to escape. It could be that the world of human habitation was considered a large place, which included Yggdrasill, the different realms of the gods, and under/close to one of the roots of Yggdrasill miðgarðr, which would have been the part where humans lived: the North.

Other Sources I shall now compare Grímnismál and its portrayal of cosmology with some other sources. The skaldic poem Þórsdrápa, which I believe is related to Grimnismál for a number of reasons which I have discussed elsewhere, shows a similar belief. In fact, in the second stanza of Þórsdrápa, the seventy-fourth found in Skáldskaparmál: 74. Geðstrangrar lét gǫngu gammleið Þórr skǫmmu – fýstusk þeir at þrýsta *Þorns niðjum – sik biðja, þár er *harðvenjuðr gǫrðisk Gandvíkr Skotum ríkri endr til Ymsa kindar Iðja setrs frá Þriðja.34 (Þórr swiftly let the vulture-path bid him on the going to the path severe to the frame of mind — they made themselves eager to crush Þorn’s offspring. then when *the court —accustomed one of Iði’s seat more mighty than the Scots of Gandvíkr makes himself [travels] moreover to Ymsi’s offspring from the Third One.) The part of interest in this stanza is the kenning Gandvíkr Skotum. It can be literally translated as ‘of the Scots of Gandvíkr’. Gandvíkr literally translates as ‘the bay of the wizard’s staff ’ and, in this case, as a place name, refers to the White Sea, another Northern landmark. The Scots of Gandvíkr are jǫtnar. Mythological beings similar to gods, jǫtnar are explicitly said to reside on the far east of the Scandinavian peninsula — and one is left wondering whether Skaði herself hailed from there. This kenning, therefore, which also belongs to a poem likely related to Grímnismál, supports my view of gods, other supernatural beings, and men residing in the same world.

34 Snorri Sturluson, Skáldskaparmál, p. 26.

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Turning to the Christian religion: in Genesis, chapter 2, verses 9 to 14, we read the following: And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison: that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; And the gold of that land is good: there is bdellium and the onyx stone. And the name of the second river is Gihon: the same is it that compasseth the whole land of Ethiopia. And the name of the third river is Hiddekel: that is it which goeth toward the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is Euphrates.35 The image we get of the Garden of Eden is the following: it is a terrestrial paradise, with four rivers surrounding and enclosing it. Turning to Bede’s (672–735 ad) commentary on Genesis where he discusses the tree of life: And indeed the tree of life was so called because it received by divine agency this virtue, as I have said, that he who ate from it, his body would be strengthened by enduring health, nor would it ever be altered by any infirmity or age into a worse state or slip into death.36 One might be tempted to compare Yggdrasill, or the apples of Íðunn, with this tree of life. Having already fallen into such traps myself, I would argue against it. Most, if not all, cultures and religions in the world have shown the importance of trees. It is of critical importance to stress that similarities do not necessarily mean a common source, nor do they mean that one was influenced by the other. Of importance here are the rivers. Bede proceeds with analysing them: ‘For the Nile, which waters Egypt, is Gihon itself, which in the following verses is said to flow out from paradise. So too, by those same cities of Sodom that were destroyed’,37 and: The source of Pishon, which they now call the Ganges, is certainly in the region of the Caucasus mountain. The source of the Nile, which, as I have said, is called Gihon in Scripture, is not far from the Atlas mountain, which is the ultimate limit of Africa toward the west. Then, the source of the Tigris and Euphrates is out of Armenia.38 Lastly, discussing Euphrates, Bede says the following: With regard to the Euphrates, it does not say where it flows or what lands it encompasses, because, since it flows in the vicinity of the Promised Land, it

35 Genesis 2. 9–14. 36 Bede, On Genesis, trans. by Kendall, p. 112. 37 Bede, On Genesis, trans. by Kendall, p. 114. 38 Bede, On Genesis, trans. by Kendall, p. 114.

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could readily be known by the people of Israel who were going to read these words settled in that very place.39 Bede’s interpretation, which uses the help of Augustine’s works as well, paints a very realistic image of heaven on earth and places it in a very specific region. Returning to Grímnismál 24, a similar image is painted. This image leads to the following conclusions: the composer of Grímnismál knew the Bible well enough to emulate this description while composing Yggdrasill, or the religious beliefs themselves had been affected by Christianity by the time Grímnismál was composed. However, a further conclusion can be made: whichever of the two aforementioned conclusions is true, the composer of Grímnismál thought Yggdrasill to be present in the world of human habitation. Þórr, in order to reach Yggdrasill, has to cross Kǫrmt, Ǫrmt, and the two Kerlaugar. The similarities are striking. Not only is Yggdrasill, just like Eden, enclosed by rivers, but their number agrees as well. Thus, Þruðheimr is present in the same world as Yggdrasill, and therefore the world of human habitation. In reading Grímnismál 44, we learn that bilrǫst is the best of bridges. Bilrǫst, which is also called bifrǫst in some other sources, is thought to refer to the rainbow.40 This is exactly how Cleasby and Vigfússon translate it in their dictionary, for instance.41 Ásgeirr Magnússon, in his etymological dictionary, also translates it as ‘rainbow’ and tentatively traces the etymology of bifrǫst to ‘trembling path’ and bilrǫst to ‘the colourful path’.42 Alternatively, Rudolf Simek writes that bilrǫst ‘is probably related to Old Norse bil, “moment, weak point” and is possibly the original name of the bridge to heaven’, and also connects it to the rainbow.43 In his entry for bifrǫst, Simek writes that de Vries’s connection of bifrǫst to the Milky Way instead of the rainbow is unlikely.44 Our connection of bilrǫst to the rainbow might have been heavily influenced by Snorri’s statement that it is indeed a rainbow. Rainbows start somewhere on earth and finish somewhere on earth too. Yet, no matter how one might try to reach the beginning or end of a rainbow, they will ultimately and utterly fail to do so. As highly developed as the Norse understanding of the world might have been, there is no reason to believe that they understood the way a rainbow works. Its unapproachability possibly made it a matter of wonder and awe. Bilrǫst could be a bridge that gods used, but that humans could not. Its starting point could be in the part of earth that is miðgarðr while its ending point could be outside said enclosure, and thus in the part of the world inhabited by gods and other mythological beings. If bilrǫst is indeed the rainbow, why should one picture it the way that Snorri describes it, changing 39 Bede, On Genesis, trans. by Kendall, p. 116. 40 Grímnismál, ed. by Vésteinn Ólason and Jonas Kristjánsson, pp. 376–77. ‘Askr Yggdrasils, | hann er œztr viða | en Skíðblaðnir skipa, | Óðinn ása | en jóa Sleipnir, | Bilrǫst brúa | en Bragi skálda, | Hábrók hauka | en hunda Garmr’. Translation: ‘The ash of Yggdrasill, | he is the noblest of trees | but skíþblaðnir of ships, | Óðinn of gods | but of steeds Sleipnir, | Bilraust of bridges, | but Bragi of skalds, | Hábróc of hawks | but of hounds Garmr’. 41 Cleasby and Vigfússon, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, p. 62. 42 Magnússon, Íslensk Orðsifjabók, p. 54. 43 Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology, p. 37. 44 Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology, p. 36.

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its shape into an actual bridge to the heavens, when it could be the actual rainbow? Otherwise, the interpretation mentioned by Brink and Lindow, which suggests that bilrǫst could refer to the sea, can suggest a single loka.45 Both these interpretations would support the hypothesis of the gods residing in this loka. I shall now draw some comparisons with medieval Christian and earlier writings about the rainbow and see whether one can draw any conclusions about bilrǫst.46 To begin with, Genesis itself, in chapter 9, verse 13, calls the rainbow an arcus ‘bow, arc’ and states it is a connection between God and earth.47 Furthermore, Pliny, in Historia naturalis, discusses the shape of the rainbow, saying how it is only a ‘dimidia circuli’ (semi-circle).48 Bede, in De tabernaculo, tells of the rainbow trailing ‘mille trahentem varios adverso sole colores’ (a thousand different colours before the sun).49 This is heavily reminiscent of one of the etymologies given to bilrǫst: ‘colourful path’. Looking at these texts, I end up making different conclusions. One is that Snorri, in explicitly stating that bilrǫst is the rainbow, had been influenced by Christian texts. Just like God is connected to earth through the rainbow, the gods would be connected to miðgarðr through bilrǫst. Another conclusion would be that the composer of Grímnismál, and possibly his beliefs, had been influenced by Christian views. A third possible conclusion could be that the similarities are coincidental. If that were the case, one could still think of Þórr as the god of thunder and rain, the rainbow appearing when rain is about to come, and Þórr using it as a bridge to travel to and from miðgarðr and other places. No definitive conclusion can be drawn with the amount of information available on bilrǫst. However, while both Roman and Christian sources show how the South described the shape of the rainbow as an arcus, with both ends being on different parts of this earth, there is no reason to not expect a similar view from the Germanic North.

Conclusion The question of the residence of the gods is not a universally agreed one in scholarship. The very need for Brink and Lindow to discuss this in a recent publication shows that.50 The purpose of this article is to interrogate the standard hypothesis about the nature of Old Norse cosmology on the basis of Grímnismál. I have presented a number of factors that show the probability of the abodes of the gods and other mythological beings existing in the world of human habitation and not being other worlds or heavens. The world of the gods was in the same North that created and

45 Brink and Lindow, ‘Place Names in Eddic Poetry’, p. 186. 46 I am very thankful to Helen Foxhall Forbes who has done work on this subject and very kindly helped me with sources. 47 Genesis 9. 13. 48 Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, trans. by Bostock and Riley, ii.60. 49 Bede, De tabernaculo, ed. by Hurst, ii.1153: ‘si enim decorem flammas que astrorum, si multifariam nubium speciem, si ipsam irim consideras mille trahentem uarios aduerso sole colores, nonne uideris tibi multo plures ac pulchriores quam uelo tabernaculi intextae sunt inditas caelo colorum notare picturas?’. 50 Brink and Lindow, ‘Place Names in Eddic Poetry’, pp. 186–87.

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shaped it. The North itself was miðgarðr, an enclosure made for humans to inhabit, with jǫtnar living near the White Sea, and other mythical creatures in similar regions. This paints a much clearer image of the world. The concept of two or more lokas, coupled with the unfamiliar concept of these being different and yet connected somehow, but having no explanation as to how or why, seems unlikely. Whoever composed Grímnismál, and the people from the same area, believed in one world, supported by the axis mundi that is Yggdrasill, in one part of which the gods resided, in another the humans, and so on. To conclude, it seems that there are no texts that support the view that the Norse-speaking people had a highly developed conception of different planes of existence. Even by taking all of the Eddic poetry into consideration, one can find no description, allusion, or mention of the means of transport, the difference between each world, and how Yggdrasill connected them. By contrast, the Scandinavians are always shown as being highly knowledgeable of the world around them, their knowledge of seafaring showing a sophisticated understanding of the world. They also probably knew that there was an extremely large part of the world that had not been discovered by them yet. It is there where, maybe, the gods resided. The importance of this analysis of Grímnismál is that it is, ultimately, the main surviving source of Old Norse cosmology. Vǫluspá, albeit mentioning the creation of the world, does not describe the different realms, nor does Vafþrúðnismál. Two hundred years have passed since Finnur Magnússon. It is time to reassess the mythological landscapes and place them where they were in Old Norse cosmology: here, in the North.

Works Cited Primary Sources Bede, De tabernaculo, in Opera exegetica, iia: De tabernaculo; De templo; In Ezram et Neemiam, ed. by David Hurst, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 119a (Turnhout: Brepols, 1969), pp. 3–139 ———, On Genesis, trans. by Calvin B. Kendall, Translated Texts for Historians, 48 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008) Grímnismál, in Íslenzk fornrit: Eddukvæði, ed. by Vésteinn Ólason and Jonas Kristjánsson (Reykjavik: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 376–79 Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, trans. by John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London: Taylor and Francis, 1855) [accessed 10 May 2019] Snorri Sturluson, Skáldskaparmál, ed. by Anthony Faulkes (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 1998) ———, Prose Edda, in The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology, trans. by Jesse Byock (London: Penguin, 2005) Tacitus, Germania, in Tacito, La Germania, La Vita di Agricola, Dialogo Sulla Eloquenza, ed. by A. Resta Barrile (Bologna: Zanichelli editore, 1996)

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Thiofrid, ‘Vita Sancti Willibrordi’, ed. by Georg H. Pertz, in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores in folio, 23 (Hannover: Hahn, 1874), pp. 23–30 Secondary Works Agrell, Sigurd, Semantik Mysteriereligion Och Nordisk Runmagi: En Inledning I Den Nutida Runologiens Grundproblem (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1931) Andrén, Anders, ‘Behind Heathendom: Archaeological Studies of Old Norse Religion’, Scottish Archaeological Journal, 27.2 (2005), 105–38 ———, Tracing Old Norse Cosmology: The World Tree, Middle Earth, and the Sun in Archaeological Perspectives (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2014) Ásgeir Blöndal Magnússon, Íslensk Orðsifjabók (Reykjavík: Orðabók Háskólans, 1989) Branston, Brian, Gods of the North (London: Thames and Hudson, 1955) Brink, Stefan, ‘Myth and Ritual in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Landscape’, in Sacred Sites and Holy Places: Exploring the Sacralization of Landscape through Time and Space, ed. by Sæbjørg Walaker Nordeide and Stefan Brink (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), pp. 33–52 Brink, Stefan, and John Lindow, ‘Place Names in Eddic Poetry’, in A Handbook to Eddic Poetry: Myths and Legends of Early Scandinavia, ed. by Carolyne Larrington, Judy Quinn, and Brittany Schorn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 173–89 Cleasby, Richard, and Guðbrandur Vigfússon, An Icelandic-English Dictionary, ed. by William A. Sir Craigie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957) Clunies Ross, Margaret, ‘Images of Norse Cosmology’, in Myths, Legends, and Heroes: Essays on Old Norse and Old English Literature in Honour of John McKinnell, ed. by Daniel Anlezark (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), pp. 53–73 Egeler, Matthias, ‘Eikþyrnir and the Rivers of Paradise: Cosmological Perspectives on Dating Grímnismál 26–28’, Arkiv för nordisk filologi, 128 (2013), 17–39 Finnur Magnússon, Eddalaeren og dens Oprindelse, iii (Copenhagen: Forlagt af den Gyldendelske Boghandling. Trkyt hos Directeur Jens Hostrup Schultz, Kongelig og Universitets-Bogtrykker, 1825) Gordon, Eric Valentine, An Introduction to Old Norse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927) Hale, Christopher S., ‘The River Names in Grímnismál 27–29’, in Edda: A Collection of Essays, ed. by Robert J. Glendinning and Haraldur Bessason (Manitoba: Manitoba University Press, 1983), pp. 165–85 Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, ed. by Henry Stuart Jones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958) Macdonell, Arthur Anthony, A Practical Sanskrit Dictionary with Transliteration, Accentuation, and Etymological Analysis Throughout (London: Oxford University Press, 1929) O’Donnell, James J., ‘The Demise of Paganism’, Traditio, 35 (1979), 45–88 Palmer, James, ‘Defining Paganism in the Carolingian World’, Early Medieval Europe, 15 (2007), 402–25 Sijmons, Barend, and Hugo Gering, Die Lieder der Edda, iii (Halle (Saale): Buchhandlung Des Waisenhauses, 1901) Simek, Rudolf, Dictionary of Northern Mythology, trans. by Angela Hall (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2007)

Agneta Ney

The Literary Landscape of Old Norse Poetry

The Definition and Terminology of Landscape The aim of this paper is to analyse landscape in Old Norse heroic poetry: its presence, how it is pictured and presented to the audience, and the gender aspect. In medieval, feudal societies, territories were defined as private property and as political units. The gender aspect was expressed for instance in gendered legal rights, mostly in favour of males. Such structuring of landscape is also reflected in literary sources.1 But what about land and landscape in non-feudal societies, as in Northern Europe? This paper discusses imaginations of landscape in a pre-state society, as reflected in the heroic poetry of the Icelandic manuscript Codex Regius (GKS 2365 4to). ‘The heroic poems’ and ‘the mythological poems’ (collectively known as ‘Eddic poetry’) were gathered together and recorded by an unknown writer in this manuscript, which can be dated to the thirteenth century, but the poems were composed and orally transmitted in various periods in Iceland and Norway, probably not before the ninth century.2 How can the term ‘landscape’ be defined in this context? Is there such a thing as a ‘heroic landscape’? Is the term ‘landscape’ relevant in the context of Old Norse poetry? On the one hand, landscape may be regarded as a synonym of nature. On the other hand, nature and landscape may also be regarded as opposites, if landscape is defined as organized, while nature is not. Moreover, landscape in heroic poetry is difficult to identify topographically, even though places are named, and even recognized as real. One example is given by Olivier Szokody in an article on the sword testing episode, in the story of Sigurd the Dragonslayer.3 In ‘Reginsmál’, it is told that Sigurd, in order to test the quality of his sword Gramr, inserts the sword into the river Rhine: ‘Þat var svá hvasst at hann brá því ofan í Rín ok lét reka ullarlagð fyrir straumi, ok tók í sundr lagðinn sem vatnit’ (It was so sharp that he put it in the river Rhine and let a hank



1 Brink, ‘Naming the Land’, p. 57. Icelandic personal names are henceforth rendered in English. 2 Jónas Kristjánsson, Eddas and Sagas, pp. 25–30; cf. Eddukvæði, i, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, pp. 19–23. 3 Szokody, ‘Sigurds Schwertprobe im Rhein’. Agneta Ney, Senior Lecturer (docent), Department of History, Uppsala University. What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 129–152 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120790

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of wool drift on the current, and the hank was sliced apart as if it were water).4 Also in the corresponding sword testing context in Norna-Gests þáttr, the river is named Rín. However, in Völsunga saga and in Codex Regius of Edda Snorra Sturlusonar, the river name is not specified. We are only told that the sword testing is done in a river. As we can see from another text, the mythological poem ‘Grímnismál’, the river Rín belongs to a comprehensive group of mythological rivers. Thus, according to Szokody, an alternative interpretation may be a mythological river and not a real geographical one.5 Rín is also referred to in other heroic poems, for instance in ‘Atlakviða’, as the river into which the golden hoard of Fafnir was thrown:6 Rín skal ráða rógmálmi skatna, svinn, áskunna arfi Niflunga, í veltandi vatni lýsask valbaugar, (The Rhine shall rule over the strife-bringing metal, the Æsir-given inheritance of the Niflungs, the splendid rings will gleam in the running water,) The examples above show that the river Rín, depending on contextual references, may be equally understood as a mythological or a real place name. However, among the rivers listed in ‘Grímnismál’, defined as flowing round the god’s realms, it is not impossible that some real ones, as Rín, were included, and in this context understood as mythological ones.7

Materials and Method: Landscape and Place Names The term ‘landscape’ and its meaning warrant further discussion, and an approach needs to be found to make the landscape more visible. Since naming plays an active role in the process that creates landscape, Per Vikstrand’s dissertation (2001) on







4 Brink, ‘Landskap och plats som mentala konstruktioner’, p. 111 f.; Szokody, ‘Sigurds Schwertprobe im Rhein’, pp. 239–45; Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, v, ed. by von See and others, pp. 231, 258, 270, 315 ff.; ‘Reginsmál’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, p. 300; ‘The Lay of Regin’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 154. 5 ‘Grimnismál’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, sts 26–29, p. 373; ‘Grimnir’s Sayings’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 55; Norna-Gests þáttr, ed. by Guðni Jónsson, p. 315; Szokody, ‘Sigurds Schwertprobe im Rhein’, pp. 239–45. 6 ‘Atlakviða’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 17, p. 376: ‘Rosmufjǫll Rínar’; st. 28, p. 378; ‘The Lay of Atli’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, st. 27, p. 214, cf. ‘Brot af Sigurðarkviða’, st. 11, p. 326: ‘Soltinn varð Sigurðr/sunnan Rínar’; there are fifty-four place names in ‘Grimnismál’, and thirty-eight of them are river names. See also Petrulevich, Ortnamnsanspassning som process, pp. 299, 302. 7 Cf. Notes to ‘Grimnir’s Sayings’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 270.

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sacral place names and sacred landscape is useful as a theoretical starting point as well as for methodological guidance.8 According to Vikstrand, a landscape consists of places, and places in turn have three components: a locality, a name, and a meaning. Christopher Tilley (1994) supports the view that naming is a crucial component in establishing a topographic phenomenon, and also in keeping its identity, that is, for becoming a ‘place’. Naming provides a place with meaning; it also provides it with a social context and a historical background.9 While Vikstrand’s and Tilly’s approaches have been developed with reference to ‘real’ places, I propose to apply their methodologies in studying literary places. However, as noted above, places in the Eddic poetry may be read as either real or fictive. While this is not my main concern here, I will return to this issue later. The material of heroic poetry to be considered here as sources for finding onomastic records is as follows: ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I–II’ (The First Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani, A Second Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani). ‘Helgakviða Hjǫrðvarðsson’ (The Poem of Helgi Hiorvardsson). ‘Grípisspá’ (Gripir’s Prophecy). ‘Reginsmál’ (The Lay of Regin). ‘Fáfnismál’ (The Lay of Fafnir). ‘Sigrdrífumál’ (The Lay of Sigrdrifa). ‘Brot af Sigurðarkviðu’ (Fragment of a Poem about Sigurd). ‘Sigurðarkviða hin skamma’ (A Short Poem of Sigurd). ‘Helreið Brynhildar’ (Brynhild’s Ride to Hell). ‘Guðrúnarkviða I–III’ (The First Lay of Gudrun, the Second Lay of Gudrun, the Third Lay of Gudrun). ‘Oddrúnargrátur’ (Oddrun’s Lament). ‘Atlakviða’ (The Lay of Atli). ‘Atlamál in grɶnlenzku’’ (The Greenlandic Poem of Atli). ‘Guðrúnarhvǫt’ (The Whetting of Gudrun). ‘Hamðismál’ (The Lay of Hamdir).

Categorization of Place Names In total, there are seventy-four distinct place names given in the poems referred to above. These may be categorized in eight groups, depending on what type of place they signify:10 1. Water (twenty-three) 2. Mountain (fourteen) 8 Vikstrand, Gudarnas platser, p. 18 f., 33. 9 Vikstrand Gudarnas platser, p. 18 f., 33; Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape, p. 18 ff.; cf. Brink, ‘Naming the Land’, p. 57 ff.; Helleland, ‘Sociale og sakrale uttrykk i stadnamn’, pp. 124–42, and references in the article. 10 Cf. Helleland, ‘Sociale og sakrale uttrykk i stadnamn’, p. 128; Vikstrand, Gudarnas platser, pp. 36–40; cf. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed. by von See and others, p. 147.

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Forest (ten) Settlement (seven) Land, country (seven) Open field (six) Sacral place names (two) Cosmological place names (two) Other (three)

The figures above, put in brackets, are the total number of each category, and as a point of departure, they are listed from the most frequent to the rarer occurrences in the poems. I will now discuss each of these categories. 1. Water

The ‘water category’ consists of rivers, bays, and waterfalls, but also islands and nesses, that is places associated with a coastal landscape. These names are: ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’ Brandey (Brand-island).11 Heðinsey (Hedins-island).12 Varinsey (Varins-island).13 Stafnsnes (Stafnsness).14 Trǫnuey (Crane-bank).15 Ǫrvasund (Orvasund).16 Varinsfjǫrðr (Varinsfjord). Unavágar (Una-bay).17

11 The Icelandic place names translated to English (here in brackets) derive from The Poetic Edda, ed. and trans. by Larrington. Old Norse brandr, m., ‘fire’, or ‘a piece of wood for decorating a stem or a sword blade’, see Heggstad, Hødnebø, and Simensen, Norrøn Ordbok (hereafter Norrøn Ordbok), p. 407; regarding Brandr as a personal name, Peterson, Nordiskt runnamnslexikon, p. 49 f.; Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed. by von See and others, p. 147. 12 Heðinsey in ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbani I’, could be associated with Heddinge in Sjælland, Denmark, or with the German island Hiddensee, west of Rügen; cf. Petrulevich, ‘Ortnamnsanpassning som process’, pp. 220 and 231; regarding Heðinn as a personal name, Peterson, Nordiskt runnamnslexikon, p. 109, Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed. by von See and others, p. 147. 13 Regarding Varinn as a personal name, Peterson, Nordiskt runnamnslexikon, p. 247; Lind, ed., NorskIsländska dopnamn, col. 1075; Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed. by von See and others, p. 147, see also Varins-fjǫrðr (Varinsfjord), Varins-vík (Varins-bay), cf. Old Norse vari, m., ‘carefulness, wariness’, Norrøn Ordbok, p. 485. 14 Cf. stafn, m., ‘stem’, Norrøn Ordbok, pp. 406. 15 Cf. trana f., ‘crane’, Norrøn Ordbok, pp. 440. 16 Ǫrvasund is a bay, f. ǫrva, v., ‘urge’, Norrøn Ordbok, p. 518. 17 Cf. una v., ‘be comfortable’, Norrøn Ordbok, pp. 468; regarding Uni as a personal name, Peterson, Nordiskt runnamnslexikon, p. 243; Lind, ed., Norsk-Isländska dopnamn, col. 1059; Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed. by von See and others, p. 147.

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Þórsnes (Thorsness).18 Sogn (Sogn).19 ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’ Brúnavágar (Bruna-bay) (three).20 Hlésey (Hlesey).21 Leiptrarvatn (Leipt).22 ‘Helgakviða Hjǫrðvarðsson’ Sigarshólmr (Sigarsholm).23 Hatafjǫrðr (Hatafjord). Varinsvík (Varins-bay). Þolley (Tholley). Sæmorn (Sæmorn). ‘Reginsmál’ Andvarafoss (Andvara-falls). Rín (Rhine).24 Vaðgelmir (Vadgelmir).25 ‘Brot af Sigurðarkviðu’ Rín (Rhine).26 ‘Sigurðarkviða hin skamma’ Rín (Rhine).27 ‘Oddrúnargrátur’ Hlésey (Hlesey).

18 Regarding Þórr as a personal name, Peterson, Nordiskt runnamnslexikon, p. 235; Lind, ed., NorskIsländska dopnamn, col. 1206; Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed. by von See and others, p. 147. 19 Sogn is one of the oldest place names in Scandinavia, Brink, ‘Naming the Land’, p. 58. 20 The figures in brackets are the number of times the place name occurs in the poem. 21 Hlésey, f., Læsø, in Denmark, Norrøn Ordbok, p. 191. 22 Leiptrarvatn is a river, ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 9, p. 261. 23 Sigarshólmr is a small island, ‘Helgakviða Hjǫrvarðssonar’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 31, p. 252, regarding Sigarr as a personal name, Lind, ed., Norsk-Isländska dopnamn, col. 874; Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed. by von See and others, p. 147. 24 Cf. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, v, ed. by von See and others, p. 316 f. 25 Vaðgelmir is a river, ‘Reginsmál’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 4, p. 297. 26 Cf. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, vi, ed. by von See and others, p. 171. 27 Cf. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, vi, ed. by von See and others, p. 348 f.

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‘Atlakviða’ Danpar (Dneiper). Rín (Rhine) (two). ‘Atlamál in grɶnlenzku’ Lima (fjǫrð) (Limfjord). 2. Mountain

The ‘mountain category’ consists of mountains and cliffs: ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’ Himinfjǫll (Himinfell). Sólfjǫll (Sunfell). Snæfjǫll (Snowfell). Logafjǫll (Logafell) (two).28 Arasteinn (Arastein). Frekasteinn (Frekastein) (two).29 ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’ Logafjǫll (Logafell). Sevafjǫll (Sefafell) (five). Arasteinn (Arastein).30 Frekasteinn (Frekastein) (three). Unnarstein (‘The stone of Unn’). Hlébjǫrg (Hlebiorg). Styrkleifar (Styr-cleft). ‘Helgakviða Hjǫrðvarðsson’ Frekasteinn (Frekastein). Rǫðulsfjǫll (Rodulsfiall). ‘Fáfnismál’ Hindarfjǫll (Hindarfell).31

28 Sólfjǫll (Sunfell), Snæfjǫll (Snowfell), and Logafjǫll (Logafell) may be literary constructions, Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed. by von See and others, p. 202 ff. 29 Frekasteinn is a cliff, ‘The wolf ’s stone’, cf. freka, f., ‘battle’, freki, m., ‘wolf ’, Norrøn Ordbok, p. 126, cf. Geri and Freki, the wolves of Odin, ‘Grimnismál’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 19, p. 37; Snorri Sturluson, Edda, ed. by Faulkes, p. 459; Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed. by von See and others, p. 324. 30 ‘The Eagle’s Stone’, cf. ǫrn, m., pl. arnar m., ‘eagle’, Norrøn Ordbok, p. 518; Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed. by von See and others, p. 138. 31 Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, v, ed. by von See and others, p. 481 ff.

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‘Sigrdrífumál’ Hindarfjǫll (Hindarfell).32 ‘Guðrúnarkviða II’ Vinbjǫrg (Vinbiorg).33 Valbjǫrg (Valbiorg). ‘Atlakviða’ Rosmufjǫll Rínar (‘The russet mountains of the Rhine’). 3. Forest

The ‘forest category’ consists of forest, but also groves, dales, and moors (-heith):34 ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’ Brálundr (Bralund) (two).35 Gnipalundr (Gnipalund) (four).36 Sparinsheiðr (Sparins-heath). Myrkviðr (Myrkwood). ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’ Brálundr (Bralund). Bragalundr (Bragalund). Fjóturlundr (Fetter-grove). Vígdalir (Vigdal). ‘Helgakviða Hjǫrðvarðsson’ Glasilundr (Glasilund).37 ‘Grípisspá’ Gnitaheiðr (Gnita-heath). ‘Reginsmál’ Gnitaheiðr (Gnita-heath).38

32 Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, v, ed. by von See and others p. 531. 33 Cf. Petrulevich, ‘Ortnamnsanpassning som process’, p. 129. 34 Whether places ending with -heith should belong to the forest group, or to ‘open field’, can be discussed. 35 Brá f., may be the Old Norse word for eyebrows, eventually associated with the verb brá, meaning ‘shining’, Norrøn Ordbok, p. 60; for interpreting brá- as a cosmological element, associated with Miðgarðr, since this place was built from the giant Ymir’s eyebrows, cf. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed. by von See and others, p. 138. 36 Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed. by von See and others, p. 272. 37 Cf. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed. by von See and others, p. 395. 38 Cf. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, v, ed. by von See and others, p. 316.

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‘Fáfnismál’ Gnitaheiðr (Gnita-heath).39 ‘Helreið Brynhildar’ Skatalundr (Skatalund).40 Hlymdalir (Hlymdales).41 ‘Atlakviða’ Myrkviðr (Myrkwood) (two). Gnitaheiðr (Gnita-heath) (two). 4. Settlement

‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’ Hringstaðir (Hringstadir).42 Hringstǫð (Hringstod) (three).43 Hátun (Highmeadow) (two).44 Móinsheimar (Moinsheim).45 Sólheim (Solheim). ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’ Móinsheimar (Moinsheim).46 ‘Helgakviða Hjǫrðvarðsson’ Rogheimr (Rogheim). ‘Atlakviða’ Myrkheimr (Myrkheim). 5. Land, Country

‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’ Hundland (Hundland/‘The land of the Huns’).

39 Cf. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, v, ed. by von See and others, p. 395. 40 Cf. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, vi, ed. by von See and others, p. 543 f. 41 Cf. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, vi, ed. by von See and others, 536 f. 42 Brink, ‘Naming the Land’, p. 58, cf. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed. by von See and others, p. 202 f. 43 Cf. Ringsted, Sjælland, Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Formáli’, p. 15. 44 Helgi’s ships were gathered at Hátun before the battle, ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 25, p. 252. 45 -heim is a place name element in use before the Viking Age, Brink, ‘Naming the Land’, p. 58; cf. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed. by von See and others, p. 147. 46 Móinn, ‘snake- or horse name’, Norrøn Ordbok, p. 301.

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‘Helgakviða Hjǫrðvarðsson’ Norégr (Norway).47 ‘Sigrdrífumál’ Frakkland (France). ‘Guðrúnarkviða I’ Húnaland (Hundland/‘The land of the Huns’).48 Danmǫrk (Denmark).49 ‘Helreið Brynhildar’ Valland (Valland).50 ‘Guðrúnarkviða III’ Danmǫrk (Denmark). ‘Oddrúnargrátur’ Mornaland (Mornaland = Húnaland).51 Húnaland (‘The land of the Huns’). ‘Atlakviða’ Húnmǫrk (‘The Hun borderlands’). 6. Open Field

‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’ Brávǫllr (Bravoll). Sigarsvellir (Sigarsvoll). Himinvangar (Himinvangi). ‘Helgakviða Hjǫrðvarðsson’ Rǫðulsvellir (Rodulsvellir). Sigarsvellir (Sigarsvoll). ‘Helreið Brynhildar’ Hlymdalir (Hlymdales).52

47 Cf. Brink, ‘Naming the Land’, p. 60 f. 48 Cf. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, vi, ed. by von See and others, p. 231 ff. 49 Cf. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, vi, ed. by von See and others, p. 277. 50 Valland means ‘land of foreigners’, often used for France, Poetic Edda, trans. by Larrington, p. 321. 51 Old Norse morna, v, ‘getting dark’, Norrøn Ordbok, p. 302. 52 Old Norse hlymr, m., ‘noice’, Norrøn Ordbok, p. 193.

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7. Sacral Place Names

‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’ Vandilsvé (Vandilsve).53 Valhǫll (Valhall). 8. Cosmological Place Names

‘Fáfnismál’ Óskópnir (Mismade).54 Bilrǫst (Bilrost).55 9. Other

‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’ Svarinshaugr (Svarinshaug). ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’ Svarinshaugr (Svarinshaug). ‘Guðrúnarkviða II’ Fjón (Fion).56

Interpreting Place Names in a Heroic Context ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’ is particularly rich in place names, with c. thirty different names. ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’ has sixteen. Together, these two poems present c. 80 per cent of the total count of place names in the heroic corpus. Why should this be? There are several conceivable reasons why these two poems should be particularly rich in place names: Geography Locality Transmission from oral to written culture The author’s knowledge of history and place names The author’s interest in place names Narrative structure (dialogues/prose narrative) The plot 53 Old Norse vandill, m., ‘sea-king’s name or a giant’s name’, Norrøn Ordbok, p. 482. 54 Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, v, ed. by von See and others, p. 435 ff. 55 Óski is an Odinic name, Norrøn Ordbok, p. 327; cf. Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, v, ed. by von See and others, p. 439 ff. 56 The island of Fyn, Denmark, ‘Guðrúnarkviða II’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, p. 356 n. 16.

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Of these factors, geography plays an important role in setting the Helgi Hundingsbani poems apart from the rest. While the heroic Helgi poems take place in ‘the north’, other poems mainly take place in ‘the south’. The poems, in which Sigurd the Dragonslayer legend is told, are mostly set outside of Scandinavia, with some exceptions. Sigurd is born in Denmark, and his wife Gudrun, after his death, moves to the same country for a while. But when the poems tell of the dynasty of the Giukungs and of Gudrun’s second husband Atli, the scenery seems to be closer to the river Rhine, where the Huns had their settlements during the Migration era. The golden hoard that Sigurd took after slaying the dragon on Gnitaheiðr, was, according to the poems, thrown in the river Rhine. Gnitaheiðr is among the five most frequent place names in the heroic poems, second only to the previously discussed river Rín (Rhine), which is the single most frequent name.57 A list of the ‘top five’ most frequent names is as follows: Rín (five) in four poems (‘Reginsmál’, ‘Brot af Sigurðarkviðu’, ‘Sigurðarkviða hin skamma’, ‘Atlakviða’). Gnitaheiðr (four), in four poems (‘Grípisspá’, ‘Reginsmál’, ‘Fáfnismál’, ‘Atlakviða’). Frekasteinn (six), in three poems (‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I–II’, ‘Helgakviða Hjǫrðvarðsson’). Sevafjǫll (five), in one poem (‘Helgakviða Hundingsbani II’). Gnipalundr (four), in one poem (‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’). Among these frequently named places, two are from the ‘south’, and the remaining three are from the Helgi poems, ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I–II’ and ‘Helgakviða Hjǫrðvarðsson’. Gnitaheiðr may be a mythological name. However, Martin Blindheim (1973) refers to Abbot Nikolaus’s travels around 1150–55, where he describes passing Gnitaheiðr, located close to Mainz, south-west of the Rhine.58 But, as Klaus von See points out (2004), the mention of Gnitaheiðr above all indicates that the Sigurd legend was known at that time, and that Nikolaus probably mistook some village with a similar name for the legendary place.59 From my point of view, it also indicates that people actually believed that Sigurd was a historical person. The meaning of Gnitaheiðr is probably a place on the heath, covered in pieces of stone, or pebbles.60 Fafnir was lying on this place in the shape of a serpent or a dragon,

57 Six place names are found in both Helgi-poems, but with that difference, that four of them are in stanzas in the first Helgi poem, while in prose in the second Helgi poem, see ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason: these are Arnasteinn (st. 14, p. 249), Brálundr (st. 1, 3, p. 247), Frekasteinn (sts 44 and 53, pp. 255, 257), Logafjǫll (sts 13 and 15, p. 249), Moinsheim (st. 46, p. 256), Svarinshaugr (st. 31, p. 253); cf. ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason: Arnasteinn (prose, p. 273), Brálundr (prose, p. 270), Frekasteinn (prose, p. 274, st. 20, p. 275, st. 26, p. 276), Logafjǫl (prose, p. 273), Moinsheim (st. 29, p. 277), Svarinshaugr (prose, p. 273). 58 Blindheim ‘Fra hedensk sagnfigur til kristent forbilde’, pp. 3–28. 59 Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, v, ed. by von See and others, p. 159 f. 60 Cf. German Geröll, n. ‘pebbles’, Ebene, f. ‘plain’ = ‘pebbly plain’, Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, v, ed. by von See and others, p. 159 f.

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but his dwelling place according to ‘Fáfnismál’ is not outside in the open air but in an underground cave-like lair with doors, door frames, and beams made of iron.61 What, then, happened at Frekasteinn? And is it possible to locate this place?62 It is referred to in a verbal battle where Sinfjotli and Gudmund insult each other heavily. Gudmund calls upon his enemy as follows:63 ‘Fyrr vilda ek at Frekasteini hrafna seðja á hræjum þínum en tíkr yðrar teygja at solli eða gefa gǫltum. Deili grǫm við þik’. (‘Rather I should like to make ravens sate themselves on your corpse, at Frekastein, than give your bitches dog-food to devour or be feeding your pigs; may ill-luck befall you!’) Frekasteinn seems to be a location for physical battle. According to ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’, twelve thousand ‘vikings’ were gathered in order to fight a king named Hodbrodd. The Valkyrie Sigrun and eight other Valkyries were protecting them by riding high up in the sky. The association with battle is also visible in the name itself: the first part of the place name, Freki-, is connected with wolves, an animal of battle, through the names of Odin’s two wolves, Geri and Freki. Frekasteinn is therefore ‘The wolf ’s stone’. The battle at Frekasteinn was a great victory for Helgi, and is for example mentioned in a narrative stanza from ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’:64 Svipr einn var þat er saman kvómu fǫlvir oddar at Frekasteini;

61 ‘Fáfnismál’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, prose, p. 312; ‘The Lay of Fafnir’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 164. 62 Frekasteinn is mentioned in ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbani I’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, sts 44, 53; in ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, sts 20 and 26; and in a prose narrative in Helgakviða Hjǫrðvarðsson, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 44, p. 254. See also ‘Fyrr vilda ek | at Frekasteini | hrafna seðja | á hræjum þínum | en tíkr yðrar teygja at solli | eða gefa gǫltum | Deli grǫm við þik’, ‘The Poem of Helge Hjorvardsson’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 120. 63 ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 44, p. 255; ‘The First Poem of Helge Hundingsbani’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 120. 64 ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 53, p. 257; ‘The First Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 121, cf. ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, prose, p. 274: ‘Helgi samnaði þá miklum skipaher ok fór til Frekasteins’.

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ey var Helgi Hundings bani fyrstr í fólki, þar er firar bǫrðusk, œstr á ímu, alltrauðr flugar; sá hafði hilmir hart móðakarn. (A storm there was then, as they came together, of pale spear-points at Frekastein; always was Helgi, slayer of Hunding, foremost in the host, where men were fighting, eager in the battle, extremely averse to flight; that prince had a hard acorn of a heart.) While the first three most frequent place names are in a context of exceptional deeds of male heroes, the fourth name, Sevafjǫll, is strongly connected with a female warrior, Sigrun. She marries Helgi, but after his death, she is filled with sorrow and dies a short while later. The second Helgi poem tells that her home is at Sevafjǫll: ‘Út gakk þú, Sigrún frá Sevafjǫllum’ (Go outside, Sigrun, out from Sefafell).65 The English translation ‘out from’ makes it seem as if her place/house is called Sevafjǫll, and not the area/surroundings. In my opinion, the place name functions rather like an epithet or a byname, and for underlining a dramatic scene. Both the maiden and Helgi, now a ghost rider after death, call Sigrun ‘Sigrún frá Sevafjǫllum’,66 which is otherwise only mentioned in ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’. Many place names from the Helgi poems have been associated with the Baltic Sea. ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’ mentions Varinsvík, Varinsfjǫrðr, and Varinsey, which are all associated with the river Warnov, close to Rostock. Ǫrvasund is connected to Stralsund, and Svarinshaugr, from the second Helgi poem, has been connected with Schwerin.67 Svarinshaugr is the settlement of Granmarr and his sons, who were killed at Frekasteinn. However, this does not give any clues for identifying Sevafjǫll.68

65 ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 42, p. 280; ‘A Second Poem of Helge Hundingsbani’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 139. 66 Helgi calls Sigrun by invoking her name: ‘Ein veldr þú, Sigrún frá Sevafjǫllum’; ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 45, p. 281, cf. ‘You alone, Sigrun, from Sefafell’. ‘A Second Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 140. Sigrun also says: ‘Sitka ek svá sœl at Sevafjǫllum’, see ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 36, p. 279; ‘A Second Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 138: ‘I shall not sit so happily at Sefafell’. 67 Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv, ed, by von See and others, p. 276. 68 This geographical environment has at the beginning of the twentieth century been interpreted as the area around Bråviken in Östergötland, Sweden, see Nordén, ‘En stambygd för götisk dikt’, pp. 1–16. According to Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, v, ed. by von See and others, p. 101, Sefafjǫll may be connected to Schwaben.

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The place names (and also the personal names) indicate that the Helgi poems have their roots in a Scandinavian narration, but outside of Iceland.69 Worth noting is that the Helgi poems are not mentioned at all in Edda Snorra Sturlusonar. Scholars consider the first Helgi poem to be the younger of the Helgi poems, younger than the second Helgi lay. It is, according to Jónas Kristjánsson, written in a ‘new fashion which expected poets to treat only single events or single parts of the legends known from older lays’.70 The last of the ‘top five’ place names, Gnipalundr, occurs only in a single poem, ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’, where it is used four times. Helgi’s ship is out at sea, and, in a storm, the Valkyrie Sigrun rescues him at Gnipalundr.71 The specific Gnipa, however, occurs also in ‘Vǫluspá’, in the place name Gnipa-hellir (Gnipa-cave), outside of which Garm whimpers just before Ragnarǫk.72 The generic, lundr, indicates a sacred place, and it is interesting to note that Gnipalundr is also mentioned together with another possible sacral place name, Þórsnes, in a verbal battle between Sinfjotli and Gudmund, where Gudmund calls upon Sinfjotli:73 ‘Faðir varattu fenrisúlfa, ǫllum ellri, svá at ek muna, síz þik geldu fyr Gnipalundi þursa meyjar á Þórsnesi’. (‘You were not the father of any ferocious wolf, though you were older than them all, as far as I remember, after the giant girls castrated you on Thorsness by Gnipalund’.) What kind of landscape, then, emerges through these place names? Few of the names refer to real places. Among the name categories, the ‘water names’ are dominant. However, the single most frequent generic is -fjǫll (eight).74 Thus, there are glimpses

69 Eddukvæði, i, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, p. 34 f., n. 2. 70 Jónas Kristjánsson, Eddas and Sagas, p. 54. ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’ is approximately dated not long before 1100, and ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’ is not older than from the tenth or eleventh century, see both in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, pp. 13, 18 f., 33. 71 ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, sts 30, 34, and 50, p. 253, ‘The First Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, pp. 118, 121. 170. In st. 50, it is told, that there was built up a palisade ‘before Gnipalund’, and that it was done in Sogn, possibly identical with the fjord Sogn in Norway. Place names ending with -lundr are common in Denmark and Sweden, Brink, ‘Landskap och plats som mentala konstruktioner’, p. 118. 72 ‘Vǫluspá’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 43, p. 302. 73 ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 40, p. 254; ‘The First Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 119. 74 Cf. -ey (five), -lundr (five), -heim (four), and -vellir/vǫllr (four).

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of a coastal landscape with mountains, islands, bays, and cliffs, with place names that are mentioned in connection with battle at sea or on shore. The majority of the forest names are connected to a grove or a heath (or moor). But, as mentioned before, among the forest names, Gnitaheiðr and Gnipalundr belong to the most frequent names. The forest Myrkviðr is mentioned both in the first Helgi poem and in connection with the Sigurd poems, thus in the ‘south’.75 Place names referring to settlement almost categorically have the generic -heim, with four examples from the Helgi poems and one from Atlakviða.

Onomastic Knowledge for Wisdom Battles In general, heroic poetry is sparse in describing landscape. The main interest instead lies in the hero’s deeds and relations with others. However, the author of the first Helgi lay shows a great interest in onomastic knowledge and excels in it. It obviously makes sense to know place names. In comparison with other sources telling of verbal battles, knowledge of places is of crucial matter for this author. Certain types of onomastic knowledge may have a special role to play in duels of wisdom, as seen in verbal battle poems. For example, in Fáfnismál, there is an unexpected duel on onomastic knowledge between the dying Fafnir and Sigurd regarding an island and a bridge:76 Sigurðr kvað: ‘Segðu mér þat, Fáfnir, alls þik fróðan kveða ok vel margt vita, hvé sá hólmr heitir er blanda hjǫrlegi Surtr ok æsir saman’. Fáfnir kvað: ‘Óskópnir hann heitir, en þar ǫll skulu geirum leika goð; Bilrǫst brotnar, er þeir á brott fara, ok svima í móðu marir’. (Sigurd said: ‘Tell me, Fafnir, you are said to be wise and to know a great deal, 75 Myrkvið is also mentioned in ‘Lokasenna’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 42, p. 416. 76 ‘Fáfnismál’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, sts 14–15, pp. 305–06; ‘The Lay of Fafnir’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, st. 5, p. 160.

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what that island is called where Surt and the Æsir together will mingle sword-liquid together’. Fafnir said: ‘Mismade it’s called, and there all the gods shall sport with their spears; Bilrost will break as they journey away, and their horses will flounder in the great river’.) As shown above, some places may have a meaning for imagination of cosmology and wisdom, and knowing them is a rather common feature in duels of wisdom, that is, who knows the names of mythological places, and thus is wise and will be famous for it?

A Gendered Relation to Landscape and Places? What about the protagonist’s interest and feelings for the landscape? From the Icelandic Sagas, a comparative example is Gunnar from Hlíðarendi in Brennu-Njáls saga. In a well-known scene, Gunnarr is about to leave Iceland because of his outlawry. Gunnar’s horse stumbles at the farm meadow. He falls off the horse and while lying down, he notices the beauty of the landscape. It touches him so much, that he makes a choice to stay in Iceland, even if the price will be high. The saga of Brennu-Njál belongs to a different genre than the heroic poems, but may be a starting point for further discussions on the hero’s relation to landscape and places. In that case, what landscape and in which context? In general, the male hero, from that point of view, doesn’t care, not like Gunnar, bursting out his love for it. However, one example is Gunnar Gjúkason, who on his way home, after having killed Sigurd the Dragonslayer in the forest, at least reflects upon nature. In the foregoing stanza, the author tells that a raven croaks and thus forebodes Gunnar’s death:77 Soltinn varð Sigurðr sunnan Rínar; hrafn at meiði hátt kallaði: ‘Ykkr mun Atli eggjar rjóða, munu vígská of viða eiðar’. (Dead was Sigurd on the south side of the Rhine, a raven called out loudly from a tree:

77 Brennu-Njáls saga, ed. by Einar Ól. Sveinsson, p. 182, ‘Brot af Sigurðarkviðu’, ed. by Kristjánsson and Ólason, st. 11, p. 326, st. 13, p. 326; ‘Fragment of a Poem about Sigurd’, ed. by Larrington, st. 5, p. 174, st. 13, p. 175.

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‘Atli will redden his blades in your blood, your oaths will destroy you, you warlike men’.) Fót nam at hrœra fjǫlð nam at spjalla, hitt herglǫtuðr hyggja téði, hvat þeir í bǫrvi báðir sǫgðu hrafn ey ok ǫrn, er þeir heim riðu. (His foot began to twitch, he muttered many things, the destroyer of armies began to ponder what the two of them had said in their curses, the raven and the eagle, as they’d ridden home.) Gunnar is riding through the landscape, and so do other heroes, such as Sigurd the Dragonslayer. Like the former, he seldom reflects on the environment, however, when Sigurd is on his way to Gnitaheiðr (for the golden hoard), he comments on the way:78 ‘Þú því rétt er ek ríða skyldak heilǫg fjǫll hinig;’ (‘You arranged that I had to ride here over the sacred mountains;’) After having conquered the gold hoard, Sigurd meets the Valkyrie Sigrdrifa, who gives him wisdom for everyday and life, for example, how to handle dangers when riding through the landscape:79 ‘Þat ræð ek þér it fjórða, ef býr fordæða, vammafull á vegi, ganga er betra en gista sé, þótt þik nótt um nemi’. (‘That I advise you fourthly, if a witch, full of malice, lives on your route,

78 Worth noting is the word ‘sacred mountains’ in this context. The ‘sacred mountains’ is a translation from the Icelandic heilǫg fjǫll, see ‘Fáfnismál’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 26, p. 308; ‘The Lay of Fafnir’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 161. 79 ‘Sigrdrífumál’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 27, p. 319; ‘The Lay of Sigrdrifa’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, st. 26, p. 170.

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it is better to go on than to be her guest, though night overtake you’.) We might have expected that riding would be accompanied by some more information of places and landscape. Indeed, there is some, and besides, I will not say that landscape doesn’t affect the poem’s protagonists, but it is rather to nature than landscape that they pay some attention. For female heroes, nature plays a role in connection with grief. Sigrun compares her late husband Helgi with a beautiful ash tree, high above the briar bushes, and to a reindeer with his head higher than all others.80 The same matters for Gudrun, mourning for Sigurd:81 ‘Svá var minn Sigurðr hjá sonum Gjúka sem væri geirlaukr ór grasi vaxinn, eða væri bjartr steinn á and dreginn, jarknasteinn, yfir ǫðlingum’. (‘So was my Sigurd, beside the sons of Giuki, as if a leek were grown up out of the grass, or a bright stone were threaded onto a string, a precious gem, among the nobles’.) Birds play a role for emphasizing dramatic scenes, but not always birds in the wild. In a narrative stanza, the author describes Gudrun’s grief as follows:82 Þá grét Guðrún Gjúka dóttir, svá at tár flugu tresk í gǫgnum ok gullu við gæss í túni, mærir fuglar er mær átti. (Then Gudrun wept, the daughter of Giuki, so that her tears fell into her hair, 80 ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 38, p. 279: ‘Svá bar Helgi | af hildingum sem ítrskapaðr | askr af þyrni, | eða sá dýrkálfr | dǫggu slunginn, | er øfri ferr | ǫllum dýrum, ok horn glóa | við himin sjálfan’. 81 ‘Guðrúnarkviða I’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 18, p. 332; ‘The First Lay of Gudrun’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 179. 82 ‘Guðrúnarkviða I’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 16, p. 331; ‘The First Lay of Gudrun’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 179.

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and the geese in the meadow cackled in reply, the splendid birds which belonged to the girl.) The function of the details from the landscape or rather nature, seem in all to emphasize the actual dramatic scenes and future ones to come. The birth of the male hero, his courage, deeds, love, and death are such scenes that are accompanied with nature and dramatic weather. His courage is often compared to that of the wolf.83 Only once in the heroic poems does it seem to be important to mention a place for some organized activities, in this case, a place connected to oath giving. The dialogue is between Sigrun and her brother Dag. Helgi has killed their father, and Dag has avenged his death, by killing Helgi. Sigrun reminds him of the oaths he swore to Helgi, presumably in connection with the brother-in-law-ship. The places mentioned are Leiptrarvatn (Leipt) and Unnarsteinn (‘The stone of Unn’). The specific of Leiptrarvatn, leiptr- means something bright and shining and the specific of Unnarsteinn is connected to the female Unnr, one of Ægir’s daughters. In the stanza both places are connected with water, and oath swearing with brightness, thus with a positive activity and the most important social bonds between men.84 ‘Þik skyli allir eiðar bíta, þeir er Helga hafðir unna at inu ljósa Leiptrarvatni ok at úrsvǫlum Unnarsteini’. (‘May all the oaths which you swore to Helgi rebound upon you, by the bright water of Leift and the cool and watery stone of Unn’.)

Conclusions My purpose has been to study the landscape in Old Norse poetry and discuss how to define it. After some theoretical and methodological considerations, I decided to study the landscape via place names. As laid out in the materials section, a majority of the place names are from Helgakviða Hundingsbana I–II, and most of them are in the first lay. The result of the categorization is that most of the place names are associated with water and a coastal landscape, not surprisingly, since there are great 83 ‘Reginsmál’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 14, p. 299: ‘Móð hefir Meira | en maðr gamall, ok er mér fangs vón | at frekum úlfi’; ‘The Lay of Regin’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 154. 84 ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana II’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 31, p. 278; ‘A Second Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 138; Norrøn Ordbok, p. 266.

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battles and many descriptions of seafaring. The main actions in the first Helgi poem are after all battles at sea or on the shore. Whether the plot takes place in ‘the north’ or in ‘the south’, seems to be grounds for differences between the heroic poems. The geographic scenery is thus important for the frequencies of place names. Since there are few place names in the Sigurd poems, it is not possible to make an adequate comparison with the Helgi poems, but apart from that, the type and character for name-giving seems to be the same. The Helgi poems are transmitted only in Scandinavia, while the Sigurd poems have their roots in continental Europe. The Sigurd poems have a long oral tradition from the Migration era. The Helgi poems may have that as well, but this is unknown. The author of the first Helgi poem is obviously inspired by old poems about gods and their records of place names. It probably was a great credit for authors to know places and history, and this one excels in emphasizing place names in a mythological and historical perspective. It is interesting, that in this context is also the verbal battle between the two enemies, Sinfjotli and Gudmund. In this ritual, male virtues are at stake, and the place names are helping to strengthen the insults. But if the author of the first Helgi poem knew the second poem, even if he only treated a single event from it, it is surprising that he partly tells a different story, not told in the older lay. In the old poem, the Valkyrie Sigrun is the main protagonist. The word Valkyrie is repeated, and in a dialogue between Helgi and Sigrun is referred to as ‘the Valkyrie said’ and, respectively, ‘Helgi said’. In the younger poem, the word Valkyrie is not used. The ‘water place names’ from the second lay, Brúnavágar, Hlésey, and Leiptrarvatn are not used in the first poem. Brúnavágar is the place where Helgi and the Valkyrie meet for the first time. Helgi rests there with his men after killing King Hunding in a battle, when suddenly Sigrun comes riding in the sky. In the younger poem, he rests at Arasteinn, when suddenly thunder and lightning is seen over Logafjǫll — and this is the first appearance of Sigrun, but the author calls her and the other Valkyries‚ ‘dísir suðrœnar’ (southern goddesses), ‘hjálmvitr’ (vitr with helmet), and ‘sárvitr’ (wound-vitr).85 Is the author dissociating female warriors from the mythology? He calls her brave in battle and wise lady, but consequently avoids the Valkyrie-terminology, used in the older lay. However, in the English translation, the Valkyrie-name is used: ‘hjálmvitr’ and ‘sárvitr’ are thus translated with ‘helmet valkyries’ and ‘the wound-giving valkyries’.86 So, where do all the ‘new’ place names in the first Helgi poem come from? For example, the majority of the ‘water place names’ are mentioned in connection with the preparations before the battle, where male warriors are gathering. They are mentioned as an army, warriors and their sons, huge numbers of men, valiant young

85 ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, sts 16, 54, pp. 250 and 257. 86 ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, sts 16, 54, pp. 250 and 257; ‘The First Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, pp. 118 and 121; cf. sárvitr, f., ‘sårvette’, Norrøn Ordbok, p. 358.

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men, sailors, twelve hundred trusty men, war troop, crowd of warriors, fighters, nobles, Vikings, crew, and so on.87 Together with all these men, the kingship and leadership is underlined. A great part of the other ‘new’ places are mentioned for similar reasons, that is, emphasizing the generosity of the leader/king, for example the gifts from Helgi’s father at his birth consist of no less than seven places:88 He gave Helgi a name, gave him Hringstadir, Sunfell, Snowfell, and Sigarsvoll, Hringstod, Highmeadow, and Himinvangi, To conclude, the function of the literary landscape is to underline the dramatic sceneries and to give the poems a historical meaning and transmit an earlier tradition with place names as an example for knowledge and wisdom. Since it seems as if the author of the first Helgi poem is using the onomastic records in order to highlight a hierarchical perspective and the importance of homo-social bonds, the function of the landscape in this poem, described through many more place names than in the other heroic poems, is mirroring changes in contemporary society.

Works Cited Primary Sources ‘Atlakviða’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 372–82 ‘Atlamál in grɶnlenzku’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 383–401 Brennu-Njáls saga, ed. by Einar Ól. Sveinsson (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 1954) ‘Brot af Sigurðarkviðu’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 324–28 ‘Brynhild’s Ride to Hell’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 192–94 ‘Fáfnismál’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 303–12 ‘The First Lay of Gudrun’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 177–81 ‘The First Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 114–22

87 ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, pp. 270–83; ‘The First Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 116 ff. 88 ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I’, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, st. 8; ‘The First Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani’, ed. and trans. by Larrington, p. 115.

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‘Fragment of a Poem about Sigurd’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 174–76 ‘The Greenlandic Poem of Atli’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 217–33 ‘Guðrúnarhvǫt’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 402–06 ‘Guðrúnarkviða I–III’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 328–34, 352–61, 362–64 ‘Grípisspá’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 286–95 ‘Gripir’s Prophecy’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 143–50 ‘Grimnir’s Sayings’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 50–60 ‘Grimnismál’, in Eddukvæði, i, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Rejkjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 365–79 ‘Hamðismál’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 407–13 ‘Helgakviða Hjǫrðvarðsson’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 259–69 ‘Helgakviða Hundingsbana I–II’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 247–58, 270–83 ‘Helreið Brynhildar’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 349–51 ‘The Lay of Atli’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 210–16 ‘The Lay of Fafnir’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 157–65 ‘The Lay of Hamdir’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 238–42 ‘The Lay of Regin’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 151–56 ‘The Lay of Sigrdriva’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 166–73 ‘Lokasenna’, in Eddukvæði, i, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Rejkjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 408–21 Norna-Gests þáttr, in Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, i, ed. by Guðni Jónsson (Reykjavík: Íslendingasagnaútgáfan, 1965; repr. 1976), pp. 305–35 ‘Oddrúnargrátur’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 365–71 ‘Oddrun’s Lament’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 205–09

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‘The Poem of Helgi Hiorvardsson’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 123–31 ‘Reginsmál’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 296–302 ‘The Second Lay of Gudrun’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 196–202 ‘A Second Poem of Helgi Hundingsbani’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 132–41 ‘The Seeress’s Prophecy’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 3–13 ‘A Short Poem about Sigurd’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 182–91 ‘Sigrdrífumál’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 313–21 ‘Sigurðarkviða hin skamma’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 334–48 Snorri Sturluson, Edda: Skáldskaparmál, ii: Glossary and Index of Names, ed. by Anthony Faulkes (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, University College London, 1998) ‘The Third Lay of Gudrun’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 203–04 ‘Vǫluspá’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), pp. 291–321 ‘The Whetting of Gudrun’, in The Poetic Edda, trans. by Carolyne Larrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 234–37 Secondary Works Blindheim, Martin, ‘Fra hedensk sagnfigur til kristent forbilde. Sigurdsdiktningen i middelalderens billedkunst’, Den iconographiske Post, 1973.3 (1973), 3–28 Brink, Stefan, ‘Landskap och plats som mentala konstruktioner’, in Facets of Archeoelogy: Essays in Honour of Lotte Hedeager on her 60th Birthday, ed. by Konstantions Chilidis, Julie Lund, and Christopher Prescott (Oslo: Unipub, 2008), pp. 109–20 ———, ‘Naming the Land’, in The Viking World, ed. by Stefan Brink in collaboration with Neil Price (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 57–66 Brink, Stefan, and Neil Price, eds, The Viking World (London: Routledge, 2008) Heggstad, Leiv, Finn Hødnebø, and Erik Simensen, Norrøn Ordbok, v: Utgåva av Gamalnorsk ordbok (Oslo: Det Norske Samlaget, 2008) Helleland, Botolv, ‘Sociale og sakrale uttrykk i stadnamn. Freistnad på ei tematisering’, in Ortnamn i språk och samhälle: Hyllningsskrift till Lars Hellberg, ed. by Svante Strandberg, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Nomina Germanica. Arkiv för germansk namnforskning, 22 (Uppsala: Uppsala universitet, 1997), pp. 124–42 Jónas Kristjánsson, Eddas and Sagas: Iceland’s Medieval Literature, trans. by Peter Foote (Reykjavik: Hið Íslenzka Bókmenntafélag, 1988)

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Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, ‘Formáli’, in Eddukvæði, ii, ed. by Jónas Kristjánsson and Vésteinn Ólason, Íslenzk fornrit (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 2014), p. 15 Nordén, Arthur, ‘En stambygd för götisk dikt. Anteckningar i samband med en arkeologisk utgrävning’, Ord och bild, 35 (1926), 1–16 Petrulevich, Alexandra, ‘Ortnamnsanpassning som process. En undersökning av vendiska ortnamn och ortnamnsvarianter i Knýtlinga saga’ (doctoral thesis, Uppsala universitet, 2016) See, Klaus von, and others, eds, Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, iv: Heldenlieder: Helgakviða Hundingsbana I, Helgakviða Hiǫrvarðssonar, Helgakviða Hundingsbana II (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004) ———, Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, v: Heldenlieder: Frá dauða Sinfiǫtla, Grípisspá, Reginsmál, Fáfnismál, Sigrdrífumál (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006) ———, Kommentar zu den Liedern der Edda, vi: Heldenlieder: Brot af Sigurðarkviðo, Guðrúnarkviða I, Sigurðarkviða in skamma, Helreiđ Brynhildar, Dráp Niflunga, Guðrúnarkviða II, Guðrúnarkviða III, Oddrúnargrátr, Strophenbruchstücke aus der Vǫlsunga saga (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2009) Lind, Erik H., ed., Norsk-Isländska dopnamn ock fingerade namn från medeltiden (Uppsala: Lundequist, 1905–15) Peterson, Lena, Nordiskt runnamnslexikon, 5th edn (Uppsala: Institutet för språk och folkminnen, 2007) Szokody, Oliver, ‘Sigurds Schwertprobe im Rhein’, in Verschränkung der Kulturen: Der Sprach- und Literaturaustausch zwischen Skandinavien und den deutschsprachigen Ländern, ed. by Oskar Bandle, Jürg Glauser, and Stefanie Würth (Basel: Francke, 2004), pp. 239–45 Tilley, Christopher, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments (Oxford: Berg, 1994) Vikstrand, Per, Gudarnas platser: Förkristna sakrala ortnamn i Mälarlandskapen, Acta Academiæ Regiæ Gustavi Adolphi, 77 (Uppsala: Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akad. för Svensk Folkkultur, 2001)

Ellen Alm and Rune Blix Hagen

Sámi Magic and Rituals from Historia Norwegie to Johannes Schefferus, c. 1150–1680

Going back to the Middle Ages, the present-day indigenous people of northern Fennoscandia, the Sámi, have a long-standing reputation as magicians, perhaps largely as a result of their perceived pagan identity. Long after the Norse peoples had become Christian, the Sámi were believed to have held onto their pagan religion. Organized Christian missionary activities among the Sámi in the northern part of Denmark-Norway began in the 1720s. At the start of the mission, the Sámi living in the high north were granted amnesty from death sentences for witchcraft. This was due to an initiative taken by the Sámi missionary Thomas von Westen (1682–1727) because the threat of execution for witchcraft created difficulties and obstacles for the missionaries and their work among the Sámi of the high north. The Danish-Norwegian king confirmed the amnesty in 1726. However, these associations with witchcraft have been sustained by representations and misrepresentations of the high north as a hotbed of magic and sorcery. The hostile and frightening borderland of the northern ‘Sagalands’ is often described in fabulous terms, with notorious witches and terrible magicians, most of them to be found among the native people of the high north. The Sámi were previously named Lapps, Laplanders, and Finns.1 The far north was associated with the home of Lucifer and was seen as a scary place of icy-cold darkness and death. Indeed, to travel northwards to Lapland was perceived as leaving civilization on a journey downwards to the very seat of evil. The people living in the extreme north of Europe were known for their magical signs and incantations, trying to conjure up evil spirits by diabolical juggling and other horrible doings. The saga narratives, together with medieval sources



1 For clarification of designations like Finns, Lapps, and Sámi see Evjen and Hansen, ‘One People – Many Names’, pp. 214–16. As Evjen and Hansen point out, the term Finns, and especially the term Lapps, were considered derogatory and often used as outsiders’ names of the Sámi. Ellen Alm, Senior Research Librarian, NTNU Library, dep. Gunnerus Library. [email protected] Rune Blix Hagen, Associate Professor, Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology, Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, UiT The Arctic University of Norway. [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 153–173 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120791

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Figure 8.1. Sapmi — ‘The land of the Sámi’, black area illustrating ‘Sapmi’. Source: Wikimedia Commons, released into the public domain under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence.

and early modern travel accounts, situated the Sámi people in a frozen wilderness joined by further images of magical abilities and intolerant ungodliness.2 Provoking curiosity and fascination among learned Europeans, the magic of the Sámi was identified as a form of magic originating, not from the true Christian God, but from the Devil. Our article will follow accounts about Sámi pagan belief and magic in light of some well-known printed books about Norway and Scandinavia. From the Latin chronicle Historia Norwegie (about 1150) and Olaus Magnus’s History of the Northern Peoples (1555), our text moves to the work of the Norwegian historian Peder Friis A Description of Norway and Adjacent Islands (1613/printed 1632) and Johannes



2 About the Sámi and their Sagaland connection, see Barraclough, Beyond the Northlands, pp. 50–61. The expression and term ‘Sagalands’ relates to the presentations of the far north in Old NorseIcelandic literature. An outline of these saga texts and their influences can be found in Perabo, ‘Here Be Heathens’, pp. 27–35.

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Schefferus’s Lapponia (1673). These texts relate to Swedish Lapland and Finnmark, a large peripheral region in the high north with mixed ethnicity. Most of the Sámi people lived in the fjords and the interior parts of Finnmark and Sweden-Finland, but were influenced by relationships and coexistence with different social groups such as the Norse population of fishing communities, German or Norwegian merchants, Swedish-Finnish populations, and people in the neighbouring frontier area of Russia.

Lapland Witches and Historia Norwegie Lapland witchcraft, rituals, and magic were known to have several distinctive characteristics, according to educated Europeans of the medieval and early modern age. The Sámi were renowned for their abilities to tell fortunes and predict future events. Ever since the Norse sagas had been written this feature of the native populations of the North had been well known. The Sámi people are described in these sagas as highly skilled in various kinds of magic. In general, Old Norse sources give the impression that all Sámi were great sorcerers. According to the Norwegian law of King Magnus the Lawmender issued in 1274, it was forbidden to visit the Sámi of the north-eastern province of Finnmark to have one’s fortune told. Closely associated with their powers of prophecy were the abilities of the Sámi to narrate events by invoking dead souls. Through the use of magic drums, in Norwegian runebomme, and other rituals, a Sámi shaman (in Sámi noaidi), according to reports from outsiders, would allow himself to fall into a trance — at which time his spirit would be led far away. Upon awakening, he could tell a patron of events that had occurred at the site to which his spirit had travelled. The anonymous medieval text Historia Norwegie will be our starting point in trying to shed light on the representations of Sámi magic and rituals through the ages. From the account below we can see that the magic related to what we today call shamanic skills and shamanistic rituals, forms a central part of storytelling about a Sámi magician who died when trying to transform his spirit into a whale (see Fig. 8.2). Once when some Christians were among the Lapps (Finnos/De Finnis) on a trading trip, they were sitting at a table when their hostess suddenly collapsed and died. The Christians were sorely grieved but the Lapps, who were not at all sorrowful, told them that she was not dead but had been snatched away by the gandi of rivals and that they themselves would soon retrieve her. Then a wizard spread out a cloth under which he made himself ready for unholy magic incantations and with hands extended lifted up a small vessel like a sieve, which was covered with images of whales and reindeer with harness and little skis, even a little boat with oars. The devilish gandus (diabolicus gandus) would use these means for transport over heights of snow, across slopes of mountains and through depths of lakes. After dancing there for a very long time to endow this equipment with magic power, he at last fell to the ground, as black as an Ethiopian and foaming at the mouth like a madman, then his belly burst and finally with a great cry he gave up the ghost. Then they consulted another man, one highly skilled in the magic art, as to what should be done about the two of them. He went through the same

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Figure 8.2. Shaman trance. Source: Johannes Schefferus Lapponia, NTNU Library.

motions but with a different outcome, for the hostess rose up unharmed. And he told them that the dead wizard had perished in the following way: his gandus in the shape of a whale, was rushing at speed through a certain lake when by evil chance it met an enemy gandus in the shape of a sharpened stakes, and these stakes, hidden in the depths of that same lake, pierced its belly, as was evident from the dead wizard in the house.3 This depiction of unknown provenance from an observer stems from a Latin chronicle called Historia Norwegie (‘History of Norway’), written down supposedly sometime during the second half of the twelfth century. The author seems to be a Norwegian cleric who possessed at least some kind of knowledge about the conditions in the northern parts of the Nordic area and the Sámi settlements there. Being familiar with Sámi religion and lifestyle and with characteristics of the region’s geography, he might even have been from the north himself. Besides his curiosity and fascination with the actual events, the recorder’s aim may have been to underscore the need for proper Christian missionary activities in the high north to combat paganism among the Sámi population. Furthermore, he identifies this kind of shamanic magic as a form of theomanteia, that is, a form of magic originating not from the true Christian God but from the Devil, containing details of shape-shifting, demons, and soothsaying among other evil deeds. 3 Translation and citation from A History of Norway, trans. by Kunin, pp. 6–7. See also the slightly different translation in Hansen and Olsen, Hunters in Transition, p. 345.

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‘Gondols ondu’ and the Sorcerers from the Extreme North A witch trial from 1325, in fact the first documented case of sorcery to take place in Scandinavia, against a woman called Ragnhild Tregagaas, contains a few interesting aspects related to the supposed magic activities of the Sámi rituals.4 Even though this case comes from the western part of Norway, from Fusa parish, near Bergen, the content of the court stories have strong connections to the far north. This is evident when discussing the kind of magic that the accused woman was supposed to have been practising. The ‘northernness’ of the magical rituals has a strong resemblance to the magic practised by the Sámi population living up north and to the established and long-standing reputation of the Sámi as clever sorcerers. Ragnhild, a Norwegian woman, had used the following magical curse to harm her former lover: I hurl the spirits of Gandul; (In Latin: gondols ondu) One bites you in your back, Another bites your chest, And the third one afflicts you with hatred and envy. The concept of diabolicus gandus, in the Historia Norwegie, and the word Gandul (gondols) mentioned in the first part of Ragnhild’s loathsome curse is of interest. Gondols is a word derived from gand or gandr which refer to a kind of demonic spirit or magical projectile.5 The sorcerers among the Sámi are renowned for their use of gand-sorcery. Gand was perhaps the most important kind of sorcery attributed to the Sámi. This kind of sorcery can be found in several of the early modern witchcraft trials in Norway, especially from the extreme north when the native Sámi people are involved in the persecution of witches. The casting of spells — or gand (diabolicus gandus) — was what Norwegians, and other pious men and women, feared most of all; a fear that exists even today. The Sámi were known to cast their evil spells across vast distances. In fact, such spells could be carried upon the northern winds and result in illnesses among people far to the south in Europe. Shootings, or the conjuring of spells ‘on the wind’, were a well-known malevolent magic across most of northern Scandinavia. The gand was imagined to be something physical. ‘Lapp shots’ were perceived to be small leaden darts, which the Sámi could shoot across great distances. Olaus Magnus (1490–1557), writing in the middle of the sixteenth century, for instance, spoke of this kind of spell as small leaden arrows. Historical court records, from north Norwegian witch trials, offer specific descriptions and actual illustrations of the Sámi’s gand. One of the passages even mentions that the gand resembles a mouse with heads at both front and rear. Consequently, the Sámi were known to bewitch by casting spells upon people.

4 Mitchell, ‘Heresy and Heterodoxy in Medieval Scandinavia’, pp. 43–44. 5 Heide, Gand, seid og åndvind, pp. 34–35.

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Figure 8.3. Gand as an arrow (with bow and butt). In a manuscript written by a missionary in Trøndelag in 1723. Source: XA Qv. 374, NTNU Library.

This kind of spell casting is the kind of bewitching that we can read from the court records of the sorcery trials from seventeenth century where Sámi people were involved. These beliefs were asserted with great conviction by some of the greatest intellectuals residing in France, England, and Denmark. Among others, the famous French jurist and demonologist Jean Bodin (1529/30–96) had a lot to say about the evil magic of ‘les sorciers de Lappie’.6 Turning back to the 1325 case against Ragnhild Tregagaas, the expression gondols ondu could refer to the spirits connected to this kind of gand shooting. When cast out these spirits were supposed to bite, scratch, or otherwise harm the victim of the curse from a long distance. From the court records, we know that Ragnhild had some connections to the far north. According to her confession, she had travelled northward to Hålogaland in her youth, where a person called Sørle Sukk had taught her ‘heretical conjuring’.7 It is tempting to think that Ragnhild had learned some kind of magic rituals from people up north, perhaps from the Sámi population. Sørle Sukk might very well have been a Sámi. Ragnhild’s confession and the whole content of the case can to a certain degree support an interpretation like this. In the first half of the fourteenth century, there were tight networks and interactions between the western part and the northern part of Norway due to the expanding trading traffic with grain and fish, via merchants from Bergen, to the high north.

Olaus Magnus and his Description of the Sámi’s ‘Wind Knots’ During the medieval period and the beginning of the modern era, the northern peoples were renowned throughout Europe for their wind magic. Numerous reports began to surface of foreign traders who had purchased wind from the natives. Two people played a large part in giving the Nordic people a reputation for sorcery related to wind magic. One was the Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1150–c. 1220), while the other was the exiled Swedish archbishop Olaus Magnus (1490–1557). 6 Bodin, De la démonomanie des sorciers, p. 98b. 7 Diplomatarium Norvegicum, ix, 114.

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Figure 8.4. A Sámi and a sailor dealing wind-knots. From Olaus Magnus, 1555. Source: NTNU Library.

Although Saxo Grammaticus and Olaus Magnus mention the art of Sámi sorcery, this art is always placed within a greater tradition of Nordic sorcery. Sámi and other people within the Old Norse world are able to cause bad weather. In both cultures, magic is used in much the same way to cause harm and healing.8 Nonetheless, the comments on Sámi sorcery and its diabolical characteristics were what caught the attention of early modern European people. The Sámi, like other peoples who lived on the geographical and cultural periphery, were considered to be the most potent sorcerers, and their rituals increasingly became associated with the notion that the northern regions were a hothouse for the forging of witchcraft and idolatry. Their accounts of the strong belief in sorcery among the Sámi became well known when their writings were distributed during the sixteenth century, which was also the golden age of Europe’s scholarly demonology. Fantastic representations and fanciful tales became related to a magical setting up north. Saxo explains how some northern peoples, such as the Finns, could control the elements of nature, and used magic instead of weapons to defend themselves. Saxo writes about weather magic as being primarily a Lapland specialty. As examples of witchcraft of the Sámi, Olaus Magnus mentioned wind magic, spell casting,

8 Hagen, ‘Images, Representations and Self-Perception of Magic’, pp. 286–87.

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fortune-telling, the ability to foresee the future, writing magic signs, and singing incantations. Since the Finns were in harmony with nature, they could interpret the weather. Olaus Magnus explained how the inhabitants of the far north could attach ‘wind knots’ to straps and used magical powers to protect against harm. The inhabitants of Finland and Lapland are experts at this, writes the apostle of Nordic culture, at the same time branding the art of sorcery as mad and deranged. The entire world is irresistibility fascinated by this devilish art. Sailors are forced to buy wind because of the wind conditions in the north, and for a small change of money they get three bewitched knots tied to a strap. Bad things will happen to those who doubt the power of the knots, but they are nonetheless forced into seeking advice from sorcerers.9

The Scottish King on Weather Magic In the final decades of the sixteenth century, members of the Scottish, Danish, and Swedish royal families came to feel the curses of witches from the high north in their confrontations with poor weather, fog, thunder, and lightning along the coast of Norway. A wedding in November 1589 between the Danish and Scottish royal houses had to be held in Oslo and not in Edinburgh because witches of the North Sea conspired against a Christian alliance between the Oldenburg and Stuart monarchies. But measure for measure, the Scottish Stuart king, James VI, reacted by proclaiming himself Satan’s mortal archenemy. James VI wrote a textbook in 1597 on demonology and how to combat sorcery based upon his painful experiences fighting evil weather witches of the North Sea. Because of this book, the king became the era’s foremost expert on the connection between sorcery and bad weather. He had lots to tell about the affliction of northern witches. The devil’s worst havoc occurs in ‘such wild parts of the world, as Lapland and Finland’, wrote the monarch with great pathos, and pointed to the horrible roar of the oceans.10 Witches of the far north could raise storms with the Devil’s help. Magical winds could be bought from the native Sámi for a mere slant. Portrayed as evil witches from the remote North, the Sámi became famous all over Europe as the Lapland Witches — a favourite cliché and powerful motif in travel narratives, literary fiction, and demonology throughout the early modern centuries. Even William Shakespeare writing his Comedy of Errors in the early 1590s mentioned the ‘Lapland Sorcerers’.

9 Olaus Magnus, Description of the Northern Peoples, ed. by Foote, trans. by Fisher and Higgins, i, 173–74. 10 Citation from King James VI in Normand and Roberts, eds, Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland, p. 414.



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Figure 8.5. Sámi idolatry. Source: Johannes Schefferus Lapponia, NTNU Library.

A Norseman’s Tale about the Norwegian Sámi One of the first and most groundbreaking historical works on Norway published in the 1600s was written by the Stavanger-based priest and historian Peder Clausøn Friis. The publication, ‘A Description of Norway and Adjacent Islands’, was written in 1613, but was not printed until 1632, after his death. It was later translated into German and Latin, and was long considered the prime source of Norwegian history and topography. The book largely drew on sources like Olaus Magnus, older Norwegian manuscripts, and some very local informants. Friis himself was hardly outside his district (Agder) in the south of Norway while researching his book.11 Nevertheless, Friis’s description of Norway has a long and rich chapter on the Norwegian Sámi in the two northernmost counties, Finnmark and Nordland, and on their proficiency in magic. Friis summarized the knowledge circulating in the academic literature on the Norwegian Sámi, and their paganism and their supernatural skills. What Friis emphasized about the Sámi was idolatry, gand sorcery, shamanism, and weather magic. He used fantastic anecdotes from ‘the real world’ to verify the truthfulness of his claims. On Sámi idolatry, Friis wrote that the Norwegian Sámi people were pagans and unwilling to let themselves be inducted into the Christian faith. They preferred to worship stone formations, trees, and tree gods erected in the wilderness, and they 11 Jørgensen, ‘Peder Claussøn Friis’.

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sacrificed to these in secrecy. Even if some Sámi people had their children baptized, he warned that such pagan activities remained pro forma.12

‘Gand-Lapps’ Friis wrote that in Norway the Sámi people were called Gand-Lapps, because whether they lived by the sea or in the mountain, they were all performing a black magic called gand.13 Friis goes on to write that the art of gand was passed down through the generations, making each successive generation more wicked in their magical skills than the previous one. The coastal-dwelling Sámi would even send their children to be raised by relatives in the mountains to learn the art of gand. This was seen as essential self-defence; if a Sámi was unable to cast out gand sorcery, he/she would be vulnerable to others using gand against them. This need to be proficient at using gand was so deeply rooted in the Sámi people, claims Friis, that they would feel uncomfortable unless they sent out gand-shots at least once a day, either in people, animals, or in the weather. Some Sámi people would engage in blackmail with their supernatural powers: one Sámi would throw gand on a person, while another would charge to lift the gand. According to Friis, the gand looked like horrible blue flies, and were kept in a leather bag.14 Later missionaries who wrote about gand as flies came to interpret them as diabolical devil-flies, sent by the devil to serve the Sámi. A famous Norwegian priest, Petter Dass (1647–1707), made the gand flies well known as ‘Beelzebub’s flies’ (Beelzebub = one of seven princes in hell). According to Friis, the world had never known more wicked magicians than the Sámi people.15

Shamanism among the Sámi Friis also mentioned Sámi shamanism. He wrote that the Sámi could fly in spirit and visit places far away. To do this, the Sámi would lay down, turn blue in the face and would seem to be dead. On waking, the Sámi could bring news from faraway places.16 Surprisingly, Friis makes no mention of the shaman drum (‘rune drum’) which would become a matter of great interest among later authors. Friis went into great detail about how the Sámi were selling wind knots, an idea he likely took directly from Olaus Magnus. Friis nevertheless closed his chapter by excusing these bad ways

12 Friis, Norriges oc omliggende Øers sandfærdige Bescriffuelse, pp. 131–32. 13 Friis, Norriges oc omliggende Øers sandfærdige Bescriffuelse, p. 131; Alm has written in English about gand sorcery in Gemini, NTNU/SINTEF blog post: [accessed 18 February 2019]. 14 Friis, Norriges oc omliggende Øers sandfærdige Bescriffuelse, p. 132. A small leather bag is still ordinary equipment to the Sámi costume, where they keep small needments like needles, scissors, thread, etc. 15 Friis, Norriges oc omliggende Øers sandfærdige Bescriffuelse, pp. 132 and 134. 16 Friis, Norriges oc omliggende Øers sandfærdige Bescriffuelse, p. 133.

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Figure 8.6. Johannes Schefferus’s book Lapponia. Source: NTNU Library.

of living by blaming them on Satan. He explained that the Devil was behind it all, luring the Sámi into paganism and depravity.17 The Sámi were so primitive that they could not see how deep Satan was rooted in them. They acted almost on instinct.

Johannes Schefferus and his Book Lapponia The scholar Johan Schefferus, a native of Strassburg, Germany, came to Sweden in 1648 on the invitation of Queen Kristina. He worked as an esteemed professor at Uppsala University, and published the book Lapponia in 1673/74, the first major work on Sámi territory and people. The book was quickly translated into a number of languages (English, German, French and Dutch), and can be seen as the first definitive work on the Sámi.

The Background of the Book The task of writing about Sámi territories and people was commissioned by the Swedish state, after rumours in Europe about the Swedish successes in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) being the result of Sámi sorcery.18 Schefferus never travelled to Swedish 17 Friis, Norriges oc omliggende Øers sandfærdige Bescriffuelse, p. 134. 18 Lindkjølen, ‘Johannes Schefferus’, p. 27.

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Lapland for his book, but talked with Sámi people in Uppsala and surrounding areas. He had access to Sámi artefacts in the royal curio cabinet, and available manuscripts and literature in the royal library and archives.19

An Outstanding Collection of Quotes Schefferus’s presentation built largely on already famous historical works on the Nordic countries, from classical, medieval, and contemporary authors like Tacitus, Plinius, Snorri, Saxo, Olaus Magnus, Friis, and others. The original contributions in his work were the priest-reports (‘presterelasjoner’), written by clerics living in Lapland among the Swedish Sámi. The priests were instructed by the government to write all their knowledge about Sámi customs and way of life due to Schefferus’s book-project.20 The priests’ reports dominate Shefferus’s presentation of the Sámi. Some historians label the book ‘an outstanding collection of quotes’.21 Concerning the chapter on Sámi religious and magical practices, Schefferus tries to classify and connect (in a reasonable way) the well-known old literature of the Sámi, with the new information from the priest-reports. This is especially evident in Schefferus’s explanation about how the Sámi are spiritually and physically connected with spirits (which he called ‘divination spirits’), and how the spirits were, in turn, connected to the rune drum. Sometimes his sources were contradictory, even incredibly improbable, but he denied his sources’ statements only a few times. Mostly his argument was that one ‘fact’ does not exclude another, and he would mention them all without too much criticism. After all, considering he was dealing with invisible things, impossible to see and to physically prove, it is no surprise that even after spending a great deal of the book explaining and describing different religious and magical practices of the Sámi, he seemed unable to draw any clear conclusions — or to refute them. While Schefferus’s governmental mandate was to de-emphasize some of the fantastical myths circulating about the Sámi people, his book nevertheless ended up doing the opposite. Firstly, because Lapponia depended a great deal on already well-known literature that put the Sámi into a suspicious light. Secondly, the foreign abridged translations of the book focused on the exotic chapters dealing with Sámi paganism and magic. Thirdly, Schefferus (as a man of his time) only rarely rejected the fantastic statements of his informants, he obviously trusted their word as men of honour. The work intended to downplay the Sámi’s magical skills ended up maintaining the impression of the Sámi as a people riddled with paganism and magic.

19 Löw, ‘Johannes Schefferus och hans “Lapponia”’, pp. 15–16; Lindkjølen, ‘Johannes Schefferus’, pp. 27–28. 20 Löw, ‘Johannes Schefferus och hans “Lapponia”’, pp. 14–15, 17–18; Lindkjølen, ‘Johannes Schefferus’, p. 28. 21 Lindkjølen, ‘Johannes Schefferus’, p. 28.

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Sámi Magical Arts In the chapter on ‘Sámi Sorcery’ (‘Om Lapparnas trolldom’), Schefferus discussed Sámi skills in magic. He divided Sámi sorcery into two groups: sorcery done with the rune drum, and sorcery done without the drum, such as wind-knots, gand, and incantation. Contrary to Friis, Schefferus pays a great deal of attention to the rune drum and its uses. In his book, Schefferus does not deny at all that the Sámi people use magic: there ‘can be no doubt about that’, he says, ‘too many good men and serious authors give evidence to that’.22 He explains: these people [the Sámi] are naturally hereditarily predisposed to sorcery […] it is because they are living so far away in the wilderness, as hunters, far away from other people, only surrounded by wild animals. Living like this will encourage the use of black magic and to seek company with demons.23 Another issue Schefferus points out, is that the Sámi are eager to give honour to their ancestors’ traditions, and they are by nature heavily into the force of habit. These facts all combined with the lack of enlightenment and good Christian education, makes it difficult to convert them into strong believers and civil human beings.24 Schefferus points out that getting involved with profane spirits (‘divination spirits’) runs in the blood of the Sámi people: ‘each family is connected to certain spirits through generations’. Some of them got the spirits just by nature, other are taught by their fathers. Still, he adds, ‘these profane arts are not done as openly as before, since the good King has forbidden these cruel acts by law’.25 He points out, however, that not all Sámi can connect with spirits, it depends on a natural talent — and the devil knows who are the most gifted.

The Rune Drum Among the Sámi who use the drum, there are several levels of skills in its usage — and it is not for everyone to know them all, Schefferus writes.26 After a long technical explanation on the construction of the drum and which artefacts belonged to the drum (hammer and rings), he explains what the secret signs painted on the drum symbolized. He shows that the signs were different from drum to drum and illustrates this with several illustrations in the book. Schefferus emphasizes that some drums are more dangerous than others, but in which way he does not know. He writes that

22 Schefferus, Lappland, p. 152. 23 Schefferus, Lappland, pp. 121, 122. 24 Schefferus, Lappland, p. 122. 25 Schefferus, Lappland, pp. 152–53. 26 Schefferus, Lappland, p. 155.

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Figure 8.7. The rune drum (‘Runebomme’). Source: Johannes Schefferus Lapponia, NTNU Library.

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according to Sámi custom, the drum should not be touched by a woman.27 Schefferus also revealed the purposes of the drum, that is: – News communication from faraway places – Divination guidance, for good and bad luck – To remedy illnesses – Knowing which god to sacrifice to and which god to address in various situations.28

‘The Devil’s Instrument’ Over time, the Christian missionaries chose to see the rune drum as a gift from Satan to the Sámi. The drum, or ‘instrument of the Devil’, was the means by which a sorcerer would summon his demons. Such demons were believed to reside in the drum, and these were revived and called into action by striking it. In this manner, each drumbeat was intended for Satan in Hell. While in his satanic trance, a shaman would communicate with his attendant demon, who, because of his tremendous acuity and faculty for moving swiftly, could divulge global events to his master. As a result, early missionaries appointed to Lapland, made arrangements to burn the drums and destroy the pagan gods of the Sámi. As for the Sámi who believed in their abilities to predict the future, they were accused of being satanic prophets.

Gand Tyre Schefferus is very interested in gand sorcery: ‘this is the kind of magical arts they practice, not only to harm strangers, but also to be used against each other’.29 Schefferus does not deny the existence of gand, but claims that it is not lead arrows, as described by Olaus Magnus, or flies, as described by Friis, but a gand tyre (gand stone). He had access to a gand tyre in his museum and included a picture of it in his book. It was a round ball, about the size of a small apple, and made with animal hair or moss. This tyre could cause sudden illness and death. The Sámi could use their magical art to give the gand tyre life, and sell it to someone that wanted to harm his enemies. It would move as fast as a shot and strike the first person it hit. It was not uncommon for the gand tyre to hit the wrong target, ‘and there were many sad examples to this effect’, he adds.30

27 Schefferus, Lappland, pp. 155–66. 28 Schefferus, Lappland, p. 167. 29 Schefferus, Lappland, p. 181. 30 Schefferus, Lappland, p. 183.

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Figure 8.8. A gand tyre. Source: Johannes Schefferus Lapponia, NTNU Library.

Witch Trials in the North In a period of about five hundred years there seems to be some amazing similarities among the different images and representations of the Sámi. All of the storytellers presented in our article have contributed to firmly establishing the reputation of the Sámi as dangerous sorcerers through this long span of time. With this in mind, it would be easy to think that the witch-hunts in northern Fennoscandia would be primarily directed at the Sámi population. This did not happen. The Sámi who resided in the fjords and on the tundra of high north were drawn into the witch persecutions of the seventeenth century as secondary targets. Sámi people made up about one fifth of those convicted of witchcraft in Northern-Norway.31 No other part of Norway experienced such a thorough and brutal persecution of sorcerers and witches as Finnmark during the seventeenth century. In a county of about 3200 inhabitants in the middle of the century, at least 138 people were formally accused of witchcraft. Of these people, ninety-two were executed in consequence of their persecution. There were many more cases in east Finnmark than in west Finnmark. Furthermore, it is Norwegian women from the coastal fishing villages who are the prime targets in the east. In this central part of the country the trials are strongly influenced by typical motifs reproduced from learned treatises on diabolical witchcraft.

Sámi Sorcerers The majority of the cases in the west, however, involved Sámi men. These present a different concept of witchcraft. The Sámi men are understood to be dangerous magicians in their own right, but without the motivation of connection to a diabolical network. The western periphery of Finnmark appears to be one of the very few regions in Europe with a greater proportion of men than women in the records of witch trials.

31 For an overview of the early modern witch persecutions in Norway and the other Nordic countries, see Hagen, ‘Witchcraft Criminality and Witchcraft Research’.

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Sámi Women Sámi Men Norwegian Women Norwegian Men Unknown Total

11 (8) 26 (20) 120 (87) 14 (5) 6 (6) 177 (126)

Table 8.1. The numbers of convicted people in documented witch trials in the northern part of Norway (the present-day counties of Finnmark, Troms, and Nordland), 1593– 1695. The numbers in parentheses show the number of death sentences.

Moreover, the region is certainly unique in a European context in having a distinct element of indigenous people among the victims. In other words, the witch trials of the true north are distinctive in a European context because of the simultaneous prosecutions of Norwegians, most of them married women, and of the native Sámi, most of them being men. The Sámi drum, for instance, is mentioned in just two of the Finnmark court cases. Drum playing was a focus of a trial against an old Sámi man called Anders Poulsen in Vadsø 1692. Poulsen highlighted some areas of use when explaining the drum’s symbols and drawings. These had to do with healing, fortune telling, finding lost objects, the absolution of sins, and practising weather magic. Furthermore, he was able to predict the weather, and could produce fair weather by playing on the drum or by using other kinds of ritual magic as well. It is noteworthy that neither in the interpretation of these symbols, nor in other proceedings of the case, was anything mentioned that could possibly tie his drum playing directly to present-day conceptions of shamanistic ecstasy and trance-like states. On the other hand, Poulsen certainly possessed certain qualities necessary for communication with the otherworld. To find solutions to problems relating to demands from people in this world, he tried to get in touch with spirits of the alternate world. To a certain degree Poulsen can be considered as an ordinary, cunning man who used common spells, charms, and magical healing — in the broader tradition of magical and ritualized acts used by lay people all over Europe.32 As table 8.1 above suggests, the witchcraft trials of the high north are distinctive in a European context because of the simultaneous prosecutions of quite a few Norwegians, most of them married women, and a lower number of the native Sámi, most of them being men.

Witch Trials in Mid-Norway, the South Sámi Area In Trøndelag county, mid-Norway, which is a part of the core area for the South Sámi population, the Sámi are only rarely represented in the witch trials. In Alm’s

32 Hagen, ‘The Sorcery Trial of Anders Poulsen in 1692’.

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ongoing research, she has found 141 witch trials in Trøndelag county, but only three cases involve persons of Sámi ethnicity. The three cases we know for certain involved people of Sámi ethnicity were directed against Henrik Meraaker in 1614, Anne Aslakdatter in 1674, and Kirsten Iversdatter in 1674. The sources for Henrik Meraaker’s trial are not informative; they simply say he has threatened his neighbours with evil words, and the neighbours are convinced he is dealing with ‘sorcery’.33 ‘Meraaker’ is a local council in northern Trøndelag, and it is reasonable to think that Henrik was settled there. That means he was not among the nomadic Sámi families in the area. Nevertheless, he was sentenced to death. Whether Henrik’s kind of ‘sorcery’ was connected to his Sámi identity is impossible to say because of the lack of information. In the case of Anne Aslakdatter it is the same scenario, except that she was a vagrant beggar, wandering around with a three-year-old son and no husband. The court record says she had not attended the Eucharist, which was a civic duty at the time. She had threatened farmers in Gauldal, south of Trøndelag, with evil words when she was rejected. The farmers alleged that her predictions came true. In local court Anne Aslakdatter’s destiny was discussed among the local officers; was she to be tortured and burned as a witch, or branded on the forehead and sent away — usually a punishment for thieves. After conferring with the Court of Appeal Judge of Trondheim, he decided on the contrary to have her undergo church discipline and thereafter to be sent away.34 In her case too, there is no mention of typical Sámi sorcery.

The Last Burned Witch in Trøndelag The third person, Kirsten Iversdatter, was the last witch burned in Trøndelag county.35 Her case is found in the courtbook of the Court of Appeal.36 The local court record is missing, and we have to deal with fragmentary information about what was going on in the local court of Gauldal. Like Anne Aslakdatter, Kirsten Iversdatter was a vagrant beggar with children and no husband, and she did not attend the Eucharist. These circumstances were her primary crime, and for this she was sentenced to death in the local court and sent to prison. The local bailiff was her prison guard, and he was experienced in dealing with witches. During Kirsten Iversdatter’s time in custody, she suddenly confessed that she was bound to Satan. From this point forward, her case takes another direction and turns into a witch trial. It is the need for further official inquiry that leads her case to the Court of Appeal in Trondheim. 33 Trondheim Annual Accounts 1614–1615, State Archives of Norway. 34 Stiftamtstue Annual Accounts 1674, Trondheims stiftamt and Nordland Amt. Leilendigeskatt H: Gauldal, and Attachments. State Archives of Norway. 35 Alm, Trondheims siste heksebrenning. Alm has written in English about this trial in Gemini, NTNU/ SINTEF blog post: [accessed 18 February 2019]. 36 Trondheim Court of Appeal lawbook 1671–1676, fol. 100b–102a.

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Though elements in Kirsten’s ‘confession’ related to Sámi magic or the pagan universe might be expected, this is not the case. In Kirsten’s trial there are no signs of gand, playing the drum, wind knots, or shamanism. Instead, her case follows the ideas of European demonology, and the ideas that are common to see among witches with Norse identity. Kirsten confessed meeting and worshipping the Devil, and riding through the air with other women to Satan’s party, and she names them all. In this matter it is important to emphasize the fact that in her trial, there is no mention of any kind of specific damage, illness, or misfortune she should have caused with sorcery. She was convicted on Christian theological and demonological foundations. Or, as the Court of Appeal Judge of Trøndelag says in his rendition of judgment, against such sinful spiritual evil and low morals, he has nothing else to do than sentence her to death by burning at the stake. She was put to death in public in Trondheim in 1674. Kirsten named about thirty people as allies in worshipping the Devil; city people in Trondheim and farmers south and north living in Central Norway. Some of them belonged to the highest social, economic, and administrative elite of mid-Norway society. The fact that several upper-class people were mentioned as accessories to the crime resulted in further investigations. These people — some of them legally trained and others with strong economic resources, were able to push their trials high up in the legal system. Then, the excellently trained judges of the Norwegian High Court of Justice found the witch trial of Kirsten full of irregular procedures and illegal use of the law. In the judgment for the defendant, a warning was given to all public court men in Trøndelag: to observe the rules and approach the law in a correct manner. After this, it was impossible to get a witch convicted. Thereby, Kirsten Iversdatter was the last witch burned in Central Norway.

Final Remark As a final remark, let us note that between 1639 and 1749, in the regions of Swedish and Finnish Lapland, at least seventy-three Sámi males and three Sámi females were prosecuted on charges of using drums and practising sacrificial rituals. However, few of them received the death penalty.37 We can conclude from this that the literature that had framed the Sámi as especially adept at magic only had limited effects on the witch-hunts in the North.

37 Graff, ‘Trolldomsransakingene i Sverige’. For the cases of the northern parts of Finland and Sweden, see also the article by Granqvist, ‘“Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods before Me”’. It seems that the persecution became more severe in northern Norway because it took place at an earlier stage in the seventeenth century than that of Finnish and Swedish Lapland. The differences in chronology should, furthermore, be seen in the context of the strategies of penetration and expansion of the different states in the region.

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Works Cited Manuscripts and Archival Sources Oslo, State Archives of Norway, Stiftamtstue annual accounts 1674, Trondheims stiftamt and Nordland Amt. Leilendigeskatt H: Gauldal, and attachments ———, Trondheim annual accounts, 1614–1615 ———, Trondheim Court of Appeal lawbook, 1671–1676 Primary Sources Bodin, Jean, De la démonomanie des sorciers (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1988; repr. of the 1st edn, Paris: 1580) Diplomatarium Norvegicum, ix (Christiania, Malling, 1847); [accessed 21 February 2020] Friis, Peder Claussøn, Norriges oc omliggende Øers sandfærdige Bescriffuelse: Indholdendis huis vært er at vide, baade om Landsens oc Indbyggernis Leilighed oc Vilkor, saa vel i fordum Tid, som nu i vore Dage (Copenhagen, 1632) A History of Norway and the Passion and Miracles of the Blessed Óláfr, trans. by Devra Kunin, ed. by Carl Phelpstead (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, University College London, 2001) Olaus Magnus, Description of the Northern Peoples, ed. by Peter Foote, trans. by Peter Fisher and Humphrey Higgins, 3 vols (London: Hakluyt Society, 1996–98) Schefferus, Johannes, Lappland, trans. by Henrik Sundin, Acta Lapponica, 8 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1956) Secondary Works Alm, Ellen, Trondheims siste heksebrenning: Trolldomsprosessen mot Finn-Kirsten (Trondheim: Museumsforlaget, 2014) ———, ‘Gand’, SPOR, 2017.1 (2017) [accessed 21 February 2020] ———, ‘So What Is Gand Sorcery – Really’, Gemini, 28 March 2018 [accessed 21 February 2020] ———, ‘Finn-Kirsten Iversdatter: Norway’s Forgotten Witch’, Gemini, 25 January 2019 [accessed 21 February 2020] Barraclough, Eleanor Rosamund, Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyage and the Old Norse Sagas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) Evjen, Bjørg, and Lars Ivar Hansen, ‘One People – Many Names: On Different Designations for the Sami Population in the Norwegian County of Nordland through the Centuries’, Continuity and Change, 24.2 (2009), 211–43

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Graff, Ola, ‘Trolldomsransakingene i Sverige. En kamp for krone og katedral’, Ottar, 5 (2012), 34–41 Granqvist, Karin ‘“Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods before Me (Exodus 20:3)”. Witchcraft and Superstition Trials in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Swedish Lapland’, in Kulturkonfrontation i Lappmarken, Sex essäer om mötet mellan samer och svenskar, ed. by Peter Sköld and Kristina Kram (Umeå: Kulturgräns norr, 1998), pp. 13–29 Hagen, Rune Blix, The Sami – Sorcerers in Norwegian History: Sorcery Persecution of the Sami (Kárášjohka — Karasjok: ČálliidLágádus, 2012) ———, ‘Witchcraft Criminality and Witchcraft Research in the Nordic Countries’, in The Oxford Handbook of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe and Colonial America, ed. by Brian P. Levack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 375–92 ———, Ved porten til helvete: Trolldomsprosessene i Finnmark (Oslo: Cappelen Damm, 2015) ———, ‘Images, Representations and the Self-Perception of Magic among the Sami Shamans of Arctic Norway, 1592–1692’, in Contesting Orthodoxy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft, ed. by Louise Nyholm Kallestrup and Raisa Maria Toivo (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, Springer, 2017), pp. 279–300 Hansen, Lars Ivar, and Bjørnar Olsen, Hunters in Transition: An Outline of Early Sámi History (Leiden: Brill, 2014) Heide, Eldar, Gand, seid og åndevind (Bergen: Dr art avhandling Universitetet i Bergen, 2006) Jørgensen, Jon Gunnar, ‘Peder Claussøn Friis’, in Norsk biografisk leksikon (Norwegian biographical encyclopedia) [accessed 21 February 2020] Lindkjølen, Hans, ‘Johannes Schefferus og bokverket “Lapponia” utgitt 1673’, in Festskrift til Ørnulv Vorren, Tromsø Museums skrifter, 25 (Tromsø: Universitetet i Tromsø, 1994), pp. 23–35 Löw, Bengt, ‘Johannes Schefferus och hans Lapponia’, in Johannes Schefferus: Lappland, Acta Lapponica, 8 (Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1956), pp. 9–23 Mitchell, Stephen, ‘Heresy and Heterodoxy in Medieval Scandinavia’, in Contesting Orthodoxy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft, ed. by Louise Nyholm Kallestrup and Raisa Maria Toivo (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 35–56 Normand, Lawrence, and Gareth Roberts, eds, Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI’s Demonology and the North Berwick Witches (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000) Perabo, Lyonel D., ‘Here Be Heathens: The Supernatural Image of Northern FennoScandinavia in Pre-Modern Literature’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Iceland Reykjavik, 2006)

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Karin Murray-Bergquist

On Solid Ground Learning from the Lore of Imagined Lands

Introduction As an imagined landscape, vanishing islands are distinctive in nature, blending the lore of land and sea, and evoking, throughout the stories surrounding them, a sense of both warning and appeal. I argue in this paper that it is the effect of such legendary land and seascapes, shown in the stories told about them and the attempts made to claim them, that unites them into a distinct form of lore in relation to the north. The defining elements of such tales, which link them together, are their perceived remove from the ordinary human world, their association with high risk and deadly peril, and the equally strong attraction of their rumoured, but inaccessible, riches. I intend to demonstrate that, as part of Northern European folklore, these qualities have been associated with both legendary and historical voyages to the west and, increasingly, to the north. They can be understood as a means of coping with an environment that could be harsh, without defying it. As a specifically northern motif, there are certain themes shared throughout these stories. Samuel Eliot Morison suggests the Navigatio Sancti Brendani as an initial inspiration and the basis of a tradition, remarking: ‘The whole atmosphere of the story is northern’.1 Certainly the narrative seems to set the tone, and for good reason, as Morison points out that, despite the far-fetched nature of its narrative, it rings true to sailors in northern seas. Islands play their role in St Brendan’s voyage, and in a variety of forms, from the distinctly spiritual to the humorous, in which a supposed island is in fact the back of a very polite whale. Localization of legendary islands is interesting, showing them not so much to be illusions as shared landscapes. What have they in common with the islands that, from genuine belief, were put on the map? And how does the North-West Passage, as a site of folklore, share traits with both distinct kinds? I will argue that the lost ships of English explorer Sir John Franklin have taken on the character of a legend, 1 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 24. Karin Murray-Bergquist, Memorial University of Newfoundland. [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 175–191 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120792

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with strong ties to lost island lore. As for the elusive Passage itself, the framing of the story more resembled that of a realistic but non-existent island, being thought possessed or possessable, yet unseen, and tangible, but disenchantable at a touch. Two main types of island form the basis for this study, with a third emerging between them. Vanishing islands which are understood to be supernatural, or in some way physically unreachable, constitute an imagined landscape, or seascape, with strong effects on the way people view the natural world. Islands that have been placed on the map, and perceived (or at least theorized) as part of the physical world, are informative sources on human history. Inhabiting a space between these types are islands now known and inhabited, whose origins are said to have been otherworldly, and islands that have been removed to the supernatural world. The similarities between the two types are many and various: they are generally thought to be extremes, either rich and impossibly beautiful, or barren crags. The weather is usually static and unchanging. The islands are either uninhabited, or lived on only by supernatural beings. The folklore motifs that I intend to explore are F213 (Fairyland on Island), and F730 (Extraordinary Islands), both often found in tale type ML4075 (Visit to Fairyland).2 In connecting these tales with the Arctic exploration narratives I hope to demonstrate an affinity between them. I intend to connect the narrative elements common to northern exploration history, in particular the search for the North-West Passage, with this body of lore, suggesting mutual influence between them, as well as possible reasons for the traits they share. Such a need to envision an impossibly far, though visible, land, can be explained in a multitude of ways, but the aspect on which this paper will focus is the positioning of these islands and how they were constructed. Direction is the most evident place in which to begin, and so it must be asked how they were placed in relation to the rest of the world. On the coastline of Northern Europe and the British Isles, they took to the west, but throughout many legends, and increasingly throughout the history of European exploration, their remoteness and the danger inherent in searching for them placed them in northern seas. The association with the long hours of sunlight gave them a distinctly northern landscape. Travellers from places where the daylight hours varied less drastically would be struck by the strangeness of northern skies. It is this strangeness, above all else, that characterizes vanishing islands in the North Atlantic.

Distance The idea of beyondness, of the attraction of the unknowable, is frequently cited in the literature of exploration and, most recently, in the rhetoric surrounding the north. Jean-Baptiste Charcot’s musings on the attrait des pôles are an eloquent phrasing of this sentiment, one that had previously been situated in the far west.3 In a sense, the

2 Simpson, Scandinavian Folktales, p. 203; Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. 3 Larrington, The Land of the Green Man, p. 43; see Súðurnes Science and Learning Centre for details on the explorations of Jean-Baptiste Charcot.

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nineteenth century saw a shift from west to north as the Americas became increasingly settled by Europeans, but from their perspective, the icy seas remained largely, and temptingly, uncharted. Despite the forbidding traits that Arctic regions undoubtedly possess, those looking towards the north have frequently envisioned paradises within it. The land of the Hyperboreans was, to the Greeks, an endless source of curiosity and speculation. Fascination with the midnight sun is understandable, as mentioned above, to writers coming from regions with more regular light, and the Greek writer Pytheas, in speaking of the northern land of Thule, described such a light in wonder.4 Throughout the years, Thule became Hyperborean in its aspects. Its most significant, and specific, geographical trait was that it belonged to the north. The constant light of dawn, or the unusually long hours of light, described by Pytheas, eventually became part of supernatural island lore. Often, they turned into places where the sun never set, or to which the sun returned after its daily trajectory.5 Although the symbolic or spiritual aspects of this were in evidence, lived experience in northern lands and seas may have played an equally strong part, alongside the desire to explain or characterize the movement of the sun in relatable terms. And these islands were generally located beyond the map. Sea exploration carried with it certain perils, but also wonders. Perdita, the ‘lost island’, in a very literal sense, is described in De imagine mundi.6 It is an island that can only be found by chance, never successfully sought. In this it is perhaps the best demonstration of this distance, being an uncertainty not only accepted, but embraced. Islands had an already long association with this sense of otherworldliness, besides those described in the Navigatio: as Eldar Heide points out, they are often understood as being ‘on the other side of water’ from the mainland.7 In possessing the ‘dual citizenship’ spoken of by Seamus Heaney, between sea and land, they have come to be representative of elusiveness, ambiguity, and transformation.8 Likely the most famous of these nowadays is Avalon, known as a place of healing and restoration in Arthurian legend. Its being referred to as the ‘island of apples’ also recalls the theme of lands of endless resources, to which I will return shortly.9 In both cases, they were also associated with death. As will be shown below, the themes of remote otherworldliness and mortal peril are key aspects of island lore, and link it with the afterlife, often as a habitation for those lost at sea. Paradoxically, the most localized island tales tend to place the islands at the furthest remove, whether in distance or time. On the west coast of Ireland, it seems sometimes that every community has another name, another legend about an island impossibly far away, or long since lost beneath the waves. Often there is a definite time at which they resurface, whether ‘just before sunrise on May morning’ every

4 McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place, p. 23. 5 See Ó hÓgaín, ‘The Mystical Island in Irish Folklore’; Morison, The European Discovery of America. 6 Lyons, Impossible Journeys, p. 154; see Nansen, ‘In Northern Mists’. 7 Heide, ‘Holy Islands and the Otherworld: Places beyond Water’, p. 58. 8 Heaney in Thomson, The People of the Sea, p. xi. 9 Norako, ‘Avalon’.

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seven years, or longer.10 In the Aran Islands the lost island Beag-Árainn, which had been part of the group, is said to be merely temporarily absent, for it will eventually resurface; rather more sinister is the promise that the others will be submerged at the same time. Similarly, Cill Stuifin, located at a break-water near Lahinch, is known as a death omen, illustrating the more sinister aspect of these legends, to be discussed below.11 First, however, it is important to return to the matter of where islands were said to be in relation to the mainland, or known waters. One of the more famous islands is Hy-Brasil, the appearance of which, like Orkney’s Hether Blether, has been mentioned by writers and observers nearly up to the present day, now known to be unreachable, but strong enough in its effect to blend with or take over the names of other islands along the coast. ‘It is an enchanted island, never still; now sighted by a shepherd from high Achill, again glimpsed through fog off the Aran Islands, or appearing to the crew of a vessel rounding the Blaskets’, according to one volume, summing up the uncertainty surrounding its identity, location, and appearance.12 With familiarity, it seems, Hy-Brasil has lost its locality. The island has been borrowed for use in many accounts. It is said to have been sighted on Cabot’s voyages and, in accordance with traditional patterns, is apparent every seven years. It is also a persistent island — it only disappeared from the Admiralty charts in 1850.13 Accounts of its existence are many and various, including one sailor’s claim that his ship passed by ‘so near, that he could have cast a biscuit on shore’.14 The island may thus be an example of both types of understanding, historic and legendary. Interestingly, it was not removed until the second wave of attempts to find the North-West Passage was at its height, or slightly past it. The Franklin expedition of 1845 had disappeared, and subsequent parties had been sent to find it, during which time the coastline of the High Arctic had been redrawn multiple times. Aside from eyewitness accounts, people have looked for the evidence to support such islands as Hy-Brasil and Beag-Árainn in other ways. The appearance of holly, heather, and other items of plant matter far out at sea, in the absence of another explanation, has long been cited as proof of the elusive presence of these lands.15 Morogh O’Ley’s ‘Book of O’Brasil’ was offered as firm evidence, and prompted several expeditions to try and find the island.16 However, with most legends as with this one, the most important thing seems not to have been to prove or disprove the existence of the place, but to find the ways in which it makes itself known. Had O’Brasil been able to offer only an ordinary range of resources, it would not have mattered to history, and only its remarkable qualities made it worth investigating. How did they come to be this way? Some, in stories told all over Scandinavia, Britain, and western France, were said to have been submerged beneath the sea 10 Ó hÓgaín, ‘The Mystical Island in Irish Folklore’, p. 248. 11 Ó hÓgaín, ‘The Mystical Island in Irish Folklore’, p. 251. 12 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 103. 13 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 186; Stommel, Lost Islands, p. 82. 14 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 104; Stommel, Lost Islands, p. 82. 15 Freitag, Hy Brasil, p. 71. 16 Stommel, Lost Islands, p. 80; Ó hÓgaín also discusses this theme.

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in retribution for sins. Of these, ‘sea-cold Lyonesse’ of Cornwall may be the most renowned, but by no means the only one, to have been submerged beneath the sea in the fashion of Atlantis, after the inhabitants had sinned.17 Breton lore contains Ys, whose case was similar to that of Lyonesse, though versions vary in terms of whether the sin was material or spiritual. While the tone of such stories is certainly religious the sins themselves were sometimes mundane, such as neglect or dereliction of duty. In other cases they were removed from the human world for their own protection, as in the case of Cill Stuifin, hidden beneath the waves by magic, kept that way due to the death of the one who removed it, after having irretrievably lost the key that could reclaim it.18 Other islands are hidden a little less dramatically, shrouded in mist rather than sunken beneath the sea. The saying that ‘mist, music and sailing are three things under enchantment’, mystical though it may sound, is, like the Navigatio, reflective of observed qualities.19 Indeed, in one such story, it is the singing of one on the island that leads an imperilled boat to safety on it.20 In another, a story of Hilda-Land recounted by Ernest Marwick, the marks of otherness include surprising fog, and certain telling actions on the part of the faerie merchant guiding the boat.21 Where islands such as Cill Stuifin and Beag-Árainn were submerged and destined, at some unknown time, to resurface, others were enchanted, and enchantments can be broken, by those who know how. Despite the far remove, there were means to reclaim or regain them for the mundane, human world. Tory Island, associated with the Irish conversion to Christianity, was said to have been restored by St Colm Cille. Not all such acts carried such overt religious themes, however. Inis Bó Finne was said to have come into the ordinary world by the simple act of having ashes fall on it.22 Often the reclamation of an island required the introduction of a foreign material, such as fire, ember, or metal, all typical charms against the supernatural or the dark. Sometimes only intense concentration, or constant eye contact with the island, was required to keep it visible. All of these elements are also useful to survival, especially in situations where getting lost is a major risk, and keen observation, smoke, and metallic noise may be factors in being rescued. Yet most of these stories, despite exact instructions, are narratives of failure. Disenchantment of the island would mean dissolution of the story, hence the multiple accounts of attempted reclamation ending in the islands’ return to their native, enchanted state. The role of the human visitor to such islands is important to note. In the story recounted by Tom Muir of Hether Blether, although the girl living on the island could not (and did not want to) leave, she was able to lead her father and brother to safety, and to give them a means of return — even if this was 17 De La Mare, Sunk Lyonesse, cited in Larrington, The Land of the Green Man, p. 49. 18 Ó hÓgaín, ‘The Mystical Island in Irish Folklore’, p. 251. 19 Mac Cárhaigh, ‘An Bád Sí’. 20 Muir, The Mermaid Bride and Other Orkney Folk Tales, p. 136. 21 Marwick, The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland, pp. 26–27. 22 Ó hÓgaín, ‘The Mystical Island in Irish Folklore’, p. 254.

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promptly lost.23 The visitors are cautioned not to speak to the girl’s husband, for fear of unspecified consequences, but they are otherwise treated as welcome guests. Her role is ambiguous, as one between two worlds, and although benevolent to her relatives, she cannot return to shore with them. The old motif of a knife used to secure the sailor’s return, perhaps tied to traditions of fairies and iron or steel, appears once again. The addition of its being lost, vanished in the sea, where it presumably would never be found, is much like sunken bell, church, or treasure traditions in the rest of Britain.24 The loss of lands and the failure to reclaim them was an oft-repeated theme among Northern European cultures, and if nothing else, it tells us that the awareness of failure was acute. Punishment of sins was a subject on many people’s minds, but it was conceived of on a scale that reflected intricate and important connections between humans and their environment, almost in the same way that we discuss climate change and the risk of rising sea levels today. In the case however of Utrøst, an island off the coast of Norway, no attempt is made in the story to secure its presence in the mortal world, for the crew sheltering there are happy simply to accept its sanctuary.25 This reflects another crucial element of sea-lore in general, in which it can be termed the lore of give and take. The sea is a benefactor with dangerous qualities, and the characters in these stories seem to have accepted their luck in a rescue unlooked-for, knowing it is not a guarantee. Most of the stories of enchanted islands as sanctuaries have them appear, like the medieval legend of Perdita, only to those who do not actively seek them.26 Although this may seem counter to the attitudes of explorers, whose role was to do exactly that, it certainly reflects the element of chance or surprise that was crucial to these tales as well. There were also certain rules surrounding interaction with these places, as with most places of faerie origin or habitation. Here, the most frequently recurring instruction is that the visitors are ordered not to speak. In the case of Hether Blether, for example, the tales described above suggest that this silence is the guests’ sole guarantee of safety, and the ability to leave.

Danger The otherness of supernatural islands often, as I have demonstrated, associated them with the dead or lost. This made them extremely perilous to the ordinary, living person. They are in this sense comparable to raths or tumuli, in land-based Irish folklore, and breakers or standing waves seem to have served a similar role, in a maritime setting, marking the places where the living should not, for their own safety, dare to go.27

23 Muir, The Mermaid Bride and Other Orkney Folk Tales, pp. 113–14. 24 Westwood and Simpson, The Lore of the Land, p. 382. 25 Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, p. 270. 26 Lyons, Impossible Journeys, p. 154. 27 Ó hÓgaín, ‘The Mystical Island in Irish Folklore’, p. 247.

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The island of Utrøst, in Norway, was said to be only visible to humans in times of mortal danger.28 Similarly, the stories of Eynhallow or Hilda-Land, in Orkney, home of the Fin Folk, frequently involve a supernatural deed of rescue by one already lost at sea. Hilda-Land is featured as a refuge and a real, physically reachable place, but it is implied that it is only the dead or lost who can guide others there. In illustrating the dangers of the sea, explorers spoke the same language, using slightly different terms. Just as fishermen’s yarns of seafaring dangers, woven into tales about islands under enchantment, or moral lessons, framed by sunken lands submerged by divine wrath, carry practical or social information and advice, the stories of newly discovered islands could serve a dual purpose. In terms of vainglory, they could certainly allow ambitious men to put their names — or their patrons’ names — on the map. They could also serve, however, to indicate something experienced at sea, though perhaps misattributing the cause of the encounter, and to warn future explorers of genuine dangers. Although Captain Thomas Hurd in 1814 supposed that many of the northern vanishing islands were ‘Ice Islands’, the lore suggests rather more variety, and the use of vanishing islands to illustrate an impressively wide range of perils encountered in northern waters.29 Indeed, the words of Lucas Debes in 1673 show the breadth of thought such islands inspired — ‘I should say that it was icebergs, that come floating from Greenland: and if that be not so, then I firmly believe that it is phantoms and witchcraft of the Devil’.30 Such things as fog were part of the supernatural aspect of vanishing islands, but were also the lived experience of fishermen and sailors. The Scottish proverb linking northern haar, or mist, with weather, demonstrates the importance of wariness in these waters.31 The accounts, tinged with supernatural tones though they were, of the 1783 emergence of a volcanic island off Iceland illustrate one possible use of such lore as a valuable guide to real dangers.32 It is interesting to note how map-makers have dealt with doubtful islands over time — reducing their size, marking them as underwater, calling them rocks or something other than islands, and finally covering them with the map legend.33 As a means of coping with uncertainty, these various methods demonstrate a certain tension, giving way to an act of startling indecision. It seems it was preferable to err on the side of caution, rather than remove an island that might prove to be a dangerous shoal. If phantom islands of this kind have, over the centuries, been the source of confusion, legendary islands have been the source of inspiration. Hy-Brasil, for example, has given its name to Brazil Rock off of Sable Island, Nova Scotia, a phantom island in a very different sense.34 Known as the ‘Graveyard of the Atlantic’, its shifting sands, low elevation, and changing coastline have caused 28 Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, p. 270. 29 Stommel, Lost Islands, p. 83. 30 Debes (1673), cited in Nansen, In Northern Mists, p. 375. 31 Inwards, Weather Lore, p. 145. 32 Stommel, Lost Islands, p. 69. 33 Stommel, Lost Islands, p. 79. 34 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 104.

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many hundreds of ships to be lost, and it seems apt that one of the most renowned islands of folklore should be permanently linked with an area that has itself become storied. In giving this name to an actual feature of the known world, the map-makers have followed the long-standing pattern of affixing legend to landscape, much as Sir George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, did in claiming the ‘Colony of Avalon’ for King James I.35 This blending of the literal and the imagined has characterized both exploration history and vanishing island lore, and it is time that the territory they share is fully appreciated. Some islands owed their continued attribution on the nautical charts to the presence of mind of certain map-makers, who included every possible obstacle in order to clear themselves of blame should cargoes run aground. According to Morison, ‘several library navigators of this century insist that every mapped island must represent a real one. The contrary is true’.36 Although it is difficult to evaluate his claim that islands were frequently included in maps simply to fill in blank space and make them more pleasing to the eye, he observes crucially that the inclusion of islands of uncertain veracity was often done as an extra safety measure. Islands marked and subsequently disproven became known to sailors as ‘Flyaway Islands’, but until proven otherwise, they were considered potential dangers.37 Buss Island was an interesting case as, according to Morison, ‘the cartographers, loath to give it up, introduced a “Sunken Land of Buss” which, like Hy-Brasil, hung on into the nineteenth century’.38 As previously mentioned, this was a familiar way of disposing of disproven lands. Discovered on the return journey to England by one of the ships in Martin Frobisher’s expedition, the island was quickly deemed rich in resources; in 1592, it made its first appearance on a globe.39 Interestingly, when it was next glimpsed, first by Zachariah Gillam and then Thomas Shepherd, it was quickly dotted with names belonging to men of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Its existence did not go unquestioned as subsequent expeditions passed that way without seeing it, but the presence of heavy weather causing large waves made many believe that something, whether island or reef, was there worth noting. There was the traditional element of patronage in evidence, with the naming of parts of the island, but also the concern of the sailor over hazards to navigation — and benefits or hindrances to further lucrative expeditions.40 The timing of its discovery coincided with the first rush of English fascination with finding the North-West Passage, during which the focus was emphatically on finding the fabled route to the Orient and its riches. By the time Hy-Brasil vanished from the charts, some three centuries later, the search had developed into something far more fantastical. Both forms of vanishing island represented experience and kinds of knowledge. Social and commercial dangers are often intertwined with physical ones in these 35 Colony of Avalon Foundation. 36 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 82. 37 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 83. 38 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 544. 39 Lyons, Impossible Journeys, p. 150. 40 Lyons, Impossible Journeys, p. 153.

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tales of warning. Ernest Marwick recounts the story of a journey to Hilda-Land, with specific directions such as sailing east of every obstacle, and blindfolding the boatman while they came to shore. Such details are common to much of the lore surrounding faerie geographies, and the instructions for ordinary humans to reach mystical worlds can be very particular indeed. The man in the tale is there for purposes of commerce, but pays dearly for it, as next Lammas fair the stranger with whom he had done business blinds him, punishment for gleaning what ought to be hidden.41 It too is a familiar motif, found in the tale type ‘Midwife to the Fairies’ (ML5070), as is that of turning a boat withershins, as a mark of a non-human mariner, and the dense surprising fog. Residents of magical islands also give us some indication of local beliefs, and understanding of the environment. Though Iceland has seemingly few vanishing or phantom islands in the sense of the others in this essay, its islands have been the home of supernatural creatures. In the story ‘Blessing the Cliffs’, the priest’s knowledge is both psychological and practical, as he gleans the genuine reason the cliff in question is deemed haunted, and wisely chooses to fix the problem without disrupting the beliefs of his parishioners.42 By employing their trust in him, and in particular their faith that he as priest can resolve issues of a spiritual nature, he is able to rid the cliff of a jagged rock which had caused ropes to fray and thus send many to their deaths. A similar story, in which the hidden people reveal themselves more plainly, involves the equally perilous cliffs of Latrabjarg. Depending on the version told, either a monstrous claw, or the Devil himself, begs the bishop who is blessing the cliffs to be allowed somewhere to live, a request that the bishop gallantly grants.43 As evidence of the double-sided nature of sea-lore, in which bounty and peril — physical or moral, it seems — go hand in hand, there are few better examples. Land-based folklore, as well, could transfer its meaning to a maritime environment, with the attendant reconstructions of rational explanations for the phenomena. Lysaght suggests that a maritime variation on the Wild Hunt could be a sky-borne reflection of the phantom island, an apparition given name and identity by stormy weather or mirages.44 ‘The ship-symbol has been related to the holy island’, as well, and indeed they share some important territory, not least of which is their contact with the human world.45 Are phantom island sightings, like ships, given as a premonition? Phantom ships were generally regarded as omens, often of death by shipwreck, and some accounts do tell of islands acting as supernatural warnings or death omens.46 Faerie boats competed with mortal fishermen, warned them of danger, and were taken as signs to return to shore.47 With both phantom and faerie ships, the most common motif is that they never make landfall. This could 41 Marwick, The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland, p. 27. 42 Simpson, Icelandic Folktales and Legends, p. 78. 43 Simpson, Icelandic Folktales and Legends, p. 79. 44 Lysaght, ‘The Hunt that Came over the Sea’. 45 Mac Cárhaigh, ‘An Bád Sí’, p. 142. 46 Ó hÓgaín, ‘The Mystical Island in Irish Folklore’, pp. 258–59. 47 Mac Cárhaigh, ‘An Bád Sí’, pp. 168–69.

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be considered a variation on the theme of islands which are regularly visited — but only by chance, or by following very specific instructions to the letter. The stories of fishermen saved by mystery islands, or, more commonly, of drowned men’s souls inhabiting such places, stand in contrast to the ones concerning entire crews lost to supernatural power at sea — such as the Norwegian folk tales of ‘The Fisherman and the Draug’ and ‘Jack of Sjöholm and the Gan-Finn’.48 Islands as sanctuaries are absent from these tales. The symbolic role of both ship and island was, then, ambiguous, and could act as either a positive or a negative influence upon the mortal sailor. Illusions and visual distortions play their part in this body of lore as well, in connection with towers seen out at sea, as in the tale of Immram Maíle Dúin. There is an actual rock known as the Rock of Donn, a character of early myth, meaning ‘the dark one’. Legendary connections are hinted by the sun.49 As in ancient Greek accounts of the Hyperboreans and Thule, the sun’s role is part of defining its otherworldliness. It is somewhere to which the sun returns, thus forming part of the pattern of defining, characterizing, and assigning definite location to elusive objects. Whether the circuit of the sun, or the rhythm of the tide over rock and shore, the island provided something akin to an explanation. Perhaps because the economy of fishing was so intertwined with the folklore to do with islands, it is a notable element of stories to do with supernatural oversea lands that they produce and provide riches for all time to those who reach them. It is an escape from poverty, hard work, and death, even if to go there one must be lost at sea. Eagerness to make a bit of cash is reflected by stories of explorers in search of new lands, along with the contradiction it entails: it requires quite a lot of work to find a place that will prevent any more need for hard work. The matter of material gain will be explored shortly, but it is crucial to note that this was intimately tied to the risks taken and the peril endured. The mania around the North-West Passage may have been commercial, but it became fantastical, perhaps even in the minds of those involved as well as subsequent generations; it became a ‘Siege Perilous’ in which the unworthy, those not chosen to discover it, would be destroyed. This sentiment is perhaps best expressed in the words of Sir John Richardson, ‘They forged the last link with their lives’.50 In his own, very personal, connection with the Franklin expedition and the loss of men on the Passage quest, Richardson articulated the feeling that would dominate northern history for decades — that the knowledge gained was directly thanks to the otherwise pointless death in the frozen north. John Rae, the Orcadian explorer whose voyages of exploration were marked equally by their practical success and the social ruin that followed his discoveries concerning the Franklin expedition, is rarely credited for his own link, Rae Strait, which proved much more useful.51

48 49 50 51

Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, pp. 111, 503. Ó hÓgaín, ‘The Mystical Island in Irish Folklore’, pp. 258–59. Quoted in McGoogan, Fatal Passage, p. 471. See McGoogan, Fatal Passage.

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Yet, as Robert McGhee points out, surprisingly few ships were in fact lost on the search for the Passage, despite the constant descriptions in the explorers’ narratives of dreadful danger and impossibly perilous ice.52 The imagery is otherworldly and brings ice and sky into play as nearly magical elements. It was as though this mortal peril were part of the enchantment, or the breaking thereof, to ensure possession of the territories in question. Adding to this sense of unease is the very real change that ice undergoes through the seasons, making the Passage impossible to pin down year to year, without constant, on-site observation. Part of the knowledge that can be gained from this lore, then, is cautionary. It ranges from moral warning against abstract sins, demonstrated by stories such as those of Ys and Lyonesse, to practical ones against mundane errors, for example the failure to guard against the sea, or the careless behaviour towards sea entities, such as in many Irish tales, and that of Hether Blether. The reverse is illustrated by stories in which islands are reclaimed for the human world by magical means, and disenchanted with a view to taking possession.

Desire Longing — the attraction of worldly wealth, economic security, and possession of land, or the idea that those lost to the sea have found a more comfortable home, or the knowledge of a friendly environment — is perhaps the most unifying trait of all variations on this type of lore. Desire was the driving force behind both attempts at the North-West Passage and, broadly speaking, the cause of most kinds of exploration, in both its positive and negative sense. Sometimes there is a progression from material, with an interest in resources and little else, to nationalistic, with possession of land in the balance, to intellectual, as the interest arises in knowing more about the land itself. Sometimes these motivations are in conflict. In the case of vanishing islands in the North Atlantic, all three have, at various times, been apparent and at work. The seventeenth century in the British Isles appears to have been an interesting time and place for the merging of new rational-empirical ideas and still-strong folklore. It was during this century, according to T. J. Westropp, that a sea captain made a claim of ownership for an island whose existence was yet uncertain, and which was later disproved.53 He was not the only one. Another eager explorer claimed that he ‘had discovered an island in the northern regions’ and laid claim to it, though he was not quite sure where it was. Though later presumed to be Prince Edward Island by scholars, this discovery was tellingly referred to as St Brendan’s Isle.54 Lest we think claims of ownership to lost islands too ridiculous, remember that Canada considered Sir John Franklin’s lost ships a national historic site well before the finding of the Erebus in 2014 and the Terror in 2016. Possession in theory appears to have been good enough.

52 McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place, p. 253. 53 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 184. 54 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 251.

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Similarly, representation on maps is not exactly synonymous with literal belief, but rather experience. The case of Hy-Brasil is a combination of the two kinds, as demonstrated in the naming of Brazil Rock. There was also a patriotic, or at least a possessive, element to these islands, too. On the matter of Hy-Brasil, some versions of the legend claimed that ‘none but a Celt could find it’.55 Belonging, even in the most tenuous sense, to one’s own group, was recognized as being important. As Arctic exploration and the search for the elusive North-West Passage became ever more associated with personal and national glory, it took on more and more overtones of legend. Perhaps, simultaneously, the legends grew more and more aligned with ideas of national pride. In much of the folklore, there is the desire to claim, from the unknown, an amount of control or ownership. This is reflected in many tales of supernatural islands, including that of Eynhallow, in Orkney. Formerly, this was said to be Hilda-Land, the abode of the Fin-Folk, about whom many explanations have been offered, none wholly satisfactory. The story of its reclamation is used to explain the name Eynhallow; from ‘Hyn-hallow’, it means ‘last island to be made holy’.56 Like Tory Island, then, there are explicitly Christian connections, though the rituals described are not religious in form. The Eynhallow story is an origin tale in the sense that it is used to explain the presence of an island, but it does not describe the island’s formation, only its change of hands. It is at once a tangible, physical, place, and a legend, won through strenuous effort and knowledge. The story incorporates a good deal more of sea-lore and the preoccupations of seaside communities, as well. There seems to be some significance in walking, kneeling, or doing anything ‘below flood-mark’. It is curious as well that there is advice taken from one lost, though now in the form of mysterious singing from beneath the sea, one being avenged advising one avenging. Frustratingly, it seems incomplete, making the meaning of certain elements obscure. Once again the knowledge that one must not take one’s eyes off the island is employed.57 Salt, too, is used to disband illusory obstacles, perhaps with more significance since its value was greater at a time when people did not always have access to it, and used seawater instead.58 ‘A Hether Blether Story’, from R. Menzies Ferguson’s 1884 account Rambles in the Far North, includes a few more titbits of note, while echoing familiar themes — the husband is a selkie, rather than a Fin Man, and once again, instructions are not followed as closely as the fair folk require. It retells a curious feature of sea-lore, often mentioned in connection with the Finns or the Sámi. A ball thrown into the sea brings a fair wind, but only when thrown at the right time, in the right place.59 The Icelandic folk tale ‘The Red-Headed Whale’, too, concerns an island castaway

55 Morison, The European Discovery of America, p. 103. 56 Muir, The Mermaid Bride and Other Orkney Folk Tales, p. 136. 57 See Marwick and Robertson, An Orkney Anthology. 58 See Marwick, The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland. 59 Muir, The Mermaid Bride and Other Orkney Folk Tales, Appendix A; Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend, p. 503.

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saved from otherwise certain death by the faeries.60 Its blending of tales is somewhat mystifying, and for a folk tale, it is long and complex, but its action truly begins with the protagonist deserted to certain death on an island. Though the island itself is not explicitly supernatural in nature, it is faerie folk who rescue the castaway. It becomes, in the second part, an explanatory Christian story giving the origin of a particular altar-cloth, as well as a monstrous whale — an odd combination, indeed. Lands of plenty, featuring in most folklore around the world, can be conceived of in terms of good living, or of wealth transportable. Although often associated with worlds of the dead, or with an afterlife of some kind, they were also surprisingly tangible to the living. With much of the body of vanishing island lore, the theme that appears to be on people’s minds is good living. The story of Svínoy, in the Faroe Islands, said to have been reclaimed for the mortal world by a sow carrying a metal key, combines a traditionally Celtic symbol with the notion of endless food supplies, an island of pigs.61 It also repeats the theme of metal as an agent of power against enchantment or illusion. Pigs, being a rarity in the Faroe Islands as well as Iceland, provided an allure for the islanders; the implication in the name is that it was one of the only islands where pigs were or could be kept.62 Sometimes the human visitor, though returning to the ordinary world, was changed by their experience. In an episode described in the Eyrbyggja saga, the lost sailors discover the fate of another man, long since lost to all their knowledge, on an unknown coast near Ireland.63 It has some resemblance to a tale of an enchanted island, with islands as at once sanctuary and foreign perilous lands, except that the man in question was able to grow old. His ability to leave the island is not referenced, as he is held in high honour by its people, with no apparent interest in returning home.64 And Beag-Árainn endowed visitors with gifts — in this case medicine, according to one Morogh O’Ley, in 1668, who claimed to have returned from a journey there.65 If personal danger was required to make such a journey, there was also a sense of reward. If it is a case of exchange, of danger earning a reward, then the reward must have been proportionally great, as the danger was often deadly. In northern icy seas, Captain Hurd’s theory may have held true, but the desire to discover the tangible and tantalizing lands that lay behind the fantastical stories may have been spurred by increased desperation. What islands of this nature had to offer was glory, generally; also the promise of wealth, translating the remote glamour of enchanted islands into practical worldly terms. Yet the sense of give and take was ever present. This returns the discussion to the theme of peril, in which it seems impossible for one to make landfall under ordinary circumstances. Some form of risk, or 60 Simpson, Icelandic Folktales and Legends, pp. 40–42. 61 Nansen, In Northern Mists; Kvideland and Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend; Maraschi, ‘Food in Mythology’. 62 Aðalheiður Gúðmundsdóttir, personal communication. 63 Eyrbyggja saga, chap. 69. 64 Mac Mathúna, ‘Hvítramannaland Revisited’. 65 Ó hÓgaín, ‘The Mystical Island in Irish Folklore’, p. 249; Stommel, Lost Islands, p. 81.

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offered vulnerability, is required. The perilous element is what could be termed the spiritual, or genuinely otherworldly, aspect of islands. It is also the most closely tied with the classic exploration tale, featuring achievement of the impossible by way of extreme personal sacrifice. Terming it impossible, attempting it anyway, accepting the necessary risk: these have hovered around the world of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century exploration with remarkable persistence. Fortified by Christian principle against the moral and physical perils of the Arctic, the searchers would inevitably, it was thought, finish by attaining the longed-for aim. If this was the attractive side of the picture, the dark side was the blind unwillingness on the part of the spectators to admit to flaws in their heroes, and on the part of several explorers, the willingness to ignore Indigenous accounts that might have helped resolve various questions, but contradicted the desired narrative, including the refusal of nineteenth-century England to acknowledge cannibalism on the Franklin expedition.66 Even when viewed with ironic scepticism, these journeys have been possessed of an irresistible attraction. No feat of exploration has been so surrounded by these images as the North-West Passage. It not only possesses the sense of risk, but also the directions most appealing to the vanishing island narrative — the remove of the far west, and the peril of the north, coupled with the counterbalancing force of promised riches. Thus once more the thread of the story circles back to distance, to the element of the unknown in these places as their defining trait. Far more common than stories such as Eynhallow are those of islands lost permanently, or the failure on the human visitors’ part to anchor them in our world. In character, they could be read as defeatist, but also as preserving in recognizable form the ability to face the blank spaces on the map. Far from denying them, stories of flyaway, vanishing, and phantom islands in the North Atlantic have defined those spaces in terms most suited to their nature — literal or legendary.

Conclusion The character of vanishing islands has an evident and mutual influence on exploration narratives, as they both incorporate and draw upon the same fears and desires. Stating that the North-West Passage and stories told around it should be classed with vanishing island lore is too simple, but in viewing the similarities between them and speculating on where these might have originated, we may better understand an environment that belongs to the mind as much as to the map. The shift from west to north as the direction of focus mirrors the history of exploration, but the stories continued to bear certain shared salient traits: namely, the association with repeated and agonizing failure, and the way it reflected the preoccupations of those on land. From this, the phrase ‘land meets sea, and the sea triumphs’ seems an accurate 66 See McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place, p. 225; McGoogan, Fatal Passage and Lady Franklin’s Revenge.

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depiction of an endlessly fascinating relationship — the sea as the predominant power on the landscape and on the mind.67 Far from being an escape of the mind, they are representative of people’s concerns. It is easy to explain the folklore as originating in physical circumstances, as a warning, or a main source of interaction between people and the world. Another reading of them might show the picture as slightly more complex, with the presence of intermediaries existing in both worlds adding colour to the story. The lessons, if we can term them that, in the lore of mystical islands, are not only about respecting nature and its strength — though that is a part of it — they are also about respecting luck or chance, and accepting risk. Part of it, however, is also about testing those boundaries, and it is here that the exploration history plays its largest role, in following the same narratives. There are familiar patterns in the quest for glory, the search for the unknown, and, finally, the failure to discover or retrieve one crucial tantalizing mystery. If the influence of lost island lore is felt in the framing of exploration stories, perhaps the influence of exploration narratives on island tales should be considered as equally powerful. In the cases of Hy-Brasil and Eynhallow, for example, they can take new shape to suit the interests of those taking credit for their discovery; for others such as Buss, they can themselves change the behaviour of others passing by the same place, by suggesting what might be seen there. Exploration is given life by story, and so the North-West Passage is only the most recent example of a place whose story began in legendary images, and took on the role played in folklore by mysterious islands. In its situation between land and sea, history and legend, glory and enchantment, it has reflected the concerns of its time, as well as outsiders’ views of its place in the north. It would be interesting, in acknowledging the complexity and dynamism inherent in all folklore, to conduct a study on the current form these legends take, if and how they are retold. I have here surveyed some of the written works on the subject, but would be intrigued by the prospect of pursuing the subject further. To speak with, or listen to, those familiar with the places these tales involve, would be a great privilege and would illuminate their meaning. Yet the remarkable thing is how many ‘found’ islands exist alongside the lost ones. These mirror and distort the image of the unreachable, elusive island, by presenting a tangible counterpart. It is relevant that this kind of landscape served in part as a means of coping with uncertainty, a need that we have not lost. The north is still often used to represent, or is represented to southerners as, adventure and the unknowable. The traits of distance, danger, and desire are still reflected in the modern mentality, despite the greater factual knowledge of the literal world. Echoing the paradox seen in the intimate knowledge of unreachable islands, the increase in certain areas of knowledge, as commendable as it is, has not made us more sure of our place in the world, nor our future in it, and the stories of drowned lands are ringing truer than ever. In terms of what we perceive, and what we imagine, of the natural world, instability is an increasing factor, and we 67 Williams, ‘Maritime Referents in Irish Proverbs’, p. 366.

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still look for our place in the story today as much as in these stories of disappearing islands and elusive passages in the northern seas. Lost Islands Pull, gentle current, swelling tide, and cast Your gleam across the sand, in rivulets Of silver, where the moon’s beam flits and frets Between night-clouds — linger until the last Light-buoy’s extinguished, and the foghorn’s blast Melts in a pearly morning — I’ve no debts To time nor place, but for the strange duets Of wave and wind. If fortune holds me fast To shore — yet have I liberty to trace Its edge — with green-glow steps, swept by the surge Towards phantom ships, where mirrored footsteps pace The deck in time with mine, their watches keep In wonder, as new continents emerge — Whilst in their sea-cold shroud, lost islands sleep. Karin Murray-Bergquist

Works Cited Primary Sources Eyrbyggja saga [accessed 9 May 2019] Secondary Works Colony of Avalon Foundation (2016) [accessed 9 May 2019] Freitag, Barbara, Hy Brasil: The Metamorphosis of an Island, from Cartographic Error to Celtic Elysium (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013) Heide, Eldar, ‘Holy Islands and the Otherworld: Places beyond Water’, in Isolated Islands in Medieval Nature, Culture, and Mind (Bergen: Central European University, 2011), pp. 57–80 Inwards, Richard, Weather Lore: A Collection of Proverbs, Sayings and Rules concerning the Weather (London: Paternoster Row, 1898) Kvideland, Reimund, and Henning K., Sehmsdorf, Scandinavian Folk Belief and Legend (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) Larrington, Carolyne, The Land of the Green Man (London: Tauris, 2015) Lyons, Mathew, Impossible Journeys (London: Cadogan, 2005)

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Lysaght, Patricia, ‘The Hunt that Came over the Sea: Narratives of a Maritime “Wild Hunt”’, in Islanders and Water Dwellers, ed. by Patricia Lysaght, Séamas Ó Catháin, and Dáithí Ó hÓgáin (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999), pp. 133–48 Mac Cárhaigh, Crístóir, ‘An Bád Sí: Phantom Boat Legends in Irish Folk Tradition’, in Islanders and Water Dwellers, ed. by Patricia Lysaght, Séamas Ó Catháin, and Dáithí Ó hÓgáin (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999), pp. 165–76 Mac Mathúna, Séamus, ‘Hvítramannaland Revisited’, in Islanders and Water Dwellers, ed. by Patricia Lysaght, Séamas Ó Catháin, and Dáithí Ó hÓgáin (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999), pp. 177–87 Maraschi, Andrea, ‘Food in Mythology’. In-class lecture, 9 October 2016, University of Iceland, Reykjavík. Course: Food in the Middle Ages: Facts and Mentalities Marwick, Ernest, An Orkney Anthology, ed. by John D. M. Robertson (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1991) ———, The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2000) McGhee, Robert, The Last Imaginary Place (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) McGoogan, Ken, Fatal Passage: The Untold Story of John Rae, the Arctic Explorer Who Discovered the Fate of Franklin (Toronto: Harper Perennial Canada, 2001) ———, Lady Franklin’s Revenge: A True Story of Ambition, Obsession and the Remaking of Arctic History (London: Bantam, 2006) Morison, Samuel Eliot, The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) Muir, Tom, The Mermaid Bride and Other Orkney Folk Tales (Kirkwall: The Orcadian, 1998) Nansen, Fritjof, In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times (New York: Frederick Stokes, 1911) Norako, Leila K., ‘Avalon’, The Camelot Project, University of Rochester [accessed 10 May 2019] Ó hÓgaín, Dáithi, ‘The Mystical Island in Irish Folklore’, in Islanders and Water Dwellers, ed. by Patricia Lysaght, Séamas Ó Catháin, and Dáithí Ó hÓgáin (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999), pp. 247–60 Simpson, Jacqueline, Icelandic Folktales and Legends (Stroud: Tempus, 1972) ———, Scandinavian Folktales (London: Penguin, 1988) Simpson, Jacqueline, and Jennifer Westwood, The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends from Spring-Heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys (London: Penguin, 2005) Stommel, Henry M., Lost Islands: The Story of Islands that Have Vanished from Nautical Charts (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1984) Thomson, David (with introduction by Seamus Heaney), The People of the Sea (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1954) Thompson, Stith, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955–58) [accessed 9 May 2019] Williams, Fionnuala, ‘Maritime Referents in Irish Proverbs’, in Islanders and Water Dwellers, ed. by Patricia Lysaght, Séamas Ó Catháin, and Dáithí Ó hÓgáin (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999), pp. 359–69

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Ragnhild Ljosland

Maeshowe, Orkahaugr The Names of Orkney’s Great Burial Mound as Nodes in a Heteroglossic Web of Meaning-Making

Introduction Situated on a central thoroughfare on the Orkney Mainland, and in the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Area, is the c. five-thousand-year-old burial mound now known by the name of Maeshowe. In the Orkneyinga Saga, however, and in a runic inscription in the mound itself, the mound has another name: Orkahaugr, or Orkhaugr. The aim of this article is to discuss these names focusing on reception and interpretation. I will investigate which stories have been told about these names from the Middle Ages to the present, and what these stories can tell us regarding how the mound was understood by those who heard and told them: its exterior and, perhaps more importantly, its interior, contents, and meaning. The focus is not primarily what the names Maeshowe and Orkahaugr really mean, or in other words what they originally meant in the minds of those who coined them. As with any word, the ‘meaning’ of a place name is in part determined by the listeners: those who hear the name and make their own interpretation and in turn use it themselves. A word is always addressed to someone, and anticipates this someone’s response. According to Bakhtin,1 ‘language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated — overpopulated — with the intentions of others’. Therefore, Bakhtin says, a word is ‘half someone else’s’. Each speaker ‘appropriates’ the word, using it on their own terms. But this event is only one in a constantly developing chain, or perhaps web, of similar events, leading to the word’s embedding in an ongoing cultural meaning-making process. Words are therefore dialogic, and inseparable from the community, history, and place of those who use and have used them. Place names, I assert, form part of the dialogism, or ongoing shared discourse, relating to the place they name. The name is but one strand of the ever-changing web of meaning-making that is spun by people and between people responding to each other over centuries 1 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 293–94. Ragnhild Ljosland, University of the Highlands and Islands, [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 193–210 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120793

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or millennia. Therefore, the received meaning of a name can be different to different groups of people, separated by time, geography, or social networks, as popular understandings of names change through history. It is my intention here to explore the dialogical webs of meaning-making in which the names Maeshowe and Orkahaugr/Orkhaugr are embedded, focusing on the Victorian period to the present in the case of Maeshowe, and on the medieval period in the case of Orkahaugr/Orkhaugr. Both can tell us much about the visualization of the mound and the meaning ascribed to the structure, as dialogically developed by different communities, as well as about a general visualization of ‘northernness’ and ‘vikingness’ to which it is connected.

Maeshowe The etymology of the name Maeshowe has not yet been fully explained. Its ending, howe, seems unproblematic, deriving from Old Norse haugr, mound.2 Maes, however, remains enigmatic. Orkney’s foremost authority on place names, Hugh Marwick, admits that Maes is a ‘very puzzling word’.3 However, he observes parallels from elsewhere in Orkney: Masshowe mound in the parish of Holm, he says, is pronounced ‘mezhou’ similar to the famous Neolithic chambered tomb.4 A local folk etymology, which Marwick does not mention but which I have had recounted to me, claims that the mound stands in association with a former church and a path called the Mass Gate where people would walk to Mass. Another example cited by Marwick5 is Maizer in the isle of Sanday, which he derives from a plural form Maes-haugar; similarly Mount Maisery: a seashore mound in Sanday. Finally, Marwick6 mentions a mound called Howamae in North Ronaldsay. Other place names containing the element Maes, despite not being mounds, are, according to Marwick:7 Maeslee: a beach in Shapinsay; Maestaing in Gairsay; Maesquoy: a field in Harray, which may be the same as the one Charles Tait8 refers to as being c. 5 km from Maeshowe, located at HY311166; Maesdale: a field in Burray; and Maeswell: a shoal off North Ronaldsay.9 Marwick10 does not reach a firm conclusion on how to interpret the Maes element. He tentatively suggests a Celtic word meaning ‘field’ or ‘plain’, reflected in Welsh ma or maes and Gaelic magh, and cites Jakob Jakobsen who thought that it had extended its meaning to mounds or small hills also. However, Jakobsen’s reason for thinking so, according to Marwick, was due to its evident use as such in Orkney, which makes

2 Heggstad, Gamalnorsk ordbok, p. 258. 3 Marwick, ‘Celtic Place-Names in Orkney’, p. 260. 4 Marwick, ‘Celtic Place-Names in Orkney’, p. 260. 5 Marwick, ‘Celtic Place-Names in Orkney’, p. 260. 6 Marwick, ‘Celtic Place-Names in Orkney’, p. 260. 7 Marwick, ‘Celtic Place-Names in Orkney’, p. 260. 8 Tait, ‘Maeshowe on the Internet’, np. 9 Marwick, ‘Celtic Place-Names in Orkney’, p. 260. 10 Marwick, ‘Celtic Place-Names in Orkney’.

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it a circular argument. Marwick gives no reference, but one must assume he means to refer to Jakobsen’s The Place-Names of Shetland11 or personal communication. Marwick rightly regards Jakobsen’s explanation as ‘most improbable’ and instead drafts in Gaelic màs and Old Irish máss meaning a ‘buttock’. Marwick’s only firm conclusion is that the element Maes is not Norse. This leaves us with the oddity of a compound name where the generic is Norse, and the specific is not. While there is of course a parallel in the archipelago name, Orkneyjar (see below), it is still uncommon. In contrast to Marwick’s view stands an interpretation of the name by the Norwegian place name scholar Berit Sandnes.12 She suggests that the specific, Maes, is indeed Norse, and that it derives from an Old Norse word mað meaning a meadow, especially on low lying ground near water.13 It is attested in Old East Norse and other Germanic languages, and it also, of course, figures in the English word meadow itself, where it derives from the same root. If this derivation is correct, the Old Norse form of Maeshowe, provided the word was used in Old West Norse as well, would be *Maðshaugr: a mound in a meadow. Now, let us tune in on the dialogues of the nineteenth century. In 1861, Maeshowe was excavated by the gentleman antiquarian James Farrer14 and team, leading to an intensification in discussion of the name, and a geographical broadening of participants. This dialogue, with its epicentre in the nineteenth century, is still being joined by new voices today. The nineteenth century reception and interpretation of Maeshowe, both as a name and as a place, rely on the general contemporary reception of the Norse past, where a ‘Viking’ (in various spellings) may be seen as variously barbarian, pagan, noble, brave, and simultaneously contrasting and resonating with British Victorian virtues.15 In archaeology enthusiastic provincial antiquarians began to dig up and dust off Britain’s Viking past, with interpretative creativity sometimes compensating for the modest return on the spadework invested. Neglected cairns were opened, fragmented crosses reassembled, and ancient jewellery pored over. Eager eyes spotted Odinic spears and Thunoric hammers in improbable locations. Runic inscriptions yielded up or had wrenched out of them long-hidden or non-existent secrets; and the long-neglected Viking-age voices of local dialect and place-names were heeded again.16 Among Wawn’s primary sources here are Farrer’s excavation at Maeshowe, and Stephens’s interpretation of the Maeshowe runes.17 In an intellectual climate where the figure of the Viking was the romanticized other against which Victorian Britain could compare itself, expectations of the mound were naturally created, before its 11 Jakobsen, The Place-Names of Shetland. 12 Sandnes, ‘Skånske stedsnavn’. 13 Svenska Akademiens Ordbok 1942 entry for mad. 14 Farrer, Maes-Howe. 15 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians. 16 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, p. 5. 17 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, p. 236.

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excavation and following the discovery of the runic inscriptions inside.18 The first inscription to be reported was the one now known as Or Barnes 9: ‘Ingibjorg the fair widow. Many a woman has come stooping in here. A great show-off. Erlingr’.19 Its discovery was reported in The Orkney Herald on the 23 July 1861. Below the report, in a letter to the editor dated 20 July, Farrer himself speculates that the name Ingibjorg may refer to the wife of Earl Thorfinn the Mighty, who died in 1064.20 As part of an ongoing discussion of the age and purpose of the mound, Farrer raises the suggestion that the mound may have been built or used by a woman for her own purpose, in this case by Ingibjorg: ‘Is this ancient mausoleum a tribute to the memory of her deceased lord? Perhaps the runes when deciphered may afford information on this subject’.21 As we shall see, the theme of a special female connection with Maeshowe soon developed further. The next year, Farrer published interpretations of all the Maeshowe runic inscriptions, which he had obtained from professors George Stephens, Carl Christian Rafn, and Peter Andreas Munch.22 In this publication, the theme of women — either beautiful, in distress, or as sorceresses — is developed. ‘Ingibiorgh probably resided here for safety’ Stephens suggests here.23 With reference to another inscription, Or Barnes 23, Munch suggests that Maeshowe ‘was supposed to have been originally erected for a mighty woman called Lodbrok’,24 while Rafn goes further and adds the purpose of sorcery: ‘This barrow was formerly a sorcery hall, erected for Lodbrok’.25 Farrer himself, in the footnotes to the volume, highlights the role of storytelling in passing down and shaping interpretation of the site: ‘a popular tale preserved to us in Runes, […] [tells] us that this barrow was the sorcery platform erected of old for the use of Lodbrok, and was probably also a temple and place of worship’.26 In a similar, but yet more sinister vein, Carr27 suggested in the Proceedings of the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland that the mound may have contained a ‘Mirk-Quene’ who ‘hath here decreed the depressed to become greatly exalted’. Regarding the place name, however, Carr is of the opinion that Maes is Celtic, perhaps the ‘CymroBritish’ word ‘Maes, a plain’ or preferably the Irish mais meaning ‘massa acervus’,28 i.e. a lump or heap.29 However, at about the same time, an alternative interpretation of the name Maeshowe emerged: ‘Maiden’s Mound’. It does not occur in Farrer’s 1862 book, but is 18 Johnston, ‘Runic Charm’. 19 Barnes, The Runic Inscriptions of Maeshowe, pp. 95–102. 20 The Orkney Herald, 23 July 1861, p. 2. 21 Orkney Herald, 23 July 1861, p. 2, later reprinted in the Orcadian 24 July 1861 and the Dundee Courier 7 August 1861. 22 Farrer, Maes-Howe. 23 Farrer, Maes-Howe, p. 29. 24 Farrer, Maes-Howe, p. 36. 25 Farrer, Maes-Howe, p. 37. 26 Farrer, Maes-Howe, p. 21 n. 2. 27 Carr, ‘Observations’, p. 74. 28 Carr, ‘Observations’, p. 70. 29 The Highland Society of Scotland, Dictionarium scoto-celticum, p. 615.

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raised in the dialogue following its publication. The Orkney Herald, on 16 September 1862, informs its readers that a new and alternative translation of the Maeshowe runic inscriptions is in progress ‘by a learned Icelandic scholar in one of our Universities’. The report concludes: ‘Tradition has been faithful in preserving the name of the place. “Mey’s Howe” signifies Maiden’s Mound’.30 The next issue31 follows up by further informing readers that ‘works on Maeshowe are beginning to be promised in abundance. In addition to the one we mentioned last week, we understand that another book on the interesting antiquities of the “Maiden’s Mound” is in preparation by a Leith gentleman, and will speedily be issued’. The ‘learned Icelandic scholar’ may be the Rev. T. Barclay, principal of the University of Glasgow, who in his 1863 publication32 argued strongly for the ‘Maiden’s Mound’ theory, giving its etymology as ‘Islandic MEY, MAY, MÆY, virgo, a maid; and HAUGR, Scotch HOW, tumulus, a sepulchral mound. MEY, a maid, is also Scotch’.33 It may have been Barclay who first suggested the ‘Maiden’s Mound’ interpretation to The Orkney Herald. He also makes the connection between the name and the runic inscriptions explicit: ‘This inscription, which informs us that the chambers were erected by a lady, explains the name of the structure and shows that tradition has been faithful in handing it down long after it had ceased to be understood’.34 Barclay does not himself realize that he is taking part in a distinctly Victorian dialogue and meaning-making process, where fair maidens and sorceresses fit into the emerging discourse of the ‘Old North’. The ‘Leith gentleman’ is most likely J. M. Mitchell, who in 1863 also joined the polyphony and released a book35 on Maeshowe where he interpreted the name thus: It has been said that it is probably derived from the Icelandic word, ‘Mey’, Virgin; and it may have been in the heathen age a place dedicated to the three ‘Meyer’, or prophetesses, mentioned in the Edda, who predicted the fate of man before moving on to discuss alternative interpretations. The ‘Maiden’s Mound’ interpretation quickly became popular, and was perpetuated in other publications reaching a more general public readership. One was Daniel Gorrie’s 1868 Summers and Winters in the Orkneys36 which tells its readers: Principal Barclay, it must be confessed, has excelled the other translators [of the runic inscriptions of Maeshowe] in giving greater intelligibility to the engravings. The last of the above-quoted inscriptions, he thinks, satisfactorily explains the name of the structure, and shows that the tradition has been faithful in handing it down long after it had ceased to be understood. Mey or Mæy is the Icelandic

30 The Orkney Herald, 16 September 1862, p. 3. 31 The Orkney Herald, 23 September 1862, p. 3. 32 Barclay, ‘Explanation’. 33 Barclay, ‘Explanation’, p. 17. 34 Barclay, ‘Explanation’, p. 17. 35 Mitchell, Mesehowe, p. 33. 36 Gorrie, Summers and Winters, p. 129.

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word for ‘maid’, and haugr […] is the Icelandic for ‘mound’. The Maiden’s Mound is thus the real meaning of the name Maeshowe. Gorrie was also the editor of The Orkney Herald and may have contributed to this newspaper’s endorsement of the interpretation. Other newspapers soon joined in: the London-based The Morning Post, on 21 July 1868, mentions ‘Maes-howe, or the Maiden’s Mound’ in a book review of Gorrie’s Summers and Winters. The same year, The Alloa Advertiser on 28 December assures its readers that there is ‘not a more puzzling piece of antiquities than the Maeshow in the three kingdoms’, and styles it as a ‘Chamber of Mystery’ before praising Barclay’s interpretation of the runic inscriptions and quoting his etymology for the name, itself using the term ‘maiden mound’. The Glasgow Herald, on 3 August 1887, glosses ‘Maeshow or Maiden’s Mound’; The Scotsman, on 10 June 1889, speaks of ‘the mysterious Maeshowe, or Maidens’ Mound’. By 7 September 1909, ‘Maeshowe, or the Maiden’s Mound’, is, according to The Aberdeen Daily Journal, among the ‘well-known antiquarian features of Orkney which must be more or less familiar’. The ideas of ‘mystery’ and ‘female’ in connection with Maeshowe neatly fitted the already existing interpretation of two nearby circles of standing stones, the Ring of Brodgar and Stones of Stenness, as the temples of the sun and moon respectively: Brodgar being visible as a large full circle, while the smaller Stenness is a half circle like a half moon. This idea had been around at least since the late seventeenth century, as James Wallace writes of it in 1693, and George Low in 1774. These older sources were also, significantly, made available in printed editions in 187937 (Low) and 188338 (Wallace). Stenness being closer to Maeshowe, its association with the moon fitted perfectly with Maeshowe’s developing identity as the location of some female mystery. A local character at the time was the storyteller from Yesnaby, George Marwick (1836–1912). His collected works39 call upon a conglomerate of obscure references to Egyptian mythology, Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek, in order to explain accounts of local Orkney tradition, which he may or may not relay accurately. Marwick’s explanation of the name Maeshowe is ‘the sun-worshippers’ place of confinement’40 and he tells the following story: I remember this old man two or three times speaking about ‘Mae-howe’ and what he had heard his grandfather say about it. It was something to the following effect: The married women that were able in the vicinity had to go with a ‘caisy’ full of ashes and earth every full moon after sunset and deposit their burden either on the top or sides of this knowe to keep in the bad people inside, and to make it always stronger. And to show their detestation of the place, or the ‘bad folk’ within, they had to leave their excrement on the place.41

37 Low, A Tour through the Islands of Orkney and Schetland. 38 Wallace, A Description of the Isles of Orkney. 39 Marwick, George Marwick: The Collected Works of Yesnaby’s Master Storyteller. 40 Marwick, George Marwick: The Collected Works of Yesnaby’s Master Storyteller, p. 53. 41 Marwick, George Marwick: The Collected Works of Yesnaby’s Master Storyteller, p. 55.

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The twentieth-century folklorist Ernest Marwick (1915–77) perpetuates42 this story, but changes the protagonists to ‘young girls’ in accordance with the ‘Maiden’s Mound’ theory: ‘at one time every young girl within a mile of Maeshowe had to take a kaesy [basket] of ashes to the top of the mound each full moon, empty it there and urinate on the ashes’.43 Whether or not there was ever really such a custom, for whatever purpose it may have had, it is nonetheless interesting that the story becomes entangled in the wider discourse on Maeshowe as the ‘Maiden’s Mound’. The popular Orkney poet and novelist George Mackay Brown (1921–96) also touches on the theme in several of his works, among them An Orkney Tapestry, where he describes Maeshowe as a burial chamber for ‘chiefs and high-born maidens’ and as a ‘petrified womb’ which brings promise of ‘resurrection and the spring-time’.44 Today, the dialogue about the ‘Maiden’s Mound’ continues online. In the online Frontiers Magazine,45 Charles Tait, who has also written a popular guidebook to Orkney, writes: The name Maeshowe may derive from O[ld] N[orse] Maers-howe, Maiden’s Mound. There is a persistent tradition that Maeshowe was a meeting place for young lovers. Another tale says that ‘at one time young girls would take some ashes to the top of the mound at full moon and urinate on them’. The age and veracity of these stories are open to the reader to decide. The Wikipedia entry for Maeshowe adds another strand to the dialogue, by suggesting that ‘the female regent Mae/May was seen as the principal head of the famous festival held by the adult females after the Spring equinox, today’s “Easter”. Within this context the name Maes Howe seem to reflect May’s Temple’.46 The Wikipedia author’s interpretation here shows a clear line of descent from the Victorian dialogue on fair widows, sorceresses, female mystery, temple of the moon, and the ‘Maiden’s Mound’. While these interpretations may be far removed from the intended meaning of those who in the distant past coined the name Maeshowe, such stories help people make their own sense of a place. People engage in meaning-making by sharing stories, orally, in print, and today often online. Story-sharing and the emerging meanings lead people to engage with the place, and interact with it. Today, people interact with Maeshowe for example by visiting it, uploading photos, and performing actions guided by their meaning-making, for example if they choose to visit Maeshowe in spring after reading George Mackay Brown or the Wikipedia entry. Stories are therefore important responses to places even when the stories are far removed from the intended original meaning of the place name — perhaps even more so when the original meaning of the name has been lost to us. In the remainder of this 42 Thank you to Tom Muir, who directed me to George Marwick as Ernest Marwick’s unacknowledged source. 43 Marwick, An Orkney Anthology. 44 Brown, An Orkney Tapestry, p. 139. 45 Tait, ‘Maeshowe on the Internet’. 46 Wikipedia, ‘Maeshowe’.

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article, I will show that a parallel argument can be made for the name Orkahaugr, one interpretation of which may have led a group of people in the twelfth century to interact with the mound in a particular way: they broke in.

Orkahaugr or Orkhaugr As with the name Maeshowe, the original meaning of the name Orkhaugr or Orkahaugr evades us today. And likewise, this name also has an exciting reception history which can give us insight into how people at specific times in the past have understood and engaged with the mound. We may begin by observing that there are two forms of this name. Does Orkhaugr from the runic inscription invoke the same meaning or reception as Orkahaugr from Orkneyinga saga, as two variants of essentially the same name? Or are they more readily understood as two similar names invoking separate meanings? And which meanings do they convey; how have they been interpreted? Which dialogues are they part of? The variant Orkahaugr is found in the Orkneyinga saga, chapter 93, in an episode where Earl Haraldr Maddaðarson and a group of people affiliated with him take shelter in the mound during a sudden blizzard. Haralldr iarl byriaþ ferþ sina at iolum ut i Orcneyiar; hann hafþi IIII skip ok tiu tigu manna. Hann la II netr viþ Grimsey. Þeir lendu i Hafnarvagi i Hrossey; þeir gengu þaþan inn XIII dag iola i Fiaurþ. Þeir varo i Orkahaugi [footnote: Skrevet Orkahugi] meþan el dro a, ok œrþuz þar II men fyrir þeim; ok var þeim þat farartalmi mikill. Þa var af not, er þeir komu i Fiaurþ.47 (Earl Harald began his journey at Christmas out to Orkney. He had 4 ships and 100 men. He lay two nights by Graemsay. They landed in Hamnavoe [Stromness] on the Orkney Mainland, and they went from there on the 13th day of Christmas towards Firth. They were in Orkahaugr [footnote: written Orkahugi] while there was a blizzard, and two men went crazy for them, which slowed their journey a lot. It was night, when they came to Firth). Saga readers never get to hear who first opened the mound, which seems to be already accessible when Haraldr and his men turn up. The editor, Finnbogi Guðmundsson, remarks in a footnote that the manuscript form of the name is ‘Orkahugi’, rather than ‘Orkahaugi’, but it is the first ‘a’ that concerns us here, and it is clear enough. The variant Orkhaugr appears in a runic inscription within Maeshowe’s central chamber (Or Barnes 24 M), and here we do hear who the mound-breakers were:48

47 Orkneyinga saga, ed. by Finnbogi Guðmundsson, pp. 272–73. 48 Barnes, The Runic Inscriptions of Maeshowe, p. 189.

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§ A iorsalafarar brutu orkôuh · lif mtsæilia i͡arls § B ræist § A Jórsalafarar brutu Orkhaug. Hlíf, matselja jarls, § B reist. (§ A Jerusalem-travellers broke Orkhaugr. Hlíf, the earl’s housekeeper, § B carved). I will first discuss the element Ork, common to both, before moving on to the compound forms Orkhaugr and Orkahaugr, and whether these variant forms are likely to convey different meanings or not. What immediately springs to mind, of course, is that the Ork element echoes the specific in the name of the archipelago, Orkney (Old Norse: Orkneyjar). Ork in Orkneyjar predates the Norse settlement of the islands, and is attested in early Irish as Innsi Orc, ‘Boar (people) Isle’.49 There are also several Roman attestations of the Ork element (although some copy each other), for example Diodorus Siculus50 who wrote in the middle of the first century bc: ‘Britain is triangular in shape, […] and the last [corner], writers tell us, extends out into the open sea and is named Orca’. In this source, the tip of Caithness bears the Ork name, but the islands also came to be named as such long before the Vikings settled there. The first written source of the archipelago name is in Latin form, Orcades, by the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela in the first century ad.51 Was the specific element, Ork, conveyed to the conquering Norse population in the early ninth century by the local Pictish population of the islands? Or did the Norse when they first arrived already know the ancient name of the islands, due to contact with other European peoples and through the seafaring culture? If so, we cannot be sure of what the local Picts living in Orkney called the islands or themselves. However, given the pre-Viking Age sources for the name, it is fairly reasonable to assume that the Pictish name, although unrecorded, would also have contained the Ork element.52 In the Old Norse name Orkneyjar, the Celtic/Pictish Orc has been phonologically adapted to resemble the similar sounding Old Norse word orkn (also: erkn, ørkn), which means ‘grey seal’, Halichoerus gryphus.53 ‘Seal islands’ is of course a very fitting name for Orkney, but it is not an independent name given to the islands by the Old Norse-speaking population based on the observation that there are many seals along its shores. It is merely a folk-etymology to the adapted older name. I find it reasonably likely that the incoming Norse population in one way or another associated the Ork specific with the existing Pictish population of the islands. 49 Gammeltoft, ‘Shetland and Orkney Island-Names’, pp. 19, 21. 50 Diodorus, The Library of History of Diodorus Siculus, trans. by Oldfather, v.21. 51 Nansen, In Northern Mists, pp. 89–90. 52 Gammeltoft, ‘Shetland and Orkney Islands Names’, p. 21. 53 Heggstad, Gamalnorsk ordbok, p. 131.

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Regardless of whether the Picts used it themselves, the Norse would have thought of the islanders as those ‘Ork-island people’, or perhaps even as the ‘Ork people’ if Ork was understood as a tribal name. Having thus considered the name of the archipelago, it is now time to discuss the names of the mound, Orkahaugr and Orkhaugr. Let us first consider the possibility that it has nothing to do with the name Orkneyjar, the similarity being merely coincidental, and that Ork in the name of the mound has an entirely different meaning. The Ork in Orkahaugr/Orkhaugr could for example refer to some identifying feature of the mound, such as its shape. The word ǫrk (feminine) is interpreted in Zoëga’s dictionary as ‘ark, chest, or coffin’.54 For example, a medieval runic inscription from Berge in Oppland, Norway (N 77),55 is written on a wooden chest and reads ræiþulfr: kærþi: þerork Hreiðulfr gerði þar ǫrk.56 (Hreiðulfr made [the] chest there). It is possible to envisage the shape of Maeshowe being compared to a round-lidded chest or coffin, with the underlying association that it also contains something.57 Therefore, there is a distinct possibility that the name Orkhaugr was, at one point and at least by some people, understood as a plain compound of Ork and haugr, meaning the ‘ark-mound’ or ‘chest-mound’. This interpretation, however, does not make sense for the form Orkahaugr where one needs to account for the ‘a’. Such an ‘a’ could theoretically be genitive plural: ‘the mound of the chests’, but in that case the ǫ would change to a: *Arkahaugr, and this is not an attested form. Alternatively, as Hugh Marwick suggested, while still regarding the mound’s physical shape, Ork could be a term for elevation or projection. In support of this theory, in addition to the Greek and Roman notion that Cape Orca refers to the steep cliffs on the corner of Caithness (possibly Dunnet Head), Marwick cites the names Orknagabel in Unst (Shetland), for a cliff, and De Muckle and Little Orka for two hills in Dunrossness (Shetland), and the Ness of Ork in Shapinsay (Orkney). Marwick also lists the curious sounding name Howe Hurkis in Deerness (Orkney), which he says Jakobsen explains as a transposition of the elements in Orkahaugr.58 However, let us also consider the possibility that the names Orkahaugr and Orkhaugr for Maeshowe do somehow derive from the name of the archipelago, Orkneyjar. It could for example have originated as an extrinsic name, used by Icelanders and mainland Scandinavians to refer to the most significant or best-known mound in the Orkney Islands. It may be that Maeshowe acquired some fame through its role as

Zoëga, Cleasby, and Guðbrandur Vigfússon, A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic. Samnordisk runtextdatabas. I am grateful to Prof. Jan Ragnar Hagland for drawing this to my attention. In this respect, the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition 1b under the entry for ‘ark’ is interesting: ‘Casket, treasury’. Thank you to Andrea Freund for drawing this to my attention. 58 Marwick, ‘Celtic Place-Names in Orkney’, p. 262. 54 55 56 57

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assembly site.59 This explanation would make sense whether the form of the name is Orkhaugr or Orkahaugr. In the case of Orkahaugr, the saga form, the grammar may be interpreted as masculine plural genitive of orkar. If so, orkar would refer to the people of Orkney, the whole name being thus interpreted as ‘the mound of the Orcadians’. The Orkneyinga saga (c. 1200 ad) is preserved in Icelandic manuscripts and was arguably composed in Iceland. An extrinsic name for the mound is therefore not unexpected in the saga, although an Orcadian origin for at least some of the incorporated saga material has also been argued.60 The runic inscription (Or Barnes 24), on the other hand, is physically located in Orkney and is signed by Hlíf, the earl’s housekeeper. Who was Hlíf, and where did she come from?61 She may or may not have grown up in Orkney. If the earl she refers to is one of the Earls of Orkney, i.e. Rǫgnvaldr Kali Kolsson, Haraldr Maddaðarson, or Erlendr Haraldsson, which I would regard as likely, Hlíf was probably at least a longterm resident in the isles. An extrinsic name is therefore less likely to be used by Hlíf, and lessens the probability that Orkahaugr or Orkhaugr was an extrinsic name only.62 We must therefore consider the possibility that the place name, at least in one of its variant forms, was in use locally in Orkney, and that it was perhaps given by the first Norse population in the isles. If this is the case, what does the name say about their vision of Maeshowe? Which stories could the name have been part of, and which dialogues might have taken place? If it was named Orkahaugr/Orkhaugr by the Norse population who replaced the Picts, the Ork element could refer to the former rulers of the isles as a tribal name: ‘The Ork people’. This naming would reflect the fact that Maeshowe is older than the Norse settlement and that it was understood as a significant landmark already at the point of Norse colonization. The first ‘a’ in Orkahaugr could then be explained as a masculine genitive plural of orkar where the orkar refers to the former (Pictish) population of Orkney, in contrast to the current (Norse). Following this, it is possible to imagine a later development, when memories of who these predecessors were had faded, where Orkahaugr/Orkhaugr was understood less specifically as ‘the mound of those who were here before’. We have now seen three different scenarios which could all plausibly explain the twelfth-/thirteenth-century forms of name: as derived from a physical description of the mound, as an extrinsic name referring to the mound of the current (Norse) population of Orkney, and as a local name referring to the former (Pictish/legendary) population. I wish to stress at this point that one cannot expect the understanding of the name to remain constant: it might well be that the name was understood as a description of the mound’s shape by one group of people, as a reference to the name of the archipelago or current population by others, and as referring to the former 59 Sanmark, Viking Law and Order, pp. 221–24, 230. 60 Beuermann, ‘Jarla Sǫgur Orkneyja’, p. 154. 61 Aslak Liestøl speculates that she was the daughter of Hlífolf, earl Hákon Pálsson’s cook and the unwilling executioner of St Magnus, see Liestøl, ‘Runes’, p. 235. 62 I am grateful to Dr Alexandra Sanmark for her valuable contributions in discussing Hlíf ’s role with me.

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culture inhabiting the islands by yet others — at different times and/or in different places. These are all polyphonic dialogues. The meanings outlined here are merely nodes in a greater dialogical web. There is still one scenario left to discuss: one where the mound is seen as the burial place of someone specific. The size and prominence of the mound in the landscape would lend itself to such thinking.63 This specific person or being might be mythological, for example an ancient king or earl in a mythological past.64 For people with such an understanding, the name Orkahaugr could easily be taken as weak masculine genitive singular, derived from a personal name *Orki, so that the whole name takes on the meaning of ‘Orki’s Mound’. *Orki is not a regularly attested Old Norse personal name: it is not recorded in western Scandinavia, although traces exist in Denmark and the Danelaw, and possibly in Sweden.65 However, there is the remarkable use of it in what seems to be a patronymic derived from it in one of the runic inscriptions in Maeshowe (Or Barnes 8), where a person named Oddr Orkasonr is mentioned. Barnes66 suggests that unless it was actually a regular name, meaning something like ‘the Orcadian’, the inscription could have been meant as a pun on the name Orkahaugr. To this I would like to add that it could of course be a further pun on a chest-like shape, for example describing someone’s belly. It is in any case conceivable that the name Orkahaugr in the twelfth century, when the runic inscriptions were made, was understood as the mound of someone named *Orki, in parallel to, for example, Raknehaugen (Norway), Halvdanshaugen (Norway), and Anundshög (Sweden), which in folk memory were understood as the mounds of Rakni, Halvdan, and Anund. This understanding could furthermore be connected with a foundation myth, with the purpose of explaining the name Orkneyjar. There are many parallels to this, both for larger and smaller geographical or political units. For example, from the valley of Suldal in Rogaland (Norway) comes the story that the area got its name from a King Sold: Dei første som busette seg i Suldal, var komne or Sausoknå. Det var ein gut og ei jente som ville ha kvarandre; men foreldra hadde mykje imot det, så det ikkje kunne verta gjestebod av. Då rømde dei og busette seg i Suldal. Snart flytta også andre folk til. Det vart så mange at dei laut få seg ein konge. Dei fekk ein konge som heitte Sold. Etter han vart dalen kalla Solddal, og dette namnet vart seinare til Suldal.67 (The first people to settle in Suldal had come from the Sausoknå parishes. It was a boy and a girl who desired one another, but their parents were much 63 Ljosland and Sanmark, ‘The 12th Century Intruders’ Attitude to Maeshowe’. 64 Farrer thinks along these lines when he suggests that Maeshowe was the burial mound of a legendary sea king. See Farrer, Maes-Howe, p. 23. 65 Barnes, The Runic Inscriptions of Maeshowe, Orkney, p. 94. 66 Barnes, The Runic Inscriptions of Maeshowe, Orkney, p. 94. 67 Bjørlykke and Økland, Segner på nettet, ‘Suldal’.

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against it, so there could not be a traditional wedding. They eloped and settled in Suldal. Soon, other people followed; so many that they needed a king. They got a king whose name was Sold. After him, the valley was named Solddal, and this name later became Suldal). King Sold of Suldal is certainly not the only eponymous king of a district in Norway. In the first chapter of Orkneyinga saga,68 which is a mythological tale of how Norway was founded, we also hear of a King Sokni from Sognefjord in western Norway, and from Fridþjof’s Saga and other legendary sagas we know of a King Hring of Hringaríki in eastern Norway. Even more excitingly, the first king to conquer mainland Norway (Old Norse: Nórvegr) in the mythological opening of Orkneyinga saga is named Nórr: Eptir þat fór Nórr í fjǫrð þann, er norðr gengr af Sogni; þar hafði Sókni fyrir ráðit, er nú heitir Sóknadalr. þar dvalðisk Nórr lengi, ok heitir þar nú Nórafjǫrðr. þar kom til móts við hann Górr, bróðir hans […]. Górr hafði ok undir sik lagt land allt it ytra, er hann hafði sunnan farit, ok þá skiptu þeir lǫndum með sér brœðr. Hafði Nórr meginland allt, en Górr skal hafa eyjar þær allar […]. þaðan sneri Nórr aptr norðr til ríkis þess, er hann hafði undir sik lagt; þat kallaði hann Nórveg.69 (Afterwards Nor travelled over to the fjord to the branching off Sognefjord to the north, now called Sokna Dale as Sokni had once ruled there. Nor stayed on a long time at a place called Norumfjord, and it was there that his brother Gor joined him […]. Gor had laid claim to all the islands on his way from the south and now the brothers divided the whole country between them. Nor was to have all the mainland and Gor the islands […]. From there Nor made his way back north to the country he had laid claim to and called it Norway). Historia Norvegiae also bears witness to the story that ‘Norway, then, received its name from a certain king called Nórr’.70 This brief history of Norway was composed between 1150 and 1300.71 Ekrem72 makes a good case for dating it to around 1150, which would make it precisely contemporary with the runic inscriptions in Maeshowe. Similarly, King Dan was a legendary king said to have founded Denmark (Old Norse: Danmǫrk). The legend of King Dan is found in Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, which was completed between 1200–20, and describes the deeds of the Danes from the primeval King Dan up to the year 1185.73 Saxo writes about King Dan:

68 Holtsmark, Orknøyingenes saga, pp. 11–13. 69 Orkneyinga saga, ed. by Finnbogi Guðmundsson, pp. 5–6. 70 A History of Norway, trans. by Kunin and ed. by Phelpstead, p. 2. 71 Phelpstead, ‘Introduction’, in A History of Norway, trans. by Kunin and ed. by Phelpstead, p. xvi. 72 Ekrem, Nytt lys over Historia Norvegie. 73 Store norske leksikon, entry for Gesta Danorum.

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‘Now Dan and Angul, with whom the stock of the Danes begins, were begotten of Humble, their father, and were the governors and not only the founders of our race’.74 The legend of King Dan also occurs in Danasaga Arngríms Lærða,75 which is thought to derive from a lost Skjoldunga Saga: Rigus nomen fuit vivo cuidam inter magnates sui temporis non infimo. Is danpri cujusdam, domini in Danpsted, filiam duxit uxorem, cui Dana nomen erat; qvi deinde Regis titulo in sua illa provincia acqvisito, filium ex uxore Dana, Dan sive Danum, hæredem reliqvit; cujus Dani paternam ditionem jam adepti subditi omnes Dani dicebantur. (Rigus was the name of a great chieftain. He went to marry Dana who was the daughter of Danps from Danpsted. He was the first to be called King of his land. He had a son by his wife who was named Dan and he became king after his father. When Dan had taken over the land from his father, then the people of this land were known as the Danes). There are numerous mounds in Denmark that are known in local legend as the burial mound of King Dan and named Kong Dans høj, Danshøj, and variations thereof (Old Norse: Danshaugr). Lidegaard76 documents six such legends of a King Dan buried at Dan’s mounds. I believe that the Maeshowe chambered tomb was at one point in time, in the twelfth century and perhaps for some time before and after, understood in such terms. The clinching evidence, in addition to these numerous parallels, comes from Historia Norvegiae, a history contemporary with the Maeshowe break-in. It says: ‘In this sea are the Orkney Islands, more than thirty in number, deriving their name from a certain earl named Orkan’.77 The Latin Historia Norvegiae’s ‘Orkan’ must be none other than the eponymous ruler thought to have founded Orkney, which in local folklore had his resting place in the mound of Maeshowe. A folk-etymological understanding of Orkahaugr as the burial mound of Earl Orki/Orkan would help explain the interaction which we know took place in the mid-twelfth century: the mound was broken into. Some of the runic inscriptions left in the central chamber as a result of this incident speak of a ‘treasure’ that the intruders expected to find there, but which seemingly was not found (Or Barnes 4, 8, 25, 26, 27, 28).78 Other inscriptions make references to sagas or saga-type stories (Or Barnes 1, 20, 23). In combination with other stories and beliefs, such as the belief in a haugbúi, or undead mound-spirit that guards a treasure, which is commonly attested79 in later folklore both in Orkney and other parts of the Norse world, and

74 Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, i.1, ed. by Killings, trans. by Elton, p. 1. 75 Bjarni Guðnason, ‘Danasaga Arngríms lærða’, p. 9. 76 Lidegaard, Danske høje, pp. 81, 86, 188, 200, 207, 233. 77 A History of Norway, trans. by Kunin and ed. by Phelpstead, p. 8. 78 Barnes, The Runic Inscriptions of Maeshowe. 79 See for example Marwick, The Folklore of Orkney and Shetland, p. 39, and Farrer, Maes-Howe, n. 1.

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saga stories of heroes overcoming such spirits and winning treasure and fame,80 the notion that Orkahaugr was the burial mound of Earl Orki/Orkan would help explain the intruders’ desire to break in.81 The intrusion into Maeshowe in the twelfth century may therefore be read as another example of how names, folk-etymologies, and storytelling are all part of a dialogism, in which interaction with the place, guided by this dialogism, also plays a part.

Conclusion In conclusion, while the original meanings of the names Maeshowe and Orkahaugr/ Orkhaugr are still uncertain, I find value in exploring how the names have or may have been understood by different people at different times. If we put the search for a single, true meaning aside for a while, the emerging and changing meanings offer valuable insights into how various groups of people living in different time periods have engaged with and interacted with this place. The Victorian and the medieval responses to the different names for the great Orcadian burial mound share a role as nodes in a web of storytelling and meaning-making: the Victorian story-web — which to some extent still lives on today — spins tales around the notions of the mound as ‘Maiden’s Mound’ and reads into it special meanings connected with magic (or negatively as sorcery), spring, the female sex and the contrasting female attributes of virginity and fertility. The medieval story-web interprets the mound as ‘Orki’s Mound’ and weaves it into a narrative of a notable spirit inhabitant guarding a treasure, which can be conquered by the right hero. These two story-webs have much in common, in the sense that they both led to personal and communal meaning-making for those who shared it, and furthermore to certain types of interaction with the place. Examining these narratives and the connected processes of meaning-making as they developed, through the evidence still available to us, is therefore a valuable exercise. It offers insights into not only how the mound itself has been understood over time, but also into how it connects with a wider narrative web of how people in the Victorian period understood and constructed ‘The Old North’,82 as a way of making a Germanic, British, and Orcadian mythological past. Similarly, these story-webs show us how people in the twelfth century understood the mythological past of their islands, represented by the burial mound of its eponymous founder. Into these stories, people connect themselves, by participating in the expanding story-webs, and by interacting with the place itself — in the case of the twelfth-century intruders by enacting the role of a saga hero, or as the writer of one of the Maeshowe runic inscriptions so aptly puts it: ‘That is a Viking […] [who] then came here underneath’.83

80 Beck, Haugbrot, pp. 215–16. 81 Full argument given in Ljosland ‘The Men in Maeshowe’. 82 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians. 83 Barnes, The Runic Inscriptions of Maeshowe, p. 61.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History of Diodorus Siculus, iii: Books IV. 59-VIII, ed. by Charles Oldfather, Loeb Classical Library, 340 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006) [accessed 21 April 2017] Gorrie, Daniel, Summers and Winters in the Orkneys (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1868) Historia Norvegiae: A History of Norway, and the Passion and Miracles of Blessed Óláfr, ed. and trans. by Devra Kunin and Carl L. Phelpstead, Viking Society for Northern Research Text Series, 8 (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, University College London, 2001) [accessed 2 May 2017] Low, George, A Tour through the Islands of Orkney and Shetland, Containing Hints Relative to their Ancient, Modern, and Natural History, Collected in 1774 (Kirkwall: William Peace, 1879) Marwick, George, George Marwick: The Collected Works of Yesnaby’s Master Storyteller, ed. by Tom Muir and James Irvine (Kirkwall: The Orcadian, 2014) Orkney Herald, Tuesday 23 July 1861, p. 2, ‘The Excavations at Stenness’ and ‘Kirkwall, July 20, 1861’ Orkney Herald, Tuesday 16 September 1862, p. 3, ‘New Readings of the Maeshowe Inscriptions’ Orkney Herald, Tuesday 23 September 1862, p. 3, ‘Maeshowe’ Orkneyinga saga, ed. by Finnbogi Guðmundsson, Íslenzk Fornrit, 34 (Reykjavík: Hið Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 1965) Orknøyingenes Saga, trans. by Anne Holtsmark (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1970) Samnordisk runtextdatabas/Scandinavian Runic-Text Database, downloadable from [accessed 2 May 2017] Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum: The Danish History, Books I–IX, ed. by Douglas B. Killings, trans. by Oliver Elton (Project Gutenberg, 2006) [accessed 2 May 2017] Tait, Charles, ‘Maeshowe on the Internet’, Frontiers Magazine (2013) [accessed 2 May 2017] Wallace, James, A Description of the Isles of Orkney: Reprinted from the Original Edition of 1693, with Illustrative Notes from an Interleaved Copy in the Library of the University of Edinburgh, Formerly the Property of Malcolm Laing, the Scottish Historian, together with the Additions Made by the Author’s Son, in the Edition of 1700 (Edinburgh: William Brown, 1883) [accessed 18 April 2017] Wikipedia, ‘Maeshowe’ [accessed 5 September 2016]

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Secondary Works Barclay, Thomas, ‘Explanation of the Inscriptions Found in the Chambers of the MaesHowe’, Collectanea Archæologica, 2.1 (1863), 9–17 Barnes, Michael P., The Runic Inscriptions of Maeshowe, Orkney (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 1994) Beck, Heinrich, ‘Haugbrot im Altnordischen’, in Zum Grabfrevel in Vor und frühgeschichtlicher Zeit, ed. by Herbert Jankuhn, Hermann Nehlsen, and Helmut Roth (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), pp. 211–28 Beuermann, Ian, ‘Jarla Sǫgur Orkneyja. Status and Power of the Earls of Orkney According to their Sagas’, in Ideology and Power in the Viking and Middle Ages: Scandinavia, Iceland, Ireland, Orkney and the Faeroes, ed. by Gro Steinsland and others (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 109–62 Bjørlykke, Bjørn, and Nils Tore Økland, Segner på nettet [accessed 21 April 2017] Brown, George M., An Orkney Tapestry (London: Quartet, 1973) Carr, Ralph, ‘Observations on Some of the Runic Inscriptions at Maeshowe, Orkney’, Proceedings of the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland, 6 (1865), 70–83 Ekrem, Inger, Nytt lys over Historia Norwegie: mot en løsning i debatten om dens alder (Bergen: IKRR, Seksjon for gresk, latin og egyptologi, 1998) Farrer, James, Maes-Howe: Notice of Runic Inscriptions Discovered during Recent Excavation in the Orkneys (Edinburgh: Printed for private circulation by R. & R. Clark, 1862) Gammeltoft, Peder, ‘Shetland and Orkney Island-Names – A Dynamic Group’, in Northern Lights, Northern Words: Selected Papers from the FRLSU Conference, Kirkwall 2009, ed. by Robert McColl Millar (Aberdeen: Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster, 2010), pp. 15–25 Heggstad, Marius, Gamalnorsk ordbok med nynorsk tyding (Oslo, Det norske samlaget, 1930) Jakobsen, Jakob, The Place-Names of Shetland (London: Nutt, 1936) Johnston, Jennene, ‘Runic Charm: Considering the Victorian Interpretations of the Maeshowe Inscriptions’ (unpublished master’s thesis, University of the Highlands and Islands, 2014) Lidegaard, Mads, Danske høje fra sagn og tro (Copenhagen: Arnold Busck Nyt Nordisk Forlag, 1998) Liestøl, Aslak, ‘Runes’, in The Northern and Western Isles in the Viking World, ed. by Alexander Fenton and Hermann Pálsson (Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, 1984), pp. 224–38 Ljosland, Ragnhild, ‘Pondering Orkney’s Runic Inscriptions’, The Orcadian, 4 June 2015, p. 21 ———, ‘The Men in Maeshowe: Why Did They Break in?’, John D. Mackay memorial lecture, Orkney International Science Festival, 11 September 2017 Ljosland, Ragnhild, and Alexandra Sanmark: ‘The 12th Century Intruders’ Attitude to Maeshowe’, paper presented at Orkney Rune Rede 9th Full-Day Runic Colloquium, Kirkwall, 21–23 May 2015

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Macleod, John, and others, eds, Dictionarium scoto-celticum: A Dictionary of the Gaelic Language; Comprising an Ample Vocabulary of Gaelic Words … with their Signification and Various Meanings in English and Latin … and Vocabularies of Latin and English Words with their Translation into Gaelic; To Which Are Prefixed, an Introduction Explaining the Nature, Objects and Sources of the Work, and a Compendium of Gaelic Grammar (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, Highland Society of Scotland, 1828) Marwick, Ernest, An Orkney Anthology: Selected Words of Ernest Walker Marwick, ed. by John Robertson (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1991) Marwick, Hugh, ‘Celtic Place-Names in Orkney’, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquities of Scotland, 57 (1923), 251–65 Nansen, Fridtjof, In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times, i, trans. by Arthur G. Chater (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911) Norseng, Per S., ‘Gesta Danorum’, in Store Norske Leksikon [accessed 2 May 2017] Sandnes, Berit, ‘Skånske stedsnavn i nordisk perspektiv’, Ortnamnssällskapets i Uppsala årsskrift 2011 (2011), 77–90 Sanmark, Alexandra, Viking Law and Order: Places and Rituals of Assembly in the Medieval North (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017) Wawn, Andrew, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in NineteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge: Brewer, 2002) Zoëga, Geir T., Richard Cleasby, and Guðbrandur Vigfússon, A Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910)

Jay Johnston

Rites, Runes, and Maeshowe Northern Landscapes and Lived Belief

For me, north is an integral part of the land. I can touch it in the cold shadow of a mountain, the green side of a tree, the mossy face of a rock. Its energy is made visible in snow and ice.1

Introduction In the above quotation, contemporary artist Andy Goldsworthy expresses an approach to ‘north’ that eschews its meaning pertaining to direction in preference for an interpretation of it as a medium: a felt agency or subtle material implicit to the northern landscape. To encounter this north requires a shift in perception. The individual does not follow a visual line on a map or a compass point but rather is invited by Goldworthy’s artwork to experience — with all the senses — a particular aspect of landscape. Goldsworthy’s art,2 regularly made of elemental materials (stone, water, wood, flowers, snow, etc.), directs the viewer to look at the landscape and its features closely; to consider pattern, colour, texture, and the ephemerality of its elements. Despite the great diversity of his oeuvre, the experience of the viewer–environment relation is central. This is a temporal, specific, embodied relation that draws attention to the unseen ‘energetic’ exchange between viewer and object. The artwork may be caught, suspended in time, by photography but its production relies on the experience of specific environments and specific durations of time. Taking a cue from this experiential, temporal, visceral interpretation of ‘north’ this chapter is similarly concerned with perception and experience. In particular it seeks to examine the way in which archaeological sites — specifically Maeshowe, Orkney — have been interpreted. Two themes will be taken up for consideration.

1 Andy Goldsworthy quoted in Taylor, Refiguring the Spiritual, p. 162. 2 For examples of Andy Goldworthy’s artwork see: [accessed 20 January 2020]. Jay Johnston, Associate Professor, Studies in Religion, University of Sydney. [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 211–225 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120794

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Firstly, epistemology: a consideration of the types of knowledge employed to understand Maeshowe and the validation (or not) of these forms of knowledge in a range of contexts. Secondly, perception: the way in which an individual and/or cultures’ perceptive schema impact upon the interpretation of ancient material culture. Overarching this discussion is a broader concern with the way in which the now booming topic of ‘Prehistoric Religion’ is being constructed in the discipline of religious studies. This includes the increasing use of the expression ‘ritual landscape’ — a very elastic term — to describe complexes/sites like the Stenness-Brodgar complex of which Maeshowe is considered a distinctive element. The deployment of ‘temple’ to designate specific prehistoric buildings is also currently fashionable and similarly problematic (for example the identification of a ‘temple’ at the Ness of Brodgar).3 Terminology such as ‘ritual landscape’ and ‘temple’ — because of their prior usage and common meaning — present a singular narrative about a particular place that is paradoxically aligned with general claims about use and the valuation of the surrounding area. Ambiguous terminology like this can operate as an empty signifier with the effect of closing down, rather than opening up, debate about the use, belief, and multiple ways in which landscapes are ‘lived’. While this chapter cannot address this broader issue with the detail required, its concerns are directly interrelated with it.

Disciplinary ‘Matter’: Positing Invisible Evidence As I have detailed elsewhere,4 historically the academic discipline of religious studies has prioritized textual sources in the study of belief and its attendant practices. This dominance has been strongly critiqued in recent times and a series of different approaches developed and applied. These include ‘Material Religion’,5 that developed from material culture studies and focuses on the role of material objects and ‘Aesthetics of Religion’6 which approaches religion primarily as a sensory and mediated practice. These two approaches put bodies, including their capacities, actions, products, and the environment in which they dwell, respond, and produce, at the forefront of analysis. One of the more exciting and tricky edges of these approaches has been the consideration of material agency. In archaeology this position is strongly associated with the work of Christopher Tilley (with Wayne Bennett): ‘We can suggest in a general sense, the stones themselves were considered to be subjects rather than objects in the Neolithic […] The stones were like people’.7 It is also a feature of scholars working with the concepts of image and object agency provided by anthropology (especially the work of Alfred Gell, Bruno Latour, and Tim Ingold).8 Duncan Garrow and Chris Gosden’s

3 See for example Robin, ‘Neolithic Discovery’. 4 Johnston, ‘Body/Embodiment’, Vocabulary for the Study of Religion, e1–10. 5 For examples of approach see, Plate, ed., Key Terms in Material Religion. 6 See Aesthetics of Religion. 7 Tilley with Bennett, Body and Image, p. 174. 8 Garrow and Gosden, Technologies of Enchantment, pp. 23–26; Gell, Art and Agency; Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; Ingold, The Perception of the Environment.

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volume Technologies of Enchantment: Exploring Celtic Art (2012) is one such example. Although they critique Gell’s focus on the finished product and make a case for the importance of the process of production and life cycle of an object when considering artefact, Garrow and Gosden remain equally concerned with agency and ontology. This was not an art of fixed or fixable meanings but one designed to have an impact on the senses, the emotions, and on notions of key relations with human and non-human forces.9 For Garrow and Gosden these non-human forces included ‘spirits’ and ‘sacred powers’.10 Whatever the terminology employed, these approaches all factor into their analyses forms of invisible agency — whether it be ascribed to the material object itself or be considered as an implicit aspect of the context in which the material culture existed, for example the environment. Here then agency is not something only ascribed to human subjects, but is understood as potentially a feature of objects themselves and/or emergent from the relations between subject and object, objects and the broader environment.11 Garrow and Gosden’s work also focuses on the interrelationship of agency and material production processes: for example, smelting and other forms of metalwork. Processes like carving, painting, weaving, etc. can similarly be ascribed significance and positioned as important to the production of material agency. These perspectives present the process of production (and of destruction) as being as — or more — important than the finished object. Although these approaches take as their central focus of study, materiality and material objects, this does not mean that textual sources (if available) are entirely eschewed. Indeed, when considering the meanings ascribed to monuments like Maeshowe there is a complex web of narratives which frame the experience of visiting these sites and of viewing them. The following discussion considers textual and material evidence and the multiple stories and experiences that these have engendered in specific times and contexts. It would take several monographs to exhaustively recount the numerous narratives that Maeshowe has engendered, this chapter will focus on a small selection pertaining to ‘traditional’ belief and the interpretation of the runic inscriptions during the nineteenth century.

Knowing Maeshowe Maeshowe is a feature of one of the best-known and most significant monumental landscapes in Europe. It is found in what is referred to as the ‘Stenness-Brodgar complex’, located where two peninsulas meet (with lochs Harray and Stenness on either side) on the Mainland of Orkney. In addition to Maeshowe and other burial mounds, the Neolithic and early Bronze Age landscape includes two stone circles

9 Garrow and Gosden, Technologies of Enchantment, p. 5. 10 Garrow and Gosden, Technologies of Enchantment, p. 27. 11 Malfouris, How Things Shape the Mind.

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and several settlement sites.12 The chambered tomb’s name has been rendered in a number of forms including ‘Maes Howe’, ‘Maes-howe’, and ‘Mesehowe’; however, this chapter will follow the terminology currently used by Historic Scotland: ‘Maeshowe’.13 Today, Maeshowe is a central feature of the ‘Heart of Neolithic Orkney’ a designation used by Historic Scotland to reference the sites of Maeshowe, Barnhouse, Skara Brae, the Stones of Stenness, and the Ring of Brodgar. The ‘mound’ of Maeshowe is certainly a noted feature of the surrounding landscape: it is situated on a raised circular ‘platform’ which is demarcated by a ditch and a bank.14 The chambered tomb itself has a ten-metre-long passageway that leads to a small room (now 4.7 metres wide and 4.5 metres high). Three walls contain ‘side cells’ (inbuilt recesses) and each corner of the chamber features a tall upright megalith.15 Featured on postcard designs, the corbelled roof of the main chamber is an impressive vault of stone slabs. Linking to the celestial environment, the central passageway is aligned to the midwinter solstice: ‘at sunset during three weeks before and after the shortest day of the year (21st December) the light of the setting sun shines straight down the passage and illuminates the back of the chamber’.16 At the time of the first excavations directed by James Farrer — which commenced on 6 July 1861, with the west-side passage being discovered on 8 July and Farrer being done and dusted with the investigation by the close of the same month17 — the land was owned by David Balfour. He was just one of a number of distinguished Orkney residents who, with specially invited gentlemen from ‘down south’, were present for the commencement of the excavation.18 This company of observers included Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland: Colonel Forbes Leslie; James Hay Chalmers; Joseph (but given as John S. in the Orkney Herald!) Robertson, whose very arrival on the island was noted;19 John Stuart; and local antiquarian George Petrie.20 In addition to the distinguished members of the Society that warranted individual identification, the Orkney Herald reported that ‘a large number of ladies and gentlemen connected with Orkney’ also witnessed the ‘diggins’;21 in addition, nameless ‘workmen’ were also (necessarily) present. This gathering highlights the interest of the venture for gentleman scholars and a broader ‘society’ public. This interest, maintained during and for a substantial period after the excavation, was communicated via scholarly and newspaper publications, many of which focused on the mystery of what the tumulus was originally used for and on the decipherment of the runic inscriptions uncovered within it. The first of such inscriptions discovered in Orkney.

12 Noble, Neolithic Scotland, p. 173. 13 Foster, Maeshowe and the Heart of Neolithic Orkney. 14 Foster, Maeshowe and the Heart of Neolithic Orkney, p. 10. 15 Foster, Maeshowe and the Heart of Neolithic Orkney, p. 14. 16 Foster, Maeshowe and the Heart of Neolithic Orkney, p. 18. 17 Farrer, Maes-howe, p. 13. 18 Farrer, Maes-howe, p. 11. 19 Orkney Herald, 9 July 1861, p. 2. 20 Stuart, ‘Notice of Excavations’, p. 248; Barnes, The Runic Inscriptions of Maeshowe, p. 21. 21 Orkney Herald, 9 July 1861, p. 3.

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Throughout its long history, predating this antiquarian excavation, Maeshowe has been known and interpreted in very many different ways. This much can be easily gleaned from written records, let alone those beliefs that predate or have eluded capture in script: they must remain necessarily ambiguous. The following discussion presents three examples of antiquarian interpretations (informed by local custom and broader intellectual debates of the period). 1. Abode of a Hogboy

And there was moreover in those days another factor — the dreaded ‘Hogboy’ who dwelt in the howe. Anyone who knows the old Orkney feeling on the subject of tampering with haunted howes will understand perfectly how such a mound stood unopened and almost unmolested through the centuries. One might open such a howe in a lonely moor or a strange land whose inhabitants would be left to suffer the vengeance of their own hogboy, but not within the bowshot of the home-fields and houses!22 That mounds were believed as inhabited by ‘in-between’ beings — hogboys, fairies, etc. — is widely evidenced. It was well documented in particular by antiquarian clergy-scholars, an infamous example being Robert Kirk.23 Accounts of such belief also feature in later studies, for example, J. M. McPherson’s (poorly titled) Primitive Beliefs of the North-East of Scotland. Indeed, the figure of hogboy is intertwined both with concepts of the ‘trowie’ and those of an ancestor spirit dwelling within the burial mounds of their family farms. In the above quotation, Clouston references the belief in Maeshowe as a wellknown (and respected) residence of a hogboy in order to support his argument that the Norse ‘tomb-breakers’ proposed responsible for the runic inscriptions — in Clouston’s particular figuring, Hakon of the Orkneyinga saga — were the only folk to have entered the howe.24 That is, local belief had rendered it inviolable and it was only the arrival of ‘outsiders’, attributed with little regard for local belief, that resulted in Maeshowe being opened. There are innumerable problems with this proposition, not least in terms of historicity and the Norse influence in the origins of Orcadian belief in ‘mound-spirits’. The salient point in this context is that folklore has been a dominant interpretive framework for Maeshowe. That it was considered the abode of a, potentially, rancorous ‘hogboy’ is also referenced by John Stuart in a paper about Maeshowe and its runic inscriptions published in 1864, he noted: I may remark, in passing, that Maeshowe is believed to have been tenanted by a goblin inhabitant of great strength, popularly known as the Hogboy (perhaps corrupted, as Mr Farrer suggests, from Haugbuie, which in Norse means ‘The

22 Storer Clouston, ‘Something about Maeshowe’, p. 10. 23 Robert Kirk, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. 24 Storer Clouston, ‘Something about Maeshowe’, p. 10.

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Ghost of the Tomb’); and that both Professor Philips and Mr Bateman, in describing sepulchral mounds in Yorkshire and Derbyshire, inform us that there also some of these houses are reputed to be the abode of an unearthly or supernatural being.25 In an interesting conjunction of folklore and ‘scientific’ explication accounts of the hogboy were presented in excavation reports nestled amongst the more empirical concerns of material, measurement, and the visual recording of runic inscriptions. Stuart’s note, by way of reference to Farrer’s creative philology, does indicate Norse associations with the conceptualization of the supernatural mound-dweller. The Victorian construction of the old North played a significant role in the debates about mainstream identity in Scotland. In his exhaustive analysis Andrew Wawn26 identified a series of issues that, having emerged in the eighteenth century, continued to inform nineteenth-century ‘nordophilia’ via the analysis of scholars, political and social groups, and artists like Walter Scott and William Morris. Of relevance to this topic area are the ideas of a ‘multinational’ old North that spanned Scandinavia and the North Atlantic, Wawn noting that comparative folklore studies were often put to task to uncover these common hidden roots. 2. Home of an Astrologer

I observe that Prof. Gordon Childe in a recent volume classified Maeshowe as a sepulchral chambered cairn. But I should like to ask: What would be the point of having a burial cairn with a long carefully built-in entrance deliberately aligned on a large monolith at a measured distance as well as pointing directly to the winter solstice? Such alignments cannot be accidental, and the view of Lockyer and Magnus Spence — that it was the official residence of the astronomer in the late Neolithic Age — is a very reasonable explanation of it. It may well have been used for burials, of course, at a later period, but that was not the primal purpose of its erection.27 This observation by John Cook, published in the Proceedings of the Orkney Antiquarian Society in 1939 raises a number of noteworthy points. Its primary concern is clearly the purpose for which Maeshowe was originally constructed, with Cook supporting previously published interpretations of it as the residence of a late Neolithic astronomer in contra-distinction to that proposed by noted Australian-born archaeologist Gordon Childe (1892–1957) who was Abercromby Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh at the time of Cook’s article. Childe is well known for excavating sites on Orkney including Skara Brae and Maeshowe (although this did not take place until after Cook’s comments in the 1950s) and for his dominantly Marxist interpretative framework.

25 John Stuart, ‘Notice of Excavations in the Chambered Mound’, pp. 255–56. 26 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, pp. 31–33. 27 Cook, ‘A Comparison of Stonehenge with Stone Circles of Stenness Area’, p. 57.

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As Cook recounts, Childe’s interpretation privileged the mound’s role as a ‘sepulchral chambered cairn’. While conceding that Maeshowe may have been used for this function at a ‘later period’ Cook does not concur that it was the original purpose of the building, being unable to reconcile the astronomical alignment of the passageway with the logics of burial requirements. Two unacknowledged discursive frameworks are apparent in this discussion. Firstly, Cook applies his normative (modern, western, broadly Judaeo-Christian) concepts of burial practice in a universalist manner and fails to appreciate the sociocultural and historic diversity of such practices. Secondly, Cook — like many in his time and after — is committed to identifying the singular and original reason for Maeshowe’s construction. Discourse on the origins of Maeshowe (in antiquarian discussion) commonly swung between ‘temple’ and ‘burial place’ options. Indeed, the quest for locating a ‘temple’ in the Stenness-Brodgar site continues with the recent revivification of this term to describe a large structure found at the Ness of Brodgar28 (it’s a tempting word ‘temple’, as the following example will also illustrate). Ascribing a singular use to architectural space is a strongly modern convention and one that I think we should avoid simply reinscribing upon buildings from vastly different cultures and time periods. Cook’s interpretation not only privileges archaeo-astronomical explanation, presenting the building as an astrological ‘measure’ or instrument (a late Neolithic form of observatory) but also as the dwelling-place, the abode, of an astronomer: ‘the official residence of the astronomer in the late Neolithic Age’ (to this end he does ascribe a dual-purpose to the mound). Here also, another normative convention is employed; that is the assumption of an individual specialist. The late Neolithic may or may not have had designated specialists pertaining to particular forms of knowledge; this cannot be known. However, in analysis being wary of importing contemporary conventions regarding the complex interplay between identity and knowledge and the construction of identities based-upon activity should be continually held up for scrutiny. In this presentation, Maeshowe remains an abode, albeit that of an astronomer rather than a hogboy. One additional element is a marked feature of Cook’s argument: the reading of Maeshowe in relation to other phenomena. This is not only celestial bodies but also the broader Stenness-Brodgar landscape: ‘What would be the point of having a burial cairn with a long carefully built-in entrance deliberately aligned on a large monolith at a measured distance as well as pointing directly to the winter solstice?’ Reading these elements in relation does afford a shift from an isolationist perspective that reads Maeshowe as a singularity (even is considered positioned in an auspicious location) to one that considers its function/purpose as necessarily intertwined with other human and ‘natural’ features in its vicinity. Although Cook rejects it, the very same relations can be employed in interpreting Maeshowe’s function as a burial cairn. All the interpretations discussed so far have emphasized Maeshowe as a dwelling place: home of hogboy, the dead (ancestors), or astronomer. The next and final example differs from the ‘abode’ motif and utilizes textual evidence in its case. 28 See n. 3.

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3. Magician’s Temple

This barrow was formerly a sorcery hall, erected for Lodbrok; her sons were brave, such were men as they were for themselves (such we may call valiant men, such as they were in their achievements).29 This quotation is C. C. Rafn’s translation of the first three lines of inscription XIX (which he argued should be read together with XX). It is to be noted that this text is not given as an interpretative gloss by Rafn, but is presented as the translation for the actual inscription (Barnes’s contemporary English translation is: ‘This mound was built before Loðbrók’s. Her sons, they were bold; such were men, as they were of themselves [i.e. they were the sort of people you would really call men]’.30 The concern in this context is not necessarily the ‘creative’ runology but the deployment of tropes of magic and sorcery. These I contend were mapped onto Maeshowe as a result of its — at that time — (presumed initial) use by Vikings and the broader negative views of paganism. Sorcery and magic would have been a familiar conceptual filter for the antiquarian excavators and runologists. In 1844 Samuel Laing published his translation of The Heimskringla: Or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway, which included Ynglinga saga; this details Oðin’s expertise with magic and sorcery but also its transmission to priestesses.31 Concepts of prophecy were of course also encountered in translations of Codex Regius (most often referred to in current scholarship as the The Elder Edda), particularly Völuspá (‘The Prophecy of the Seeress’), and the reference to powerful runes in Hávámal 80, available from Peder Hansen Resen’s 1665 Latin publication. Latin, as Wawn notes, being ‘the international language of scholarship’ enabled these texts to have a long shelf life, well into the Victorian period. In addition, carving runes for perceived magical intent is also found in Egils saga 57 (translation published in 1809 by Arnamagnæan Institute). While not an exhaustive list of references to runes being interrelated with magic in the sagas and verse, these examples are indicative of the presentation of the ideas in the available corpus. Such texts would have most certainly been familiar to dedicated old northern antiquarians.32 In short, the concept of sorcery and its links with runic script would have been an available paradigm through which to consider both the Maeshowe runes and the building’s purpose. Therefore, Norse identity was an important aspect of conceptualizations of the ‘North’ — including the Northern Isles (Orkney and Shetland) as distinct locations — and all of Scotland’s identity during this period. In assessing the similarities and differences of identity construction during the nineteenth century in Scotland,

29 Rafn in Farrer, Maes-howe, p. 37. 30 Barnes, The Runic Inscriptions of Maeshowe, p. 183. 31 Wawn, Orkneyinga saga in Victorian Britain, p. 95; Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology, p. 199. On the derogatory gender associations with the practice of magic and the differences between sei∂er and gandr see MacLeod and Mees, Runic Amulets and Magic Objects, pp. 10–12 and Mitchell, Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages. 32 Wawn, Orkneyinga saga in Victorian Britain, pp. 17–19; The Elder Edda, trans. by Orchard, pp. 5–14, 26.

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Northern Isles identity was created as both different and similar to the Highlands and Lowlands. The core feature was the valorization of Orkney and Shetland’s clear links (via Orkneyinga saga and archaeological remains) with a Norse past that many lowland Scots sought to incorporate into mainstream Scottish identity. Often, the Northern Isles were positioned — by both locals and non-locals — as the location of the ‘least diluted’ Teutonic blood and most authentic Norse identity. In the North the remnants of a lost heroic heritage were to be found. The Northern Isles both created itself as ‘other’ and as ‘mainstream’, and was created by lowland authors, like Walter Scott (e.g. The Pirate, 1822) as ‘other’ and as ‘mainstream’. That is, in these relations the North is perceived both as an exotic, mysterious, simultaneously appealing and threatening ‘other’ and as an essential part of mainstream Scottish identity. These facets of the North inform (to various degrees) each of the interpretive narratives of Maeshowe discussed herein. All three of these examples speak of different landscapes, different ritual frameworks, and are based on different epistemologies including knowledges and perception associated with the metaphysical, celestial, and supernatural. All three small examples approached Maeshowe from the perspective of use (to the dead and metaphysical beings; person with specialist knowledge; an astronomical instrument/place of worship and production of ‘magic’). Some narratives also present other-than-human agencies, which as a conceptual and methodological feature of contemporary analysis will be the subject of the next section. In recounting these three interpretations the aim has not only been to exemplify the variety of interpretations that Maeshowe has gleaned over the years. It has also been to raise another question: Is the difference between these interpretations ‘just’ an issue of belief or is it more intimately tied to embodied experience and perception? That is, are these readings not only about what is believed, but also about what is actually perceived: seen, heard, touched, felt (to say nothing of the tricky realm of ‘extra-sensory’ perception). These may appear ‘esoteric’ concerns. However, their consideration has found renewed vigour in contemporary debates.

Agency: From Folk Narrative to Vital Matter Sacred stones were believed to be instinct with life and power. The stone at Quoybune in Birsay, every Hogmanay night, when the clock strikes twelve marches down to the Loch of Boardhouse and dips its head in the water. It is never safe to be abroad watching its movements at that witching hour. There are many stories of venturesome outlanders — natives know better — setting out to watch this stone in its progress to the loch side. Their dead bodies were found in the morning.33 As previously noted in the discipline of religious studies there has been a challenge to the dominant interpretation of religion as being purely about ‘belief ’, with focus

33 McPherson, Primitive Beliefs, p. 80.

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shifting to analysis of everyday experience of religious practice and challenges, like ‘Vernacular Religion’, which disrupt any clear distinction between categories of ‘official’ or ‘folk’ religion.34 In addition, the turn to ‘Material Religion’ has led to an increasing focus on the role that various types of media — objects, material, and modes of communication — play in the construction and development of religion, religious identities, and practices.35 These approaches evoke closer attention being paid to routine actions and locations as well as the felt experience of the participants. All these modes of interpretative focus could be brought to bear upon the interpretation of Maeshowe and its surrounding context. The approaches all foreground the role of embodied perception in the construction of knowledge and, indeed, that this process is intersubjective — that is, created by the dynamic relations between subject and object. These approaches advocate that scholars pay greater attention to these relations. However, in thinking about Hogboys and ancestor spirits, what of landscapes, monuments, and objects ascribed forms of agency that have no obvious empirical cause? That is, as exemplified in the previous quotation, standing stones attributed with a ‘power’ and capacity to move. The source of any such agency varies according to tradition but may be viewed as something inherent to the object (ontological) or ‘given’ to the object by a deity or religious/ritual specialist. There are different degrees to how these relationships are understood, and, as previously noted, material agency has also been a marked feature of post-processural archaeology.36 In regard to concepts of other-than-human agency in Cultural Studies the approach termed ‘New Materialism’ has been very popular. Encompassing a range of applications and approaches, this framework can be understood to advocate for the recognition of other-than-human agency (which, as I have argued elsewhere, in many ways revivify older concepts of materiality and/or reference vernacular and indigenous epistemologies).37 As the examples given in the first part of this paper demonstrate such other-than-human agency figured in antiquarian accounts of Maeshowe. Antiquarian discourses — despite sundry scholarly ‘sins’ — are an example of interpretations that take into account material agency, other-than-human agency, and are simultaneously based upon many different types of epistemology and perception even if, ultimately, they enfold these within a dominant discursive structure. An attendant concern of the New Materialism approach is how to render material vitality in academic discourse: this vitality is an ‘other’, conceptualized as distinct from empirically-based observation and reason. Jane Bennett’s response is — as I have previously examined in more detail — to embrace previously discredited knowledge systems, for example, animism or vitalism. These knowledge systems may have been ‘othered’ by the dominance of academic forms of reason, yet they are foundational to

34 35 36 37

Bowman and Valk, Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life. For examples of approach see, Plate, ed., Key Terms in Material Religion. For example, see, Tilley with Bennett, Body and Image. Johnston, ‘Enchanted Sight/Site’, pp. 189–206.

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esoteric, vernacular, and indigenous traditions.38 All of which should be considered with respect and considered as containing valid knowledge, even if its ontological foundation is vastly different. These epistemologies hold multiple forms of logic and are approaches that present new ways of viewing human–object–environment relations. Such conceptualizations of material agency may be built upon concepts of invisible forces and the alternate modes of perception required to apprehend them, and, as such, in taking them seriously shifts in human perception (‘alternate perception’) are to be understood as legitimate phenomena and areas of exploration. To perceive multiple agents, vibrant matter, then multiple forms of knowledge are likely to be required. To render such diverse perceptions and interpretations into academic discourse will also require a range of strategies. These need not be complex and could, for example, include presenting a range of different interpretations without advocating for the essential correctness of any specific argument (but this does not preclude making a case in preferential support of one argument). In this way, interpretations whose epistemological base is beyond the experience and perceptive skill of the scholar may still be accorded visibility, allowed ‘to speak’ rather than be silenced by omission. Secondly, as the experience of material relations are embodied, the researcher should pay attention to their own perceptive schema and embodied relations (this is exemplified in the methodologies advocated by Chris Tilley). How one ‘looks’ at a monument, site, landscape should itself be scrutinized. Changes in the mode of vision — its temporality for example (time of day/duration) — can also lead to developing new perceptions of the objects of study. Small exercises of this type hold the potential to draw attention to dominant modes of perception allowing consideration of the sociocultural foundations of these perceptive schemas. While it will remain impossible to know the perceptive schemas of the prehistoric peoples who built Maeshowe, a better understanding of the way in which our own schemas support certain experiences and kinds of knowledge while closing down other perceptions is an important realization.

Conclusion In his discussion of the ‘interrelation’ between myth and history, with myth here being understood as a singular founding ideology/narrative, Bruce Lincoln delineates three approaches: official, revisionist, and ‘epistemological doubt’. On the latter he writes: There is, however, a second form of critical history that maintains a principled distance not only from fiction, myth and official history, but from revisionism as well. This is the kind of storytelling that self-consciously emphasizes the gap separating present from past, taking note of how much has been irretrievably lost, and stressing the unsatisfactory, lacunary, and potentially misleading nature of the slender and always tendentious sources on which we rely when attempting to conjure up some vision of ‘what actually happened’. Critique founded on

38 Johnston, ‘Slippery and Saucy Discourse’, pp. 74–96.

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epistemological doubt, evidentiary inadequacy, and scholarly humility, it seems to me, is that form of narrative least inclined to stray toward the mythic.39 Lincoln’s remarks with regard to the evaluation of written sources is also salient for material culture, as its ‘evidentiary inadequacy’ to speak ‘what actually happened’ in the past, is always present — what can be known is dependent upon a range of sources and techniques, including scientific instruments of analysis. Different ‘histories’ emerge as such technology develops and changes. Similarly, remembering the partiality of our own perception and the dynamism of the sites themselves — these are lived landscapes — should be a necessary antidote to the construction of universal (or ‘mythic’) narratives. We cannot claim to ‘know’ the perceptual field of ancient peoples or the way in which they viewed the landscape. Indeed, despite the popularity of New Materialism we cannot simply assume that because animate forms of materiality exist (and continue to do so) that this was the dominant mode of perception in the past at Maeshowe. It may very well have been one of a diverse number of ways in which objects and landscapes were perceived. As illustrated by Antonia Thomas’s recent interpretation of ‘rock art’ found at the Ness of Brodgar, it is now mainstream to consider Orkney’s Neolithic landscapes through such a framework: I have suggested that it is useful to think of Neolithic Orkney through a relational ontology. This positions human activity — including stoneworking — within a network, or meshwork of broader social interactions between people and things. In this thinking, stone is considered not as neutral or inert, but as an active and meaningful element of the animate world.40 It is significant that such animate interpretations are now receiving so much attention (as some of the previously presented antiquarian interpretations demonstrated these are not new ideas); however, we should also be cautious not to lose sight of other interpretative frameworks. The dominance of animate (or New Materialism) approaches have their own biases. Just as there are multiple narratives about Maeshowe’s purpose and use, so too are there multiple ways of viewing it — and this directly impacts upon any concept of ‘ritual’ use. However, as I hope this chapter has indicated, just because a master narrative cannot be made does not mean that there is nothing to be said: educated guesses can be made and ‘space’ consciously given to the enormous diversity of approaches. Each of the interpretative examples examined herein evidence a more general conceptualization of the North that flourished in the Victorian period and which has been identified by Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, Danielle Marie Cudmore, and Stefan Donecker as a ‘remarkably consistent’ motif: ‘the notion of the North as a sphere of the supernatural’.41 They write further: Few motifs in European cultural history show such longevity. The idea that the North is associated with supernatural forces and endowed with metaphysical

39 Lincoln, Between History and Myth, p. 116. 40 Thomas, Art and Archaeology in Neolithic Orkney, p. 222. 41 Barraclough, Cudmore, and Donecker, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii.

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qualities has endured from antiquity to the present day. Throughout the centuries, authors have located all kinds of mysterious occurrences, otherworldly beings, and sorcerous inhabitants in the North.42 This chapter opened with a reference to Andy Goldsworthy’s proposition that ‘north’ was a medium: a felt agency with its own particular quality. In certain respects this could be viewed as a continuation of a general ‘othering’ of the north. This includes positioning it as a remote, mystical place in relation to centres of ‘southern’ culture as bastions of rationality (what has been termed ‘borealism’ after Edward Said’s work on ‘orientalism’).43 However, Goldworthy’s point pays heed to many of the forms of relation presented in this chapter. Relations that result in interpretations of place and object that take into account the invisible affect (whether attributed metaphysical origins or not) of particular places and material engagement. Such engagements are lived and have been lived over long periods of time by humans and other-than-human species in relation to one another. As such the ‘lore’ of the location is embedded underfoot, and written in stone, gleaned in verse and story, and accessed (always only ever partially) via many technologies of interpretation: scientific, discursive, creative.

Works Cited Primary Sources The Elder Edda: A Book of Viking Lore, trans. by Andy Orchard (London: Penguin, 2011) Kirk, Robert, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (Mineola: Dover, 2008) Secondary Works Aesthetics of Religion: Developing a New Perspective in the Study of Religion [accessed 10 May 2019] Barraclough, Eleanor R., Danielle M. Cudmore, and Stefan Donecker, ‘Introduction’, in Imagining the Supernatural North, ed. by Eleanor R. Barraclough, Danielle M. Cudmore, and Stefan Donecker (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2016), pp. ix–xxiii Barnes, Michael P., The Runic Inscriptions of Maeshowe, Orkney (Uppsala: Institutionen för nordiska språk Uppsala universitet, 1994) Bowman, Marion, and Ülo Valk, Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life: Expressions of Belief (London: Equinox, 2012) Cook, John, ‘A Comparison of Stonehenge with Stone Circles of Stenness Area’, Proceedings of the Orkney Antiquarian Society, xv: Session 1937–38–39 (Kirkwall: Orkney Antiquarian Society, 1939), pp. 53–59 42 Barraclough, Cudmore, and Donecker, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii. 43 On this topic see for example David, The Arctic in British Imagination and Davidson, The Idea of the North.

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David, Robert G., The Arctic in British Imagination, 1818–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) Davidson, Peter, The Idea of the North (London: Reaktion, 2005; repr. 2016) Farrar, James, Maes-howe: Notice of Runic Inscriptions Discovered during Recent Excavations in the Orkneys (Edinburgh: printed for private circulation, 1862) Foster, Sally, Maeshowe and the Heart of Neolithic Orkney (Edinburgh: Historic Scotland, 2006) Garrow, Duncan, and Chris Gosden, Technologies of Enchantment? Exploring Celtic Art: 400 bc to ad 100 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) Gell, Alfred, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998) Ingold, Tim, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skills (London: Routledge, 2000) Johnston, Jay, ‘Body/Embodiment’, in Vocabulary for the Study of Religion, ed. by Robert Segal and Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. e1–10 ———, ‘Enchanted Sight/Site: An Esoteric Aesthetics of Image and Experience’, in The Relational Dynamics of Enchantment and Sacralization, ed. by Peik Ingman and others (Sheffield: Equinox, 2016), pp. 189–206 ———, ‘Slippery and Saucy Discourse: Grappling with the Intersection of “Alternate Epistemologies” and Discourse Analysis’, in Making Religion: Theory and Practice in the Discursive Study of Religion, ed. by Frans Wijsen and Kocku von Stuckrad (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 74–96 ———, ‘The Elf in Self: The Influence of Northern Mythology and Fauna on Contemporary Spiritual Subcultures’, in Imagining the Supernatural North, ed. by Eleanor R. Barraclough, Danielle M. Cudmore, and Stefan Donecker (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2016), pp. 235–50 Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) Lincoln, Bruce, Between History and Myth: Stories of Harald Fairhair and the Founding of the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014) MacLeod, Mindy, and Bernard Mees, Runic Amulets and Magic Objects (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006) Malfouris, Lambros, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013) McKie, Robin, ‘Neolithic Discovery: Why Orkney Is the Centre of Ancient Britain’, The Guardian, 7 October 2012 [accessed 9 May 2019] McPherson, Joseph M., Primitive Beliefs in the North-East of Scotland (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929) Mitchell, Stephen A., Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) Noble, Gordon, Neolithic Scotland: Timber, Stone, Earth and Fire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) Orkney Herald, 9 July 1861, p. 2, ‘Antiquaries in Orkney’ Plate, S. Brent, ed., Key Terms in Material Religion (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) Said, Edward, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979)

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Simek, Rudolf, Dictionary of Northern Mythology (Cambridge: Brewer, 2007) Storer Clouston, Joseph, ‘Something about Maeshowe’, in Proceedings of the Orkney Antiquarian Society, xi: Session 1932–1933 (Kirkwall: Orkney Antiquarian Society, 1933), pp. 9–17 Stuart, John, ‘Notice of Excavations in the Chambered Mound of Maeshowe, in Orkney, and of the Runic Inscriptions on the Walls of its Central Chamber’, Proceedings of the Society of the Antiquaries of Scotland, 5 (1862–64), 247–79 [accessed 9 May 2019] Taylor, Marc C., Refiguring the Spiritual: Beuys Barney Turrell Goldsworthy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012) Thomas, Antonia, Art and Archaeology in Neolithic Orkney: Process, Temporality and Context (Oxford: Archaeopress Archaeology, 2016) Tilley, Christopher, with Wayne Bennett, Body and Image: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, ii (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2008) Wawn, Andrew, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in NineteenthCentury Britain (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000; repr. 2002) ———, Orkneyinga saga in Victorian Britain: A Tale of Three Projects (Lerwick: Shetland Museum and Archives, 2011)

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Ballantyne ‘on the Rocks’ The Arctic as Adventure-Arena

In his seminal study The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell examines what he calls ‘the monomyth’, the adventurous journey of the prototypical hero. This journey starts with a ‘call to adventure’, which signifies ‘that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown’.1 Even in the twenty-first century, the Arctic sea between the Canadian mainland and Greenland still qualifies as such a ‘zone unknown’, as a prototypical space for adventure, and it certainly did in the nineteenth century. Indeed, during the nineteenth century the area was becoming notorious for the danger surrounding the search for a north-west passage, a supposed route from Europe to Asia through Arctic waters, and it had certainly entered the British public imagination when the return of the third Arctic expedition led by Sir John Franklin became overdue in the late 1840s. In 1849 the British government had offered a reward of £20,000 for any ship of any nation that ‘rendered efficient assistance to Sir John Franklin, his ships, or their crews, and may have contributed directly to extricate them from the ice’, sparking considerable activity in the region.2 A number of search parties were sent out, but it took another five years for news of Franklin’s fate to reach England. In October 1854 The Times reported that Dr Rae, an explorer of the Hudson’s Bay Company, had learned from Inuit about a group of some forty white men, seen alive in the winter of 1850 but discovered dead some time later. Articles collected by Inuit at the site put it beyond reasonable doubt that the dead men had been survivors of Franklin’s Arctic expedition.3 Lady Franklin was not satisfied with the report — and

1 Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 48. 2 Day, Historical Dictionary of the Discovery and Exploration of the Northwest Passage, p. 102. In the 1850s, a weaver in a cotton mill would earn between 8s. 6d. and 11s. 2d. per week, or roughly £22 to £28 10s. per year, while a skilled mechanic could earn as much as £60 per year. Hence, the reward of £20,000 constituted an incredibly large amount of money. On wages see Giffen, Economic Enquiries and Studies, pp. 181–82. 3 ‘Arctic Expedition’, The Times (23 October 1854), p. 7. Jochen Petzold, Professor of British Studies, University of Regensburg. [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 227–243 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120795

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outraged by the claim that the last survivors had resorted to cannibalism4 — and she helped to finance a total of four search-and-rescue expeditions, spending more than £3000 and ‘exhausting the fortune she had received from her husband’s will’.5 Her final expedition left Aberdeen on 1 July 1857,6 and the public debate surrounding the privately funded enterprise — the subscription list published in The Times in June 1857 amounted to more than £25007 — may well have drawn Robert Michael Ballantyne’s attention to the Franklin Expedition and may have prompted him to consider the subject of an Arctic expedition for one of his novels. By the late 1850s, R. M. Ballantyne had already gained a certain reputation as a writer of adventure fiction, and the mystery of the Franklin expedition and the adventure of Arctic exploration must have appealed to him, since he had first-hand experience of Arctic regions, albeit on the Canadian mainland. As a young man Ballantyne had worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company, and his first literary endeavours were based on this experience: Hudson’s Bay: Or, Every-Day Life in the Wilds of North America, published in 1848, recounts his personal experiences; eight years later, he fictionalized his autobiography into a rather patchy plot in Snowflakes and Sunbeams: Or, the Young Fur Traders (1856). In his next two adventure stories, Ballantyne turned to South America (Martin Rattler, 1858) and the South Sea (The Coral Island, 1858), but he returned to the North with Ungava (1858), which again deals with fur trading in northern Canada. A year later, in November 1859 (although the imprint reads 1860),8 Ballantyne published The World of Ice: Or, Adventures in the Polar Regions, which will be at the centre of my analysis. It was the first time that Ballantyne wrote about naval exploration in the Arctic, and he could not draw from his own experiences as a trader of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Hence, Ballantyne had to rely on other sources and it will become clear that he certainly drew much inspiration and factual knowledge from Elisha Kent Kane’s Arctic Explorations (1856) — a book he also summarized in the chapters on ‘the recent expeditions in search of Sir John Franklin, including the voyage of the “Fox”, and the discovery of the fate of the Franklin expedition’9 which he contributed to a new edition of John Leslie and Hugh Murray’s Discovery and Adventure in the Polar Seas and Regions, published in the summer

4 Rae’s report as reprinted in The Times states the following: ‘From the mutilated state of many of the corpses and the contents of the kettles [as reported by Inuit], it is evident that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource — cannibalism — as a means of prolonging existence’ (‘Arctic Expedition’, p. 7). According to Alan Day, the reaction to Rae’s report ‘was one of outrage’ (Day, Historical Dictionary, p. 44). A brother of one of the officers of Franklin’s expedition criticized Rae severely in a letter to The Times for not investigating the Inuit claims and for publishing his report (E. J. H., ‘Dr Rae’s Reports on the Arctic Expedition’, p. 10), and Charles Dickens published an essay in his Household Words rejecting the idea that ‘such men as the officers and crews of the two lost ships would, or could, in any extremity of hunger, alleviate the pains of starvation by this horrible means’, instead suggesting that the explorers might have been murdered by Inuit (Dickens, ‘The Lost Arctic Voyagers’, p. 361). 5 Day, Historical Dictionary, p. 98. 6 Leslie, Murray, and Ballantyne, Discovery and Adventure in the Polar Seas and Regions, p. 555. 7 ‘Lady Franklin’s Final Search’, p. 8. 8 On the dating see Quayle, Ballantyne the Brave, p. 142. 9 The quote is taken from the title page of the book, which explicitly names R. M. Ballantyne as the author of this section; the chapters themselves are not explicitly attributed to an individual author.

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of 1860.10 His fictional adventure story The World of Ice makes no explicit reference to Franklin and his ill-fated expedition, but the plot clearly suggests the connection: Frederick (Fred) Ellice is the young hero of the tale. His father of the same name captained a whaler to the Northern Seas and, when he does not return or send word for three years, his son persuades a friend of his father’s to instruct the captain of one of his whalers, Captain Guy, to devote some time to a search for the lost ship and her crew. Furthermore, both Fred and Tom Singleton, the ship owner’s son, are to travel along. The Dolphin sails north, eventually becoming ice-locked off the west coast of Greenland, and the crew have to spend the winter in the ice. They survive — as I will argue, mainly due to the help they receive from Inuit — and they even manage to find and rescue Fred’s father, the sole survivor of the wreck of his ship. The World of Ice recounts a search-and-rescue operation in Arctic waters, and I will argue that in the process of telling the tale, Ballantyne presents a striking image of the area as a space particularly well suited for adventure, a space in which the adventurers are beset by dangers, have to overcome obstacles and endure physical hardships, and can prove themselves when they battle with the elements and wild animals. Furthermore, I will show that Ballantyne’s politics of representing the native inhabitants of the region are indicative of his Eurocentric prejudices: colonial discourse clearly colours the representation of Inuit as ‘other’ to the European heroes of the tale, while the plot inadvertently makes it clear that these white heroes would not have survived without indigenous help.

The Far North as a Space of Adventure Ballantyne presents the Baffin Bay area as a space ideally suited for adventure, as a kind of playground in which the heroes of the tale can prove their mettle. Indeed, it was an area outside immediate European regulation: the legal doctrine that the ‘uses of the seas beyond a narrow band of waters adjacent to the coast were available to all’ had been established in the seventeenth century,11 and the only reference made to the Danish presence in Greenland — the colonial power since the Treaty of Kiel (1814) — is with regard to a few scattered settlements; of these, only Upernavik is mentioned by name (Ballantyne uses the Anglicized spelling Uppernavik), and the narrator relates that the governor receives Captain Guy and a small delegation from the Dolphin ‘with great kindness and hospitality’.12 The governor tells them that a year ago, Captain Ellice left the settlement and ‘set sail for England’, but he lets Captain Guy continue his expedition as he pleases. Hence, the Dolphin continues its journey north, passing ‘one or two Esquimaux settlements, the last of which, Yotlik, is the most northerly point of colonization’, and the narrator comments that ‘beyond this all was terra incognita’.13 With this declaration Ballantyne follows Elisha Kane, who also describes Yotlik as ‘the furthest point of colonization; beyond which,

10 Quayle, Ballantyne, p. 142. 11 Juda, International Law and Ocean Use Management, p. 2. 12 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 51. 13 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 51.

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save the sparse headlands of the charts, the coast may be regarded as unknown’.14 Later on, Captain Guy voices his opinion that they have come ‘far beyond the most northerly sea that has ever yet been reached’,15 and hence they have come to an area that is largely unmapped and completely outside the effective control of European state structures.16 Furthermore, the far North can become an ideal space for playful adventure because Fred and Tom are not encumbered by tedious duties: Fred sails along ‘as a passenger’, and while Tom is officially the ‘surgeon of the ship’, this does not seem to put him under many obligations.17 Along similar lines it is noteworthy that the Dolphin, although officially on a whaling cruise, does not show much activity in this line of work. The narrator describes only one encounter with a whale, in which the animal escapes. On reaching Baffin Bay, it is the captain’s intention ‘to search for the vessel of his friend Captain Ellice’, and the crew realizes ‘that they were engaged as much on a searching as a whaling expedition’.18 This exclusive change of purpose is somewhat surprising, since the search is carried out in the hunting grounds of the whaling industry and the narrator informs us that ‘many whalers were seen actively engaged in warfare with the giants of the Polar Seas’,19 but from this point onwards whaling does not play a role. As a plot device, this shift allows Ballantyne to disregard the potential tedium of repetitions and it gives his fictional characters ample time to admire the surreal beauty of the Arctic landscape. Early in the story, the narrator describes a ‘lovely arctic day’: The sun shone with unclouded splendour, […]. All round the pure surfaces of the ice-fields were broken by the shadows which the hummocks and bergs cast over them, and by the pools of clear water which shone like crystals in their hollows, while the beautiful beryl blue of the larger bergs gave a delicate colouring to the dazzling scene. Words cannot describe the intense glitter that characterized everything. Every point seemed a diamond, every edge sent forth a gleam of light, and many of the masses reflected the rich prismatic colours of the rainbow.20 The description emphasizes light and glitter, and one of the seamen declares ‘Ain’t it glorious?’, receiving the reply that ‘it bates the owld country inteirely, it does’.21 A few

14 Kane, Arctic Explorations, i, 32. Indeed, Kane declares in an endnote that with the exception of ‘occasional parties for the chase of the white bear or the collection of eider-down, there are no natives north of Yotlik’ (Kane, Arctic Explorations, i, 454 n. 5), information that Ballantyne ignores in writing the novel. 15 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 65. 16 Since 1776, the trading monopoly of the Royal Greenland Trading Department (RGTD) extended to the latitude of 73° north (Bobé, ‘History of the Trade and Colonization until 1870’, p. 125; Marquardt, ‘Change and Continuity in Denmark’s Greenland Policy’, p. 156). Since Kane places Yotlik at 73° 40’ north (Arctic Exploration, ii, 52), the area in which Ballantyne sets most of his novel would have been beyond the jurisdiction of the RGTD. 17 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 23. 18 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 48. 19 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 48. 20 Ballantyne, World of Ice, pp. 81–82. 21 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 82.

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pages later, observing a different scene, one of the central characters is overwhelmed by its beauty: ‘“What a scene!” exclaimed Tom Singleton, when he found words to express his admiration. “I did not think that our world contained so grand a sight. It surpasses my wildest dreams of fairy-land”’.22 And his companion Fred replies that ‘fairy tales are all stuff, and very inferior stuff too’, declaring that ‘this reality is a thousand million times grander than anything that was ever invented’.23 However, the beauty of the scenery hides potentially lethal dangers. At one point, the Dolphin is almost crushed between two icebergs, and shortly afterwards the crew witness the destruction of an abandoned vessel, an event that is described in vivid detail: the two masses of ice closed, and the brig was nipped between them. For a few seconds she seemed to tremble like a living creature, and every timber creaked. Then she was turned slowly on one side, until the crew of the Dolphin could see down into her hold, where the beams were giving way and cracking up as matches might be crushed in the grasp of a strong hand. […] Scarcely three minutes had passed since the nip commenced; in one minute more the brig went down, and the ice was rolling wildly, as if in triumph, over the spot where she had disappeared.24 Clearly, the ice poses a severe threat to the fictional Dolphin and its fictional crew, as it did to real ships in the real world. Ballantyne knew of these dangers, as he was preparing his contribution to the new edition of Discovery and Adventure in the Polar Seas and Region roughly at the same time he was writing The World of Ice. The chapter on northern whale-fishery states that the dangers are ‘many and great’, and explicitly points out that the ‘most obvious peril is that of the ship being beset and sometimes dashed to pieces by the collision of the icy mountains with which those seas are continually filled’.25 Indeed, in his four chapters on the various search and rescue expeditions looking for Franklin, Ballantyne writes repeatedly of the danger of ships (or their boats) being ‘crushed’ or ‘nipped’ by the ice.26 When the Dolphin is frozen in and all attempts at freeing her fail, mere survival becomes the goal and the main environmental dangers are darkness combined with severe cold. Furthermore, we are told that the ship ‘was ill provided with the supplies that men deem absolutely indispensable for a winter in the Arctic Regions’27 — namely,

22 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 96. 23 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 96. 24 Ballantyne, World of Ice, pp. 73–74. 25 Leslie, Discovery and Adventure, p. 612. Ballantyne did not write the chapter on whale fishery, but it seems certain that he knew it when writing The World of Ice, since he clearly based the description of the Dolphin on that of a typical arctic whaler found in Discovery and Adventure; cf. Leslie, Discovery and Adventure, p. 604 and The World of Ice, p. 29. 26 Leslie, Discovery and Adventure; references to ships being ‘crushed’ appear on pp. 438, 477, 484, 486, 487, 496, 512, 528, 559, 567, 575, and 586; references to ‘nips’ or ships being ‘nipped’ appear on pp. 436, 478, 496, 497, 549, and 566. 27 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 110.

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fuel and suitable food. Indeed, ‘most of the provisions were salt’, so that ‘without fresh provisions they stood a poor chance of escaping that dire disease scurvy, before which have fallen so many gallant tars whom nothing in the shape of dangers or difficulties could subdue’.28 This admission to faulty preparation may seem somewhat surprising, since the Dolphin had been specifically built for whaling in the Arctic and since its crew was meant to look for Captain Ellice. However, it is a plot device that adds to the danger and hence potentially increases the readers’ suspense. Furthermore, being ice-locked for one winter gives Fred and Tom the opportunity to explore on foot and on dog-sledge, and to prove themselves as hunters. Again, the far North is presented as an ideal space for adventure, populated with strange and sometimes dangerous creatures like polar bears, seals, and walruses. Most importantly, the region is not without human inhabitants and the English come into repeated contact with Inuit (of course, Ballantyne calls them Esquimaux).

Representation of Inuit At Upernavik the Dolphin takes on board ‘an Esquimau hunter and interpreter, named Meetuck’.29 Over the next roughly seventy pages, Meetuck is referred to only twice, and both references indicate that he is a successful hunter. However, when the readers meet him for the first time, after the ship has become ice-locked, this impression is undercut. Captain Guy wants to talk to Meetuck about the likelihood of finding deer in the area, but Fred discredits Meetuck’s role as the expert with local knowledge when he declares that he will go along with the hunting party in order ‘to take care of Meetuck’, adding that ‘he’s apt to get into mischief when left—’.30 Fred does not finish his sentence, which clearly invites a reading that suggests Meetuck has to be supervised by Europeans so as not to ‘get into mischief ’ and hence makes him seem inferior to the Europeans. This interpretation is strengthened by the ensuing events, which also belittle the Inuk. Fred does not speak on because at ‘this moment a tremendous shout of laughter, long continued, came from the deck’, and the object of mirth turns out to be the seamen dressed ‘from head to foot in Esquimaux costume’, ‘capering with delight at the ridiculous appearance they presented’.31 While one might conclude that the spectacle is funny because the seamen feel as if they were in fancy dress, this is not the case; rather, it is the ‘Esquimaux costume’ itself that is perceived as inherently funny. The narrator tells us that when Meetuck ‘put on his winter dress he became such a round, soft, squat, hairy, and comical-looking creature, that no one could look at him without laughing’.32 While Ballantyne makes fun of the Inuk’s dress, he also acknowledges that it is effective: when the Arctic winter sets

28 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 109. 29 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 51. 30 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 118. 31 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 118. 32 Ballantyne, World of Ice, pp. 119–20.

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in, the seamen find out that ‘their ordinary dreadnoughts and pea-jackets, etc., were not a sufficient protection against the cold’,33 and the captain tells them to produce winter clothing of the type worn by Inuit.34 Arguably, this paradoxical portrayal follows the general pattern of Ballantyne’s depiction of Inuit: they are repeatedly ridiculed and/or denigrated, but the narrator has to admit that their customs are indeed well suited to the harsh conditions. More specifically, Ballantyne employs typical strategies of colonial discourse that present Inuit as ‘other’ to the English characters, that is, they are given character traits that are generally seen as negative. Hence, in the novel Inuit function as a negative foil that makes the English heroes appear all the more virtuous and heroic. Indeed, it will become clear that Ballantyne presents Inuit as ridiculous, somewhat repulsive, and utterly lacking in restraint on various levels. Of course, the othering of natives is hardly surprising in a text from the middle of the nineteenth century, but it is noteworthy how far Ballantyne goes beyond his sources in depicting Inuit as over-excited children. This becomes clear when comparing the scene that describes the first prolonged meeting between a group of Inuit and the crew of the Dolphin with a similar scene in Elisha Kane’s non-fictional Arctic Explorations. This is how Kane recounts the first visit of Inuit on board his ship: When they were first allowed to come on board, they were very rude and difficult to manage. They spoke three or four at a time, to each other and to us, laughing heartily at our ignorance in not understanding them, and then talking away as before. They were incessantly in motion, going everywhere, trying doors and squeezing themselves through dark passages, round casks and boxes, and out into the light again, anxious to touch and handle everything they saw, and asking for, or else endeavouring to steal, everything they touched. It was the more difficult to restrain them, as I did not wish them to suppose that we were at all intimidated. But there were some signs of our disabled condition which it was important they should not see;35 Kane was anxious to control the Inuit, because he knew he was dependent on their goodwill, at least to some extent. Indeed, Kane notes that the Inuit ‘had it in their power to molest us seriously in our sledge-travel; they could make our hunts around the harbour dangerous; and my best chance of obtaining an abundant supply of fresh meat, our great desideratum, was by their agency’.36 The same could be said of the situation of Ballantyne’s fictional characters, but he describes the first visit

33 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 120. 34 The American Elisha Kane was very open to adopting Inuit customs and, in using his narrative as source, Ballantyne’s heroes do the same. According to Robert Feeney, this would have been unusual for a British naval expedition, since the ‘British refused to admit that their inadequate winter clothing was so inferior to what the Scandinavians or Eskimos wore at the time. They believed that Eskimo food and the use of dogs were beneath a British sailor and certainly unthinkable for a British officer’. See Feeney, Polar Journeys, p. 47. 35 Kane, Arctic Explorations, i, 207–08. 36 Kane, Arctic Explorations, i, 211.

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of Inuit on board the Dolphin in a way that presents them as ridiculous rather than potentially dangerous: It was exceedingly interesting and amusing to observe the feelings of amazement and delight expressed by those barbarous but good-humoured and intelligent people at everything they saw. While food was preparing for them, they were taken round the ship, on deck and below, and the sailors explained, in pantomime, the use of everything. They laughed, and exclaimed, and shouted, and even roared with delight, and touched everything with their fingers, just as monkeys are wont to do when let loose.37 The two scenes described are obviously very similar, but Ballantyne strips his version of all potential danger: observing the group of Inuit is ‘amusing’, not threatening. Both Kane and Ballantyne’s narrator speak of the Inuit’s laughter, but while in Kane’s text they laugh at the explorers’ inability to understand them, and hence out of a position of superiority, they laugh for no apparent reason in The World of Ice, which suggests they are naturally over-emotional. Furthermore, while Kane is aware of his (and his crew’s) ‘ignorance’ in understanding the Inuit, Ballantyne’s seamen are depicted as intellectually superior, able to ‘explain, in pantomime, the use of everything’. Both texts refer to the incessant motion of the visitors, and of their attempt to touch everything they see, but while Kane highlights the danger of theft, Ballantyne links the Inuit to monkeys. Another association suggested by Ballantyne’s text is that of excited children, unable to control their emotions. Like children, the ‘barbarous’ Inuit are ‘intelligent’, i.e. have the potential to understand things, but are amazed and delighted by what they see — which suggests that they do not really understand and hence they laugh and roar with delight when the sailors try to explain.38 This link between Inuit and children becomes particularly obvious when they express their joy at various gifts: First of all, however, a number of presents were made to them [Inuit], and it would really have done your heart good, reader, to have witnessed the extravagant joy displayed by them on receiving such trifles as bits of hoop-iron, beads, knives, scissors, needles, etc. […] But the present which drew forth the most uproarious applause was a Union Jack, which the captain gave to their chief, Awatok. […] [Awatok] gave vent to a tremendous shout, seized the flag, hugged it in his arms, and darted up on the deck literally roaring with delight. The sympathetic hearts of the natives on the ice echoed the cry before they knew the cause of it; but when they beheld the prize, they yelled, and screamed, and danced, and tossed their arms in the air in the most violent manner.39

37 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 188. 38 Charles Darwin provides a perfect example of how little can be meant by the word ‘intelligent’: ‘If worms have the power of acquiring some notion, however rude, of the shape of an object and of their burrows, as seems to be the case, they deserve to be called intelligent’. Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, p. 97. 39 Ballantyne, World of Ice, pp. 189–90.

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The suggestion that witnessing the scene ‘would really have done [the reader’s] heart good’ puts her or him into the paternalistic position of a donor of charity, who is emotionally rewarded by seeing his gifts received with exuberant joy and simultaneously ridicules the Inuit. As the narrator points out, iron ‘is as precious among them [Inuit] as gold is among civilized people’ and hence the excitement at receiving practical items like scissors or needles is understandable. But while the narrator is aware of the practical importance of these articles, he is unable (or unwilling) to truly take on the Inuit’s perspective. Rather, by calling the gifts ‘trifles’ he remains within the British perspective and ridicules the Inuit’s reaction. Furthermore, their expressions of joy when seeing the Union Jack — which is of no practical value to them and can have no cultural significance — is clearly marked as excessive. Not surprisingly, then, one of the seamen declares that ‘They’re all mad, ivery mother’s son o’ them’,40 and this opinion is not contradicted by the text. Handing out trifles to uncivilized so-called savages is a common scene in colonial encounters, and emphasizing emotional excess is a typical feature of colonialist texts that construct natives as uncivilized others to European explorers. For example, compare Ballantyne’s description of Inuit to a missionary’s description of Africans: As we drew near to York [in Sierra Leone], we discovered a number of figures crowding on the rocks to catch a glimpse of us. They were jumping about in a way that is quite peculiar to the negro when excited by great joy. […]. As soon as I set my feet on the ground, I was surrounded by a crowd of black women, dancing and shouting with all their might.41 The excerpt appeared roughly at the same time as The World of Ice, in the The Juvenile Companion and Sunday School Hive, in a piece in which a missionary narrates his experiences in Sierra Leone. The comparison shows that both Inuit and Africans are depicted as extremely excitable and as lacking all restraint in displaying their excitement. By comparison, the men of the Dolphin as well as the missionary appear rational and serene. The charge of lacking restraint does not only pertain to showing emotion; Inuit are also said to lack all restraint when it comes to eating, their ‘principal and favourite occupation’,42 and consequently they are described as being grotesquely fat. Interestingly, the accusation of frequent over-eating is also often directed against Africans — for example, in Black Ivory (1873) Ballantyne describes a night of continuous eating where the Africans gorge ‘themselves to an extent that civilized people might perhaps have thought dangerous’.43 And there is yet another feature that links Ballantyne’s description of Inuit to contemporary descriptions of Africans: both are often depicted as lacking moral restraint with regard to other people’s property. Again, a comparison between Ballantyne’s text and his source is interesting, as it reveals how Ballantyne reshaped the material he was using. Elisha Kane notes that

40 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 190. 41 Worboys, ‘News from a Far Country’, p. 266. 42 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 286. 43 Ballantyne, Black Ivory, p. 230.

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the Inuit are continuously stealing from them, but he is unwilling to interpret this ‘as an act of hostility’. Indeed, he displays a certain amount of cultural relativism when he suggests that a different concept of property rights might be an explanation for this behaviour: ‘Their pilferings before this had been conducted with such a superb simplicity, the detection followed by such honest explosions of laughter, that I could not help thinking that they had some law of general appropriation’.44 In Ballantyne’s novel, the Inuit also laugh when convicted of theft, and Captain Guy also suggests that the ‘poor fellows do not regard theft in the same light that we do’,45 but the text does not suggest a cultural norm that would explain Inuit behaviour. Rather, Ballantyne interprets it as the result of a moral insufficiency by introducing a religious dimension that is absent from Kane’s account. Thus, the narrator comments that the Inuit ‘evidently thought stealing to be no sin, and were not the least ashamed of being detected’.46 By emphasizing the concepts of sin and shame, Ballantyne defines theft not as a legal but as a moral problem. Furthermore, the Inuit are described as ‘poor creatures’ and ‘poor fellows’ in the immediate context of stealing,47 and while the adjective could be interpreted in a material sense, as an excuse for the crime, it is clearly meant as a comment on their moral depravity. It has become clear that Ballantyne depicts Inuit as morally and intellectually inferior to the English sailors; more specifically, he links them to children who lack restraint on various levels. Hence, Ballantyne’s Inuit are excessively emotional, excessive in their food consumption, and lack the moral restraint that would prevent theft. However, this is only one side of the equation, as it were, since Ballantyne also presents Inuit as extremely well adapted to the life they lead in extremely difficult circumstances. Somewhat paradoxically, the allegedly ‘childish’ Inuit are expert hunters. Meetuck was expressly hired as a hunter and the narrator points out that ‘the muskets of Meetuck, and those who accompanied him, seldom failed to supply the ship with an abundance of the flesh of seals, walrus and polar bears’, suggesting that it is Meetuck who leads the hunting trips.48 Indeed, the explorers are fascinated by Meetuck’s method of hunting seals on the open ice, one of the sailors calling it a ‘clivir trick’ and Fred agreeing that it is a ‘capital dodge’ to advance behind a canvas screen mounted on a small sledge.49 When the British explorers accompany a group of Inuit on a walrus-hunt, they similarly acknowledge local expertise by ‘taking care to keep in rear of Awatok in order to follow his lead, for they were as yet ignorant of the proper mode of attack’.50 Furthermore, Fred and Tom, the two central characters of the tale, are shown to be extremely foolhardy in their first encounter with a

44 Kane, Arctic Explorations, i, 365. 45 Ballantyne, World of Ice, pp. 193–94. 46 Ballantyne, World of Ice, pp. 194–95. 47 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 193. 48 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 109. 49 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 140. This method of hunting seals is also described in Kane’s Arctic Explorations, and Ballantyne even copied the illustration printed in Kane’s account (see Kane, Arctic Explorations, i, 243). 50 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 236.

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polar bear: they rush into an attack and are only stopped when they come up to an insurmountable channel in the ice, and the narrator comments that ‘to attack a Polar bear with a musket charged only with small shot, and a geological hammer, would have been about as safe and successful an operation as trying to stop a locomotive with one’s hand’ and calls their behaviour ‘reckless’.51 Thus, somewhat paradoxically, Inuit expertise is contrasted with European over-excitement — which is, however, presented in a way that highlights the heroes’ courage. While their ability to hunt could be easily reconciled with depicting the Inuit as uncivilized savages, Ballantyne also acknowledges their technical adaptability. Approaching winter proves that the Inuit have developed clothing that is superior to that brought by the sailors on the Dolphin, and their sledges are constructed in a fashion that is extremely well suited to withstand the extreme temperatures. The narrator tells us that an Inuit sledge ‘looked like a rickety affair, ready to fall to pieces’ but continues to praise its construction: ‘In reality, however, it was very strong. No metal nails of any kind could have held in the keen frost; they would have snapped like glass at the first jolt; but the seal-skin fastenings yielded to the rude shocks and twistings to which the sledge was subjected’.52 Interestingly, the warm clothing is ridiculed as inherently funny and the sledge looks ‘like a rickety affair’, but they both turn out to be extremely well suited for their intended purposes. Hence, an implicit lesson could be that appearances can be deceptive, but for Ballantyne this does not raise the Inuit to the same level as the British seamen. Rather, Inuit are continuously referred to as ‘natives’,53 which in a colonial context suggests cultural inferiority,54 and even when the narrator defends their practice of eating raw flesh, this does not change the assessment of their backwardness: The Esquimaux prefer it [meat] raw in these parts of the world […] and with good reason, for it is much more nourishing than cooked flesh; and learned, scientific men, who have wintered in the Arctic regions, have distinctly stated that in those cold countries they have found raw meat to be better for them than cooked meat, and they assure us that they came at last to prefer it! We would not have our readers to begin forthwith to dispense with the art of cookery […], but we would have them henceforth refuse to accept that common opinion and vulgar error, that Esquimaux eat their food raw because they are savages. They do it because nature teaches them that, under the circumstances, it is best.55 The precise line of reasoning is interesting here: the fact that Inuit eat raw meat is not, in itself, an indication of their supposed savage state, since ‘learned, scientific 51 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 100. 52 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 131. 53 See WI, pp. 148, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 193, 197, 218, 249, 251, 255, 257, 299. 54 For example, the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, first published in 1911, still defines native as ‘member of non-European or uncivilized race’. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, p. 538. 55 Ballantyne, World of Ice, pp. 154–55.

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men’ — clearly, this implies that they come from a European or North American background — do the same thing. However, for the narrator this does not mean that Inuit are not savages — although the term is only used three times in the novel in connection with Inuit.56 Rather, in putting special emphasis on the specific circumstances for eating raw meat, the narrator implies that it would be a ‘savage’ practice in other circumstances. This is interesting, because the implication is not included in Ballantyne’s source. One of the ‘learned, scientific men’ Ballantyne draws on as witness for the suitability of raw meat was clearly Elisha Kane, who declared that their journey had taught him and his crew ‘the wisdom of the Esquimaux appetite’.57 Ballantyne’s explanation hinges exclusively on the practical justification that raw meat is more nourishing, and hence better, for a traveller in Arctic regions. The assertion that the learned men might actually come to prefer it is mainly to be seen in this light, since the double emphasis of an exclamation mark and the use of italics suggests that this is hard to believe. Kane, however, gives a very different explanation which is not only based on utility, but also on taste: there are few among us who do not relish a slice of raw blubber or a chunk of frozen walrus-beef. The liver of a walrus (awuktanuk) eaten with little slices of his fat, — of a variety it is a delicious morsel. Fire would ruin the curt, pithy expression of vitality which belongs to its uncooked juices.58 In Kane’s account, raw walrus meat is a ‘delicious morsel’ to be ‘relished’, and it causes a taste-sensation that would be ‘ruined’ through cooking — clearly, this assessment cannot be simply put down to circumstances or practicality. And indeed, Kane does not limit the eating of raw meat to the polar regions. Rather, he expressly wonders ‘that raw beef is not eaten at home’, since it can be made into ‘a salad which an educated palate cannot help relishing’.59 Ballantyne’s heroes go native, as it were, out of practical necessity; Kane suggests that the eating of raw meat is very advisable in its own right.

Reconfirming European Superiority While the heroes of Ballantyne’s tale have to go native, at least to some extent, in order to survive, the text also makes it very clear that we are to see the Inuit as inferior to the crew of the Dolphin. This is achieved implicitly by ridiculing Inuit as childlike, but Ballantyne also establishes European superiority more explicitly, and again he draws on the account of Elisha Kane to do so. When Kane discovers the theft of various articles he is ‘puzzled how to inflict punishment’, but realizes that he ‘must act vigorously, even at a venture’.60 His intention

56 See Ballantyne, World of Ice, pp. 141, 152, 218. 57 Kane, Arctic Explorations, ii, 15. 58 Kane, Arctic Explorations, ii, 15. 59 Kane, Arctic Explorations, ii, 15. 60 Kane, Arctic Explorations, i, 365.

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is obviously to bully the local Inuit into submission in order to secure their help and to hide his own weakness. He launches a punitive expedition which not only recovers the stolen goods but which also takes three of the culprits as hostages back to camp. In recording the incident, Kane is aware of its symbolic importance and he apparently put on a show calculated to impress: he sends back one of the hostages ‘with the message of a melo-dramatic tyrant, to negotiate for [the hostages’] ransom’.61 The strategy is clearly condescending, as it suggests Inuit are intellectually inferior and hence unable to see through the verbal performance. However, Kane is also aware that the ‘splendours of [their] Arctic centre of civilization, with its wonders of art and science’62 are not sufficiently impressive and that he has to prove the physical superiority of his group — which he achieves through the punitive expedition: Metek [the head-man of the group of Inuit] thought, no doubt, that our strength was gone with the withdrawing party; but the fact, that within ten hours after the loss of our buffalo-skins we had marched to their hut, seized three of their culprits, and marched them back to the brig as prisoners, — such a sixty miles’ achievement as this they thoroughly understood. It confirmed them in the faith that the whites are, and of right ought to be everywhere the dominant tribe.63 Kane’s self-irony in talking about his ‘Arctic centre of civilization’ notwithstanding, this last statement of white superiority clearly mirrors his beliefs, as it does those of Ballantyne. Ballantyne adopts the motif of the punitive expedition, although he alters some of the details. But in both the factual and the fictional account the intention behind the trip is ‘to impress the Esquimaux with a salutary sense of the power, promptitude, and courage of Europeans’,64 and in both cases it is said to be effective. Not surprisingly, Ballantyne has the captain add ‘a lengthened speech as to the sin and meanness of stealing’, which, in combination with threats of reprisal and promises of presents, is said to ‘make a considerable impression on his uncouth hearers’,65 but he also insists that the physical feat accomplished was of paramount importance in coming to a mutual agreement: Strength of muscle and promptitude in action are qualities which all nations in a savage state understand and respect, and the sailors proved that they possessed these qualities in a higher degree than themselves during the hardships and dangers incident to Arctic life, while at the same time their seemingly endless resources and contrivances impressed the simple natives with the belief that white men could accomplish anything they chose to attempt.66 The basic sentiment of white supremacy is the same in Kane’s and Ballantyne’s versions, but the latter clearly goes beyond the former in emphasizing this assumed 61 Kane, Arctic Explorations, i, 367. 62 Kane, Arctic Explorations, i, 367. 63 Kane, Arctic Explorations, i, 368. 64 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 199. 65 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 199. 66 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 218.

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supremacy. For Ballantyne, Inuit are ‘in a savage state’ and are ‘simple’ enough to believe — all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding — that ‘white men could accomplish anything’. For indeed, the Europeans are dependent on Inuit hunting skills for their survival. The crew of the Dolphin are continuously bartering for food with Inuit, and the fact that the latter are able to trade food for other articles is a clear indication that they are accomplished hunters who are able to produce more food than is necessary for their survival — which the Europeans clearly are not. Indeed, when scurvy threatens the crew of the Dolphin, the captain sends out one group of men specifically ‘to find the Esquimaux, who […] would probably have fresh meat in their camp’.67 Nonetheless, Ballantyne still manages to suggest that the Englishmen are somehow responsible for Inuit successes. Setting out for the joint walrus hunt referred to above, the narrator claims that the Inuit ‘were in a state of great glee, for previous to the arrival of the sailors they had been unsuccessful in their hunts, and had been living on short allowance’.68 The ensuing hunt turns out very successful, and a causal connection between the white presence and the hunting success is at least implied. Despite the narrator’s insistence on European supremacy, it seems as if the characters need to convince themselves of their status, since European domination is one of the key concerns of a theatre performance some of the men put on for the entertainment of the rest of the crew. The play is said to have been written by Fred Ellice, who also functions as manager and takes part in the performance. The play is a farce with a strong emphasis on slapstick violence. An Inuit woman is held captive by two polar bears; she is discovered by the Inuit king, called Blunderbore, who proposes marriage but she refuses, telling the king he is ‘too big, and fierce, and ugly to love’.69 Blunderbore is attacked by the polar bears when Ben Bolt, ‘a jolly, jolly tar’,70 happens to arrive at the scene, outwitting and killing both bears. Ben falls in love with the Inuit woman and after a short bout of jealous rage Blunderbore relents and marries Ben and the woman. The narrator insists that the performance was a great success, but he also points out that it was ‘left a matter of uncertainty whether Ben Bolt and his Esquimau bride returned to live happily during the remainder of their lives in England, or took up their permanent abode with Blunderbore’; however, he concludes that ‘it is not [his] province to criticise’ but merely to ‘chronicle events as they occurred’.71 Indeed, the ending suggests that the jolly tar may have gone native in a way that would not be condoned in the non-fictional Victorian England, but the dominant message is one of English superiority versus Inuit inferiority. The character Ben Bolt — his name suggests a quarrel or a flash of lightning — is played by John Buzzby, an old friend of Fred’s who was initially introduced as ‘a regular true-blue Jack tar

67 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 221. 68 Ballantyne, World of Ice, pp. 240–41. 69 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 210. 70 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 211. 71 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 217.

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of the old school, […] tough, and sturdy, and grizzled, and broad, and square, and massive — a first-rate specimen of a John Bull’.72 Hence, Buzzby already presents the prototypical English ‘tar’ (sailor) and he is cast to play exactly this: the prototypical English tar. His character represents the crew of the Dolphin and when he comes on stage, dressed in his former dress, ‘a costume which had not been seen for so many months by the crew of the Dolphin’,73 the sailors, all dressed in Inuit style, are reminded of their European identity. Indeed, the narrator tells us that ‘their hearts warmed’ to Buzzby’s dress ‘as if it were an old friend’.74 Ben Bolt as played by Buzzby is one of them, and he represents the virtues typically attributed to an ideal English tar, particularly promptitude, resourcefulness, and bravery. This is underscored when Ben sings a song that praises his own involvement in the Battle of Trafalgar: his bravery and fierceness in action is said to have ‘gained the day’,75 and in a similar manner his actions in the play ‘gain the day’ against polar bears and the Inuit king. The latter may be a giant and hence stronger than Ben Bolt, but he is unable to overcome the bears — a feat that Ben manages by wit and cunning rather than by actual strength: he ties the tails of the bears together, which gives him the decisive advantage. Hence wit wins over the blundering strength of Blunderbore, the damsel in distress is rescued and ‘naturally’ falls in love with her rescuer. Thus, the play clearly reconfirms British superiority over polar wildlife, both in its human and animal forms. The dance at the end of the performance is then interrupted by the arrival of a group of Inuit ‘who had been sent from the camp with the stolen property, and with a humble request that the offence might be forgiven’.76 Hence, the overtly fictional insistence on European superiority is followed immediately by a plot development that similarly underscores European superiority. The Inuit chief Awatok has witnessed the theatre performance and when the narrator concludes that the ‘seemingly endless resources and contrivances’ of the English ‘impressed the simple natives with the belief that white men could accomplish anything they chose to attempt’,77 this statement does not only comment on the physical feat of the punitive expedition in which Awatok was taken prisoner, but also serves as a reinforcement of the political implications of the play.

Conclusion The World of Ice is an adventure tale mainly intended for boys or young adults, and the genre clearly influences Ballantyne’s presentation of the far North and its inhabitants. The landscape is depicted as an ideal space for adventure, a ‘zone unknown’ in the words of Campbell, largely unmapped and unregulated by state 72 Ballantyne, World of Ice, pp. 1–2. 73 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 211. 74 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 211. 75 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 213. 76 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 217. 77 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 218.

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structures. Hence the young heroes can move freely through a landscape that challenges them with physical dangers but rewards them with surreal beauty and successful hunting adventures. As is the case in many adventure stories written during the nineteenth century, encounters with ‘natives’ form part of the adventure, although, somewhat unusually, in this story there is no real danger of violent hostilities between adventurers and natives. The message of Ballantnye’s text with regard to Inuit is somewhat contradictory: on the one hand, the novel indicates that the Englishmen would not have survived the Arctic winter without the help they receive from the natives, and the rescue-plot would certainly have failed, since Fred’s father only survived the loss of his ship because he was ‘kindly received by the Esquimaux’.78 On the other hand, the novel repeatedly stresses European superiority, and denigrates Inuit as childlike and ridiculous.79 And while the text utilizes colonial discourse to construct Inuit — in their fictional representation as Esquimaux — as other to the English sailors, it is unusual, particularly in comparison to colonialist texts set in other regions of the world, in granting Inuit so much local expertise. However, Ballantyne was clearly not able to truly acknowledge the debt his fictional Englishmen owe his fictional Inuit; instead he puts the success of Fred’s rescue mission down to providence. As Captain Ellice points out near the end of the novel, There is no spot on earth, I think, equal to the Polar Regions for bringing out into bold relief two great and apparently antagonistic truths — namely, man’s urgent need of all his powers to accomplish the work of his own deliverance, and man’s utter helplessness and entire dependence on the sovereign will of God.80 Between achieving ‘man’s own deliverance’ and ‘the sovereign will of God’, the help of the ‘poor’, ‘good-natured’, excitable, and childlike ‘savages’ is conveniently forgotten in Ballantyne’s novel.

Works Cited Primary Sources Ballantyne, Robert Michael, The World of Ice: Or, Adventures in the Polar Regions (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1860; repr. 1862) ———, Black Ivory: A Tale of Adventure among the Slavers of East Africa, 5th edn (London: James Nisbet, 1878; 1st edn 1873)

78 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 255. 79 Karen Langgård’s analysis of earlier travel accounts suggests that this is a typical pattern of European writing about Inuit: their local expertise is exploited while a sense of European superiority is maintained. See Langgård, ‘John Ross and Fr. Blackley’. 80 Ballantyne, World of Ice, p. 290.

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Secondary Works ‘Arctic Expedition’, The Times, 23 October 1854, p. 7, in The Times Digital Archive [accessed 1 March 2017] Bobé, Louis, ‘History of the Trade and Colonization until 1870’, in Greenland, iii: The Colonization of Greenland and its History until 1929, ed. by Martin Vahl and others (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), pp. 77–163 Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Novato: New World Library, 2008) The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911; repr. 1921) Day, Alan, Historical Dictionary of the Discovery and Exploration of the Northwest Passage (Lanham: Scarecrow, 2006) Darwin, Charles, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on their Habits (London: John Murray, 1881) [accessed 1 March 2017] Dickens, Charles, ‘The Lost Arctic Voyagers’, Household Words, 10.245 (2 December 1854), 361–65 E. J. H., ‘Dr Rae’s Reports on the Arctic Expedition’, The Times, 30 October 1854, p. 10, in The Times Digital Archive [accessed 1 March 2017] Feenley, Robert, Polar Journeys: The Role of Food and Nutrition in Early Exploration (Washington, DC: University of Alaska Press, 1997) Giffen, Robert, Economic Enquiries and Studies, i (London: George Bell, 1904) Juda, Lawrence, International Law and Ocean Use Management: The Evolution of Ocean Governance (London: Routledge, 1996) Kane, Elisha Kent, Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, ’54, ’55, 2 vols (Philadelphia: Childs & Peterson, 1856) [accessed 1 March 2017] ‘Lady Franklin’s Final Search’, The Times, 8 June 1857, p. 8, in The Times Digital Archive [accessed 1 March 2017] Langgård, Karen, ‘John Ross and Fr. Blackley: European Discourses about Inuit and Danes in Greenland 1700–1850’, in Northbound: Travels, Encounters, and Constructions, 1700–1830, ed. by Karen Klitgaard Povlsen (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2007), pp. 305–24 Leslie, John, Hugh Murray, and R. M. Ballantyne, Discovery and Adventure in the Polar Seas and Regions, new edn (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1860) [accessed 1 March 2017] Marquardt, Ole, ‘Change and Continuity in Denmark’s Greenland Policy 1721–1870’, in Der dänische Gesamtstaat: Ein unterschätztes Weltreich? The Oldenburg Monarchy: An Underestimated Empire?, ed. by Eva Heinzelmann, Stefanie Robl, and Thomas Riis (Kiel: Ludwig, 2006), pp. 143–75 Quayle, Eric, Ballantyne the Brave: A Victorian Writer and his Family (London: Rupert Hart-Davis: 1967) Rae, John, ‘Letter to the Editor of The Times’, The Times, 31 October 1854, p. 8, in The Times Digital Archive [accessed 1 March 2017] Worboys, C., ‘News from a Far Country’, The Juvenile Companion and Sunday School Hive, October 1861, pp. 263–69, in Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals [accessed 1 March 2017]

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Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson

Self-Images of Icelanders and their Attitude towards Greenland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Introduction On 26 June 1897, an article appeared in the Icelandic newspaper Ísafold entitled ‘Knowledge of Iceland among people in the Northern Hemisphere’. The article recounts conversations between the Icelandic poet and editor, Einar Hjörleifsson, and an English traveller he had met in Southern Europe. It read: Jeg sagðist vera Íslendingur. — Hann hröklaðist aptur á bak að dyrunum, stóð þar grafkyr og virti mig heldur vandlega fyrir sjer með opna auganu. Svo færðist hann nær mjer aptur. Mjer fannst sem hann mundi vera að sitja um að komast aptur fyrir mig, svo lítið bæri á, til þess að athuga, hvort ekkert væri óvenjulegt að sjá á mjer þeim megin. Eptir stundarþögn segir hann svo, að jeg hljóti að klæða mig nokkuð öðru vísi heima fyrir. — ‘Hvers vegna þá það?’ — Hvort menn gangi ekki jafnaðarlegast í selskinnum á Íslandi til þess að verjast kuldanum. Svo rak hver spurningin aðra, hver annari vitlausari. Það leyndi sjer ekki, að maðurinn hafði allt af Grænland í huganum. Loksins fór jeg að trjenast upp á samræðunni, svo jeg ljet þess getið, að mjer þætti illa farið, hve afskræmislega hugmynd hann hefði gert sjer um ættjörð mina.1 (I told him that I was Icelandic — He recoiled towards the door, stood still as stone, and eyed me up and down carefully. He then approached me again. He looked as though he was waiting for a chance to sneak behind me to see if there was anything unusual about me from that side. After a moment’s silence, he said that I must dress somewhat differently back home. — ‘Why?’ I asked. — ‘Don’t you all walk around in seal skins in Iceland to keep out the cold?’ — There followed a stream of questions, each sillier than the last. It was clear that he was thinking of Greenland. I finally got fed up of the

1 Einar Hjörleifsson, ‘Íslands-þekking Norðurálfumanna’, p. 174. Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson, Historian and Associate Professor, University of Iceland. [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 245–260 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120796

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conversation and told him that I was shocked to hear what a distorted view of my home land he had built up.) This article will discuss Icelanders’ ideas about themselves and about their nearest neighbours, the Greenlanders, in the latter half of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century. How did these attitudes emerge, what characterized them, and why did they change during the twentieth century? To make sense of these attitudes, however, we must begin by discussing general attitudes towards Iceland and the Icelandic people amongst people elsewhere. Such attitudes were characterized by sharp contrasts. On the one hand, many Europeans considered that the continent’s northernmost countries — including Iceland and Greenland — were essentially the same. They lay outside civilization and ‘Europe’, as described in the conversations between the ‘Icelander’ and the ‘Englishman’ in the abovementioned article. It was also thought that their way of life was similar to places outside of Europe — e.g. in America and Africa. These foreign ideas on the affinity of the Icelanders and the Greenlanders and their similar lifestyles always drew a strong response, as can be seen in the article.2 On the other hand, many abroad considered that Iceland had always been an integral part of European culture and had even played a particularly significant role. Such views related to medieval society in Iceland that was deemed to have been civilized, even highly so. Iceland remained civilized, although much had of course changed since the country’s beginnings. Iceland’s ruling class at the time was very active in the debate and fought hard for recognition that Icelanders were unambiguously European. They also made a clear distinction between Iceland and Greenland, claiming that the two peoples had nothing in common. This distinction was a major factor in persuading the world — and maybe, above all, Icelanders themselves — that Iceland was a European civilization, which could and should enjoy the recognition and respect of other European countries. The first part of this article will deal with these contrasting attitudes and perceptions of Iceland, as they emerged in foreign writings in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The second part discusses how these ideas were used in Iceland to create a national self-image and how attitudes towards Greenland developed in this context. The methods used are drawn to some extent from the fields of imagology and image studies.3 The imagined geography of colonialism is also of importance in this regard.4 The geography of colonialism must be borne in mind in order to understand how Iceland and the Icelandic people are described in some travel literature from the nineteenth century — in terms of the difference between civilized, modern Europe and the primitive exoticness of the fringes and beyond the continent. We must also bear in mind the imagined geography of nationalism that transformed the status of Iceland in the nineteenth century, from being ‘hell on earth’5 — as the country had long been described — to being a central place in Europe, at least in the North.

2 See Sumarliði R. Ísleifsson, ‘Icelandic National Images in the 19th and 20th Centuries’, pp. 149–58. 3 On imagology see Leersen, ‘Imagology’, pp. 17–33. 4 Sharp, Geographies of Postcolonialism, p. 11, etc. 5 Benedikt Gröndal, ‘Frelsi – menntan – framför’, p. 28.

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Icelanders as the Antithesis of Modernity One of the world’s best-travelled women of the nineteenth century, the Austrian traveller Ida Pfeiffer, came to Iceland in 1845. Very few foreign women came to Iceland in those days, much less unaccompanied. Pfeiffer had high hopes for her trip, having read widely about Iceland and the Icelanders. At least some of these writings described the locals as kind-hearted, innocent, and well-educated. Pfeiffer expected to find ‘a real Arcadia in regard to its inhabitants’ and looked forward to seeing ‘such an Idyllic life realised’, given that there were hardly any foreigners in Iceland to corrupt the locals.6 She had also heard of the Icelandic sagas and believed that Iceland had preserved a way of life long gone elsewhere: that the Icelanders were both primitive and civilized. The reality she perceived was quite different. As she keenly describes here, she found Icelanders to be different from civilized people in most respects: Upon the whole I doubt if the Icelanders can claim to be much in advance of the Greenlanders, Esquimaux or Laplanders in point of cleanliness. I am sure the stomachs of my gentle readers would be turned, were I to relate half of what took place directly under my eyes while I was in that country; and I should lay myself open to the charge of deliberate exaggeration besides; but I defy the most powerful imagination to conceive anything in the way of filth and disgusting practices, which I have not witnessed in an Icelandic household.7 Pfeiffer considered the Icelanders to be far behind the Bedouins and the Arabs — and even the Greenlanders, whom she had hitherto taken as the reference for coarse barbarism (although she had never visited Greenland herself). Their lack of punctuality was almost intolerable, even compared to the Syrians! The same went for the laziness and apathy of Icelandic travel guides, which she considered to be a trait of society as a whole.8 Another well-known foreign traveller in Iceland in the nineteenth century was the English explorer Richard Burton. He was a renowned traveller, who had travelled widely in the Middle East, Africa, and America. Burton visited Iceland in the summer of 1872 and published his two-volume book Ultima Thule: Or, a Summer in Iceland three years later. Burton’s descriptions of Icelanders are in many respects similar to Ida Pfeiffer’s. Their uncleanliness was overwhelming and people generally lived in miserable shacks, like the Irish or the Eskimos.9 He used the Irish and the Greenlanders as a yardstick for Icelandic boorishness. He considered that the Icelanders were likely related to the Norwegians but that some Icelandic men had clearly found a wife from the country



6 Pfeiffer, Visit to Iceland and the Scandinavian North, pp. 174–75. 7 Pfeiffer, Visit to Iceland and the Scandinavian North, p. 179. 8 Pfeiffer, Visit to Iceland and the Scandinavian North, pp. 75, 96, 109, 121, 153, 175, 179. 9 Burton, Ultima Thule, i, 136, 332, 334, 336.

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Figure 13.1. Interior of a shepherd’s hut in Iceland, watercolour by Bayard Taylor from 1862. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC Digital ID, ppmsca 22887.

‘where the short-legged Esquimaux | Waddle in the ice and snow’.10 Icelanders were mixed with Greenlanders and also appeared to have Irish blood, being as they were unattractive. Burton was not much of a fan of the Irish and was familiar with the racism of the time.11 Finally, an example from the first half of the twentieth century — the writings of the German author, Adrian Mohr, who lived in Iceland in 1924. He did not have many kind words to say about the Icelanders, considering them to be as distanced from manners, culture, and modern ways as it was possible to be. They had no table manners, were always spitting left, right, and centre, and spoke a language which sounded like it was somewhere between the mewing of a cat and the barking of a dog.12 Not only did they act like animals, they were also lazy, had no respect for anything, and showed absolutely no forethought.13 His assessment of Icelanders was therefore very similar to that of Pfeiffer and Burton.

10 Burton, Ultima Thule, i, 130–32. 11 Burton, Ultima Thule, i, 130–32. 12 Mohr, Was ich in Island sah, pp. 16, 18, 34–35. 13 Mohr, Was ich in Island sah, pp. 62, 67, 72.

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There are many similarities in the descriptions of Ida Pfeiffer, Richard Burton, and Adrian Mohr. Rather than the denizens of Arcadia, Pfeiffer naturally only met normal people — many of whom were desperately poor. Some — those who were better-off, mostly Danes — were similar to people back in her homeland, while others lived in the dirtiest hovels she had ever seen. Some familiar aspects come up again and again in her writings — including a lack of initiative, a lack of respect for higher powers, drunkenness, and uncleanliness. These are common traits in descriptions of uncivilized foreign societies generally. To explain her meaning, she compares Icelanders with peoples outside of Western European cultures — Arabs, Syrians, the Sámi people, and Greenlanders. Richard Burton made a similar comparison to demonstrate the nature of the main characteristics of Icelanders. He also compared them to the Irish and Africans — deeming Icelanders to be as drunk and lazy as them and ‘equally logical, expect[ing] a chicken to bring the price of a hen’.14 Burton found the Icelanders incapable of rational argument and drawing conclusions like sensible people, being rather oriental in mindset. Adrian Mohr came to similar conclusions.

The Golden Age With better knowledge of Icelandic and Norse cultural heritage throughout Europe and a growing nationalism in the nineteenth century came an increasingly clear image of the Icelandic Golden Age. Such ideas gained currency in the second half of the eighteenth century15 and were also in line with changing ideas about the North — seen as progressive, democratic, and powerful. More and more authors spoke of medieval Icelanders as superior noble folk, who travelled extensively and were adventurous, hungry for battle, and with a literary gift.16 In these writings, Iceland was described as a haven for literature and learning, such as in Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark (1784) by the English historian William Coxe. He writes of his astonishment at learning that: Iceland, which was considered by the ancients as the Ultima Thule, or the extremity of the world, and by us as scarcely habitable, abounded in learning and science, at a time when Europe was involved in darkness. […] The Icelanders are known to have possessed several historians, long before a single annalist appeared among any of the nations from whom they were descended.17 Coxe gives a good portrayal here of the change in attitude towards Iceland that he himself had witnessed — from an island at the edge of the world, deemed uninhabitable by all but semi-human beings, to the islands of the educated, people of learning and 14 Burton, Ultima Thule, ii, 252, 285, 315. 15 Williams, The Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Northern Governments, p. 175. 16 Wheaton, History of the Northmen, or Danes and Normans, from the Earliest Times, pp. 49, 54–55. 17 Coxe, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, pp. 377, 380.

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Figure 13.2. Ingólfur Arnarson, the first settler of Iceland and his company, as they were introduced by the Danish painter Peter Raadsig in the middle of the nineteenth century. Courtesy of Reykjavík Art Museum.

science.18 Many other writers highlighted Icelandic prowess in these fields and did not hesitate to compare the ancient writings of the Icelanders with the gold standard of the time, the ancient writings of the Greeks and the Romans. One example of how things developed over the nineteenth century comes from the American lawyer, ambassador (including to Copenhagen), and academic, Henry Wheaton (1785–1848). He gave a good description of these attitudes in his academic work History of the Northmen of 1831. This is how Wheaton presents Icelandic medieval culture: the flowers of poetry sprung up and bloomed amidst eternal ice and snows. The arts of peace were successfully cultivated by the free and independent Icelanders. Their Arctic isle was not warmed by a Grecian sun, but their hearts glowed with the 18 See also Büsching, Neue Erdbeschreibung, pp. 249–50: ‘Es mangelt den Isländern nicht an Witz und Verstand, denn sie können Künstler und Gelehrte werden, welches durch viel Beyspiele bestätigt und ausser allen Zweifel gesezt wird. Diese Nation hat alles, was zur nordischen Geschichte gehört, mit grossem Fleisse und vieler Sorgfalt beschrieben; und ihre Nachrichten kommen den Dänen und Normännen zur Verbesserung ihrer Landesgeschichte sehr zu Nuβe’. Also Hammerdörfer and Kosche, Europa, ein geographisch-historisches Lesebuch, pp. 601–02.

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fire of freedom. The natural divisions of the country by ice-bergs and lava streams, insulated the people from each other, and the inhabitants of each valley and each hamlet formed, as it were, an independent community. These were again reunited in the general national assembly of the Al-thing, which might not be unaptly likened to the […] Olympic games, where all the tribes of the nation convened to offer the common rites of their religion, to decide their mutual differences, and to listen to the lays of the Skald, which commemorated the exploits of their ancestors. Their pastoral life was diversified by the occupation of fishing. Like the Greeks, too, the sea was their element, but even their shortest voyages bore them much farther from their native shores than the boasted expedition of the Argonauts. Their familiarity with the perils of the ocean, and with the diversified manners and customs of foreign lands, stamped their national character with bold and original features, which distinguished them from every other people.19 As this quote illustrates, the achievements of the ancient Icelanders are continually compared to the culture of the Greeks and the Greek Heroic Age. This was a way of making sense of Icelandic medieval culture and drawing respect for it by enabling readers to draw parallels, e.g. between the Icelandic Parliament and the Greek Olympic Games. Emphasis is placed on how superior the Icelanders in the north were to the Greeks in the south, not least in terms of daring, the love of freedom, and creativity. There was no shortage of writings in the late nineteenth century with assertions and descriptions of this type, continually likening Icelanders to ‘the Spartan in deliberate valour and mother wit, with the Athenian in daring and genius’.20 This discourse persisted throughout Western Europe up to the mid-twentieth century or even longer. ‘Fornmenning Islands er aðalsbrjef vort meðal þjóða Evrópu […] hin eina sönnun sem norrænu þjóðirnar geta fært heiminum fyrir því, að þær séu gamalt kjarnakyn og menningarkyn’ (The ancient culture of Iceland is […] the only proof that the Nordic nations can show to the world that they are of ancient origin and have an ancient culture) was quoted from Danish writer and scholar Georg Brandes, in an Icelandic newspaper early in the twentieth century.21 The greatest admiration, however, came from early twentieth-century Germany. One of these admirers held that Latin and Hebrew culture had spread like ‘logi yfir hinar andlegu akurlendur Germana […] nema á Íslandi […] þar blómgaðist andleg norræn ritmenning, sem síðar meir á að reisa við hið fallna eðli germönsku þjóðanna’ (a fire over the spiritual fields of the Germanic lands […] except in Iceland […] where intellectual Nordic literary culture flourished, which would someday restore the fallen Germanic nations).22 For these authors and many others, Iceland became in this period the holy island in the North, as the German author Hans S. Jacobsen put it: ‘Mit dem Erwachen des nordischen Rassengenius wird Island immer mehr

19 Wheaton, History of the Northmen, pp. 54–55. 20 Metcalfe, The Oxonian in Iceland, p. 393. 21 Albertsson, ‘Fornritaútgáfan’, p. 5. 22 H., ‘Hreinsun þjóðernisins’, p. 7.

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die heilige Insel des Nordens’ (With the awakening of the Nordic genius, Iceland is becoming more and more the sacred island of the north).23 One aspect of the discourse on Iceland was thus to place Icelanders at the centre of civilization, to describe the country as a model utopia, mentally and physically; this happened as the nationalism fermenting in Central and Northern Europe called Iceland to its service and formulated its utopian ideals. However, as mentioned earlier, parallel negative attitudes alongside the positive and romantic ones abounded. These contrasting images must have sown doubt on the type of country Iceland actually was and what type of people lived there. They also had a deep effect on how Icelanders viewed both themselves and their nearest neighbours, as will be looked into more closely below.

The Ambivalence of Iceland When foreign books, newspapers, and magazines spoke of Iceland, this was often reported in Icelandic newspapers and the Icelandic Parliament Gazette, which many read. Anything negative said about Iceland — such as the words of Ida Pfeiffer, Richard Burton, and Adrian Mohr — was reported and denounced as defamation and ignorance. Icelanders were, however, just as conscientious in following the positive things foreign writers said about them. One example of negative coverage picked up by Icelandic media was the reports by foreign travellers on how often they came across people in Iceland who were blind drunk.24 It was an embarrassment when foreign visitors in the 1930s claimed that young women in Reykjavik were frumpy and wore ‘nákvæmlega sams konar fötum og langömmur þeirra’ (exactly the same kind of clothes as their great-grandmothers).25 Icelanders were very upset by such claims, feeling that there was nothing worse than being considered to live like people in Greenland — except perhaps being considered antiquated and not in phase with modern times. This combination of flattery and contempt greatly affected the Icelandic self-images. On the one hand, it stimulated a sense of inferiority and even self-contempt; on the other, arrogance and ostentation. Irony was also common. When foreigners in the early twentieth century asked, for instance, whether or not Icelanders were Christians, Icelanders responded sarcastically and said they had eaten the missionaries after they had fattened them up.26 But feelings of inferiority and self-pity were probably more common consequences. This is shown, for example, in the following text: Þeir sem dvalið hafa í útlöndum, finna sárt til þess, hve langt vjer stöndum að baki annara þjóða í flestum greinum, hve alt er hjer smávaxið og fátæklegt í samanburði við stærri lönd og frjósamari. Og svipuð er sagan ef litið er á landið sjálft. Mestur 23 24 25 26

Jacobsen, ‘Deutschland und der Norden in der Zukunft’, p. 616. Alþingistíðindi 1877, síðari partur, p. 412. ‘Íslenskar stúlkur kunna ekki að brosa!’, p. 5. Jón Ólafsson, ‘Trúboðarnir og jólin á Íslandi’, p. 6.

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hluti þess er óbygðir í flestum sveitum, bæði ófrjótt og illa ræktað, þó sumir lifi í þeirri lýgi, að telja íslenzka jarðveginn jafnfrjóan og í suðlægari og hlýrri löndum. Ekkert væri eðlilegra en að flestum útlendingum, sem til Íslands koma, fyndist lítið til um landið og þær fáu hræður sem þar búa. (Those who have lived abroad find that it hurts how far we stand behind other nations in most regards, how everything here is small and wretched compared to bigger and more prolific countries. And the story is the same if you look at the country itself. The vast majority of it is uninhabited in most regions, both infertile and poorly cultivated, though some live a lie, counting the Icelandic soil as fertile as in more southerly and warmer countries. Nothing would be more natural than for most foreigners who come to Iceland to think little of the country and the people who live there).27 Attitudes of this kind appeared frequently and Icelanders’ inferiority complex was profound; little or nothing could withstand the comparison with ‘útlönd’, the lands abroad. But at the same time, great pains were taken to demonstrate that Iceland and the Icelanders were indeed a part of Europe and part of civilization — and not the same as people outside of Europe. By ‘people outside of Europe and civilization’, they especially meant people in Africa and the Greenlanders. They were Iceland’s barbarians! Both at home and abroad, great pains were taken to make it clear to everybody that Icelanders were nothing like Greenlanders and that Greenland and Iceland were two completely different worlds. For instance, Iceland’s national poet, Matthías Jochumsson compared the two peoples in his poem ‘Iceland and Greenland’ (1884), clearly setting out this view: Hinir [þ.e. Íslendingar] kristnir, hraustir, háir, hetjulýðir menntafróðir; þessir [þ.e. Grænlendingar] heiðnir, heimskir, smáir, húsgangsfólk og skrælingsþjóðir.28 (These [i.e. Icelanders] are Christian, strong, and tall, heroic, lettered, learned lords; While those [i.e. Greenlanders] are heathen, brainless, and small, roving vagrants, savage hordes.) Matthías marks a very clear distinction between the civilization and spiritual and physical superiority of the Icelanders and the barbarism of the Greenlanders. This discourse is very similar to the descriptions of Greenland in some foreign writings of the time. Even the best-looking Greenlanders were in fact deemed to look terrible.29 When they talked, they sounded like parrots and their children were said to look like monkeys, similar to ‘bushmen’ in southern parts of Africa.30 The 27 ‘Tvær greinir um Ísland’, p. 2. 28 Matthías Jochumsson, ‘Ísland og Grænland’, p. 47. 29 Hayes, An Arctic Boat-Journey in the Autumn of 1854, p. 104. 30 Huis, The Last Voyage of Capt. Sir John Ross, pp. 249, 524.

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‘qualities’ of the Greenlanders were therefore expressed in terms of parrots, monkeys, and bushmen — people and animals in Africa, deemed a place of barbarism. This discourse was taken up by many in the Icelandic ruling class when talking about their closest neighbours in Greenland, with the aim of proving that Icelanders had nothing in common with them. It may be said that the people of Iceland lived in constant fear of the situation in the country or aspects of Icelandic culture being interpreted as savagery, possibly because they realized that the two neighbouring peoples actually did have several things in common. They were both peripheral territories of the Danish state, both producers of raw materials only, and the common people in both places lived in similar housing. For instance, there was uproar amongst the Icelandic nationalistic elite when news broke in 1933 that a piece of music by Icelandic composer Jón Leifs, based in part on a traditional Icelandic musical form, the rímur, had been heard on Radio Normandie, presented in such a way that suggested to listeners that this was their opportunity to listen to the ‘íslenzka, eskimóa orchestra’ (Icelandic Eskimo orchestra).31 The shame! Another writer in the Icelandic newspaper Morgunblaðið in 1948 considered it a disaster that the novel Sjálfstætt fólk by the Nobel prize-winning author Halldór Laxness had appeared in the USA under the title Independent People, as the newspaper found that the work connected Iceland directly to the barbarianism of the Eskimos. It was emphasized that it was necessary to prevent the publication of such works.32 This fearfulness was evident throughout the entire twentieth century, with Icelanders very wary of being referred to as ‘Eskimos’. An example from the second half of the twentieth century is when Icelandic strongman Jón Páll Sigmarsson was competing for the title of the world’s strongest man in the USA in 1985. A member of the audience shouted: ‘He’s an Eskimo!’ Jón Páll immediately shouted back, as he was about to lift a heavy weight: ‘I’m not an Eskimo, I’m a Viking!’33 Iceland’s national poet, Matthías Jochumsson, mentioned above, uses the term ‘skraelings’ to describe Greenlanders, and this term is very important in this context. The term appears in Icelandic texts right back to the Middle Ages with a similar meaning as used by Matthías. Tradition had it that skraelings were small, wild, dirty, aggressive, and stupid. The term arguably sometimes had another meaning, simply denoting ‘Inuits’ without negative aspects, but on the whole people generally understood it to have the negative meaning described above. As a concept, it was and remains a negative value-laden term. It remains in use in colloquial Icelandic today, denoting people who are uncultured, unenterprising, rude, and even pushy and inconsiderate. The link with Greenland has never been broken and most people who use the term are familiar with its original meaning. It has been repeatedly stated above that Icelanders could not bear to be compared to the inhabitants of Greenland at a time when they were fighting for worldwide

31 ‘Eskimóa-músík’, p. 2. 32 Jóhann M. Kristjánsson, ‘Landkynning – þjóðkynning’, p. 5. 33 ‘I’m Not an Eskimo, I’m a Viking!’, Voimalaitos, 6 September 2009.

Se l f -I m age s o f I c e l an d e r s an d t h e i r At t i t u d e toward s Gre e nland Use of the term skraeling (skrælingi) in Icelandic newspapers and magazines, 1840-2015 2010-2015 2000-2009 1990-1999 1980-1989 1970-1979 1960-1969 1950-1959 1940-1949 1930-1939 1920-1929 1910-1919 1900-1909 1890-1899 1880-1889 1870-1879 1860-1869 1850-1859 1840-1849

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Figure 13.3. Use of the term skraeling in Icelandic newspapers and magazines in the period 1840–2015.

recognition. Many, however, also realized that there were indeed grounds for such a comparison. Iceland was an extremely poor country in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, with modernization only in its infancy. In their struggle to enter modern times, Icelanders used the concept of skraeling unsparingly. It even became something of a call to arms — ‘When are you going to stop acting like skraelings?’ the elite would ask their people. This meant: When were they going to finally put an end to the uncleanliness, lack of forethought, boorishness, impoliteness, drunkenness, stupidity, and foppishness that the elite felt affected far too much of the population? The concept of skraeling was therefore a very important one in the history of the creation of the Icelandic nation. On the one hand, it was used to draw a distinction between Icelanders and skraelings, to identify with the ‘cultured peoples’ to the south and east, and to differentiate themselves from the ‘barbarian’ inhabitants of Arctic regions. On the other, it was used in an attempt to draw Icelanders towards modern ways by pointing to aspects of their behaviour that resembled the skraelings, which needed to be stamped out as quickly as possible. The need to use the term skraeling was most often to be found in Icelandic media in the period 1910–50, as can be seen in the graph below. This need gradually abated once Iceland became an independent state and as the country modernized and the people’s self-confidence grew. Use of the word fell, although it has not completely disappeared.34

34 Hrólfur Hraundal, ‘Forheimskaðir ofbeldismótmælendur’, p. 26.

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The Golden Age and Icelandic Imperialism! Over the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, Icelanders gradually adopted the ideas emerging abroad that the Icelandic nation and people had a very unique position in Northern Europe, even in the world. The reception given to Icelandic cultural heritage in Western Europe led to the emergence of the idea of an Icelandic Golden Age. This idea gradually moved to the heart of Icelandic politics and became the foundation of the country’s cultural policy. The ruling class’s new aim was a renaissance — a renaissance of the nation and people to what it had been during the Golden Age. Everything was directed at regaining this former status and bringing Iceland and the Icelanders back on the course they were chartering during the Golden Age. It was therefore necessary to educate and edify people, make them fitter, teach everybody to swim, reforest the country, bring the country back on course, and make good the historical misfortune that had occurred in Greenland. The superiority of the Icelanders could supposedly be proven in various ways, and scholars at the time did just that. For instance, there was thought to be evidence to show that Icelanders surpassed other nations in physical prowess. Amongst other things, it was claimed that they had been taller than people in other countries.35 This notion was supported by data collected by the Icelandic Professor Guðmundur Hannesson in the 1920s and 1930s.36 Another Icelandic professor, Guðmundur Finnbogason, conducted detailed research showing that ten of the most common characteristics of the Icelanders were the following: 1) gifted, 2) courteous, 3) learned, 4) kind-hearted, 5) poets, 6) hospitable, 7) cheerful, 8) stout, 9) skilful artisans, 10) sincere — no wonder that he was full of hope for a bright future.37 One way to prove Icelanders’ superiority was to highlight their achievements abroad. Amongst other things, this was accomplished by means of newspaper columns in Iceland with headlines like ‘Icelanders abroad’, which featured accomplishments eagerly recounted in the spirit of heroic Icelanders of eras past. The familiar themes often included fitness, beauty, artistry, and intelligence and were in keeping with the qualities that Guðmundur Finnbogason had described. These columns would feature news items such as ‘Hugrakkur Íslendingur. Hindraði einsamall bankarán’ (Brave Icelander [in America] singlehandedly prevents bank robbery).38 It certainly did not hurt that in 1947 a young Icelandic girl was the winner of a children’s beauty contest in Minneapolis and received a score of no less than 99 per cent for beauty and strength.39 And, in 1952, it was claimed that no fewer than sixteen professors at the University of Manitoba were of Icelandic descent.40 This discourse — and the idea of a renaissance — in many respects made for great ammunition for a poor, sparsely populated people who had resolved to take 35 36 37 38 39 40

Helgi Pjeturs, ‘Saxar og Íslendingar’, p. 3. Guðmundur Hannesson, ‘Hæð Íslendinga’, pp. 62–63. Guðmundur Finnbogason, The Icelanders, p. 19. ‘Hugrakkur Íslendingur’, p. 2. ‘Ung íslensk fegurðardrottning’, p. 2. ‘16 prófessorar víð Manítóba háskóla íslenskrar ættar’, p. 16.

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their place among the community of nations. The discourse raised self-confidence — people became convinced of the legitimacy of being an independent country and ever more resolved to break links with Denmark. However, it also bore a tinge of haughtiness — even arrogance and xenophobia — sometimes bordering on megalomania.41 Such megalomania also manifested itself clearly in respect to Greenland. It was claimed that, during the Middle Ages, Greenland had been an Icelandic territory — Icelanders had lived there for four hundred years and therefore had historical rights to the country. They had utilized the treasures of the land, run a thriving farming system, and accumulated wealth. It was nothing more than ‘historical misfortune’ that the skraelings conquered their lands. It was also claimed that the current inhabitants of Greenland — the skraelings — were incapable of utilizing its treasures. It was therefore quite wrong and unacceptable ‘að hafa Grænland fyrir framfærslustofnun handa úrkynjuðum Eskimóum, sem þurfi að hjúkra að, meðan öðru ötulla kyni er meinað að gjöra þennan blett af jörðinni eins arðsaman að sínu leyti, eins og hann hefir þó verið áður’ (to have Greenland as a means of subsistence for degenerate Eskimos, who had to be taken care of, when another energetic race was destined to make this piece of land profitable in its own way — and as had been done in the past). This was printed in the Icelandic newspaper Norðanfari in 1872.42 Part of the Icelandic renaissance was to be the conquest of Greenland. As the twentieth century wore on, such ideas took root, with an ever more resolute nationalism emerging in Iceland. Many spoke in the Icelandic national assembly of the need to assert Iceland’s claim to Greenland. Influential figures and politicians fought the case and, in 1957, the National Association of Icelandic Greenland Enthusiasts was founded on the initiative — amongst others — of one of Iceland’s fishermen unions.43 The Association operated for around ten years and had branches throughout the country. The President of the Association, Henry Hálfdanarson, was a respected citizen who played an important role in society.44 According to the Association’s view Iceland had a greater claim to Greenland than Denmark. Therefore it was an urgent need to ‘standa vörð um og vinna aftur þau réttindi, sem með bolabrögðum hafa verið frá oss tekin lítt frjálsri hendi’ (safeguard and regain these rights, which have been taken from us by bullying and against our will).45 As can be seen, these ideas — and the arguments underpinning them — are a clear example of the imperialism of this new small state that had become a republic in 1944. They are also an example of how the idea of ‘renaissance’ was able to emerge in Iceland and how it affected how people viewed their nearest neighbours, the Greenlanders. The attitudes described here may seem amusing today, but supporters at the time were certainly not laughing. They sincerely believed that they had this right and demanded it be recognized.

41 Similar ideas can easily be found in texts published in Iceland before the economic crash in 2008, see ‘Hvernig verður Ísland best í heimi?’ (How Iceland Becomes Best in the world?). 42 ‘Um kunnugleika fornmanna í Norðurhöfum’, p. 11. 43 ‘Vill fiskveiðar við Grænland’, p. 7. 44 ‘Grænlandsáhugamenn stofna landssamband’, p. 12. 45 ‘Grænlandsáhugamenn á þingi’, p. 3.

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Overview and Conclusions In this article, I have discussed commonplace attitudes towards Iceland and the Icelanders in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Such attitudes looked down on Icelanders, who were viewed as primitive and as far from modern as it was possible to imagine. At the same time, Icelanders — particularly Icelandic medieval society — were heaped with praise and proclaimed to be the Hellenes of the North. The process described here is therefore characterized by stark contrasts and uncertainty as to what type of country Iceland was and what type of people lived there. Were Icelanders Eskimos or Hellenes? These uncertainties have through the years affected Icelanders’ self-images and Icelanders at the time fought for recognition as Europeans and not Arctic people. In their struggle for recognition, Icelanders took pains to draw a clear line between themselves and Greenlanders. The disparaging term skraelings was very important in this context. It was used to distinguish Icelanders from Greenlanders and to help bring the Icelandic people into modern times — by teaching them that they should not be primitive like the skraelings. At the same time, the idea emerged that Icelanders should have authority over Greenland, as the skraelings were unable to utilize the land they lived on. These ideas were seen to be part of an Icelandic renaissance and were very influential in Iceland up to the 1960s, after which attitudes towards Greenland began to slowly change. This article does not deal with the reasons for this, but one aspect worthy of mention is the fact that disputes over Icelandic fishing grounds in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s led some of the ruling class to draw close parallels between Iceland and existing and former colonies, including Greenland. In this context, demands for ruling or occupying Greenland had become absurd and the idea was not heard of again after 1970. Growing national self-confidence and rapid modernization also reduced the need to advance oneself at the expense of smaller neighbouring countries who were not as modern as Iceland. Fishery interests then led to a greater focus on cooperation and solidarity amongst the islands in the North Atlantic, and in 1984, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, and Greenland were classified as ‘West Nordic’ countries, distinct from other Nordic countries — micro-societies far up in the North whose existence was based chiefly on the resources of the sea. From then on, Icelanders no longer had any need for the skraelings.

Works Cited Primary Sources ‘16 prófessorar við Manítóba háskóla íslenskrar ættar’, Morgunblaðið, 16 November 1952, p. 16 Alþingistíðindi 1877, síðari partur (Minutes of plenary proceedings of the Icelandic Parliament, 1877)

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Benedikt Gröndal, ‘Frelsi – menntan – framför’, Gefn, 2.1 (1871), 1–51 Burton, Richard, Ultima Thule: Or, A Summer in Iceland, with Historical Introduction, Maps and Illustrations, 2 vols (London: William P. Nimmo, 1875) Büsching, M. Anton Friderich, Neue Erdbeschreibung, erster Theil, welcher Dänemark, Norwegen, Schweden, das ganze ruβische Kaisertum, Preussen, Polen, Hungarn, und de europäische Türken, mit denen dazu gehörigen und einverleibten Ländern, enthält (Hamburg: Johann Carl Bohn, 1754) Coxe, William, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark: Interspersed with Historical Relations and Political Inquiries, iii (Dublin: S. Price, 1784) Einar Hjörleifsson, ‘Íslands-þekking Norðurálfumanna’, Ísafold, 26 June 1897, pp. 174–75 ‘Eskimóa-músík’, Alþýðublaðið, 22 June 1933, p. 2 ‘Grænlandsáhugamenn á þingi’, Alþýðublaðið, 13 January 1960, p. 3 ‘Grænlandsáhugamenn stofna landssamband’, Vísir, 2 December 1957, p. 12 Guðmundur Finnbogason, The Icelanders (Reykjavík: Anglia, The Anglo-Icelandic Society of Reykjavík, 1943) Guðmundur Hannesson, ‘Hæð Íslendinga’, Almanak Hins íslenzka þjóðvinafélags, 51 (1925), 62–63 H., ‘Hreinsun þjóðernisins. Útlendar raddir. Málvarnarfjelag’, Morgunblaðið, 20 December 1928, p. 7 Hammerdörfer, Karl, and Christian T. Kosche, Europa, ein geographisch-historisches Lesebuch, zum Nutzen der Jugend und ihrer Erzieher, i: West- und Sud-Europa (Leipzig: Bey Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1784) Hayes, Isaac Israel, An Arctic Boat-Journey in the Autumn of 1854 (London: Richard Bentley, 1860) Helgi Pjeturs, ‘Saxar og Íslendingar’, Morgunblaðið, 24 October 1915, p. 3 Hrólfur Hraundal, ‘Forheimskaðir ofbeldismótmælendur’, Morgunblaðið, 27 April 2010, p. 26 ‘Hugrakkur Íslendingur’, Alþýðublaðið, 17 August 1926, p. 2 Huis, Robert, The Last Voyage of Capt. Sir John Ross, R. N. KNT to the Arctic Regions for the Discovery of a North West Passage [etc.] (London: John Saunders, 1835) ‘Hvernig verður Ísland best í heimi?’ (How Iceland Becomes Best in the World?), Iceland Chamber of Commerce. News 7 February 2007 [accessed 20 June 2018] ‘I’m Not an Eskimo, I’m a Viking!’, Voimalaitos, published on 6 September 2009 [accessed 10 May 2019] ‘Íslenskar stúlkur kunna ekki að brosa!’, Morgunblaðið, 6 April 1935, p. 5 Jacobsen, Hans S., ‘Deutschland und der Norden der Zukunft’, in Die nordische Welt: Geschichte, Wesen und Bedeutung der nordischen Völker, ed. by Hans Friedrich Blunck (Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 1937), pp. 610–21 Jóhann M. Kristjánsson, ‘Landkynning þjóðkynning’, Morgunblaðið, 8 August 1948, p. 5 Jón Ólafsson, ‘Trúboðarnir og jólin á Íslandi’, Morgunblaðið, 24 December 1914, p. 6 Kristján Albertsson, ‘Fornritaútgáfan’, Morgunblaðið, 21 May 1933, p. 5 Matthías Jochumsson, ‘Ísland og Grænland’, Suðri, 2.12 (1884), 47 Metcalfe, Friedrich, The Oxonian in Iceland: Or, Notes of Travel in that Island in the Summer of 1860 [etc.] (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1861)

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Mohr, Adrian, Was ich in Island sah: Plaudereien vom Polarkreis (Berlin: Otto Uhlmann, 1925) Pfeiffer, Ida, Visit to Iceland and the Scandinavian North, with Numerous Explanatory Notes (London: Ingram, Cooke, 1853) ‘Tvær greinir um Ísland’, Morgunblaðið, 9 March 1928, p. 2 ‘Um kunnugleika fornmanna í Norðurhöfum’, Norðanfari, 20 February 1872, p. 11 ‘Ung íslensk fegurðardrottning’, Morgunblaðið, 8 May 1947, p. 2 ‘Vill fiskveiðar við Grænland’, Tíminn, 16 November 1950, p. 7 Wheaton, Henry, History of the Northmen, or Danes and Normans, from the Earliest Times [etc.] (London: John Murray, 1831) Williams, John, The Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Northern Governments; viz. the United Provinces, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, and Poland [etc.] (London: T. Becket, 1777) Secondary Works Leersen, Joep, ‘Imagology: History and Method’, in Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters; A Critical Survey, ed. by Manfred Beller and Joseph T. Leerssen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 17–33 Sharp, Joanne P., Geographies of Postcolonialism: Spaces of Power and Representation (Los Angeles: Sage, 2009) Sumarliði R Ísleifsson, ‘Icelandic National Images in the 19th and 20th Centuries’, in Images of the North: Histories – Identities – Ideas, ed. by Sverrir Jakobsson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 149–58

Henning Howlid Wærp

Literary Encounters with the Arctic Landscape Among Nordic Explorers and Trappers

On the one hand, polar expeditions in the late 1800s and early 1900s are expressions of science and rationality, with polar voyagers as exponents of civilization’s very latest technology. On the other, yearning towards the desolate Arctic is seen as a way to escape modernity. This paradox is discussed by Michael F. Robinson in The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (2006). He shows how the Arctic expeditions from 1890 onwards no longer argue for the expansion of civilization, with science as companion, but just as often take a critical stand toward civilization. According to this line of thinking, explorers sailed north not to extend but to escape the reach of civilization, to find a route that returned them, in a symbolic sense, to the original state of nature.1 We find related forms of investigation and negotiation of modernity in the writings of many Nordic Arctic explorers of that time: Fridtjof Nansen, Knud Rasmussen, and Helge Ingstad among others. In a pointed remark Nansen criticizes western civilization in his book Eskimo Life: ‘the Europeans [are] a corrupt and dishonourable race, that ought to come to Greenland in order to learn morals’.2 At the same time there is in Nansen — later also in Rasmussen and Ingstad — a recognition of indigenous peoples’ vulnerability in the face of modernity, based on an assumption that traditional ways of life stand before a fall. With respect to today’s ecological crises it might be said, as Jonathan Bate observes with reference to William Wordsworth, that the pastoral is not a myth, but a psychological necessity, ‘a way of connecting the self to the environment’.3 This is how I read the texts mentioned in this article: that literary constructions of Arctic wilderness reveal qualities that point toward the essence of human life. To this end, this article focuses on aspects of Nordic polar literature and travel writing from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries to see if terms such as idyll or pastoral may be appropriate for investigating aspects of this non-fiction genre. It may seem like a strange choice of terms, since the Arctic, at least from an explorer’s perspective, may have a whole range of negative connotation: cold, 1 Robinson, The Coldest Crucible, p. 117. 2 Nansen, Eskimo Life, p. 345. 3 Bate, Romantic Ecology, p. 115. Henning Howlid Wærp, Professor of Scandinavian Literature at UiT — The Arctic University of Norway. [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 261–271 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120797

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icy waters, shipwrecks, frostbite, hunger, suffering, and death. Indeed, there are many examples of expedition failures. Yet this is not the whole picture. For example, when the polar explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson wrote a book about a five-year journey (1913–18) in northern Canada and Alaska, he entitled it The Friendly Arctic (1921). Stefansson’s Arctic is not an inhospitable desert, but a fruitful and friendly place, if you wholeheartedly embrace what the Arctic has to offer.4 When Norwegian explorer Ingstad’s book Pelsjegerliv (1931) was published in English translation in 1933, he, like Stefansson, chose an evocative title. Calling the book The Land of Feast and Famine instead of going for a literal translation such as ‘Trapper Life’, Ingstad gestures to the existence of a distinct subgenre within polar literature. This subgenre is the Arctic Pastoral. Significantly, the ‘pastoral’ side of polar literature has affinity to the genre of ‘nature writing’, to ecocriticism and to vitalism. Rather than extreme or unique, polar literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can thus be understood as integrated within literary movements that mobilize a remote and extreme environment to challenge and critique modernity.

The Pastoral: Apocalyptical, Radical, Idyllic, Post-Colonial? Greg Garrard’s Ecocriticism (2004) frames the pastoral and the apocalypse as two of the most powerful genres in ecocriticism for rousing people to action for environmental protection. The pastoral creates images of a better life, a rural existence with humans in harmony with their natural surroundings, while the apocalypse depicts an urban hell after the collapse of the ecosystem and civilization. Apocalyptic fiction emerges in the late 1800s. Since then, the genre has taken on motifs such as pandemics, environmental disasters, alien invasions, nuclear wars, data collapses, the ascendancy of machines (the cyborg), and so on. In contradistinction to the complex and unpredictable world of these depictions of doom, the pastoral offers apparent simplicity and transparency. In this context, the pastoral is much more than a historical artefact or ossified convention of Greek and Roman antiquity, the Renaissance, or the Romantic Age. As Garrard emphasizes, the pastoral may be ‘any literature that describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban’.5 The pastoral, moreover, contrasts with dominant masculinity discourses of polar literature, where a man proves himself in a series of tests that, if passed, will confirm his superiority over the North (rivers, cold, emptiness), its wild animals, and other human beings.6 The pastoral has more to do with being at peace in a place, transforming the wilderness to a place to dwell, and take under one’s care as home, in the Heideggerian sense. Pastoral comes from the Latin word for shepherd, pastor, while the term ‘idyll’ which it is often used interchangeably with refers back to the originator of the pastoral genre, the Greek poet Theocritus, from the first half of 200 bc. His idylls — from Greek eidyllion ‘small picture’ — were short, poetic texts about shepherds resting in



4 Gaupseth, ‘Naive naturbarn eller ren klokskap? Inuittene i Vilhjalmur Stefanssons vennlige arktis’, p. 203. 5 Garrard, Ecocriticism, p. 33. 6 Grace, Canada and the Idea of North, p. 185.

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the shade, talking, singing, and playing the flute. Idyll has nothing to do with idyllic. The perception that the pastoral is sentimental and exclusively backward-looking runs deep, as if the mode of writing is only about mourning for the lost golden age, of Arcadia, an idealized mountain scenery in Greece. In his book What Is Pastoral? (1996) Paul Alpers argues for not limiting the concept pastoral to such a ‘Golden Age’, nor to a particular landscape. Furthermore, Alpers’s pastoral is not a particular genre. Pastoral is rather a mode in the sense of an attitude or tone in the text. This attitude is not by definition sentimental or nostalgic. The pastoral — with the shepherd and his life in the centre — is a way to address loss, decline, and constraints, while maintaining the idea of a human community. The shepherd is no hero, ‘he is able to live with and sing out his dilemmas and pain, but he is unable to act so as to resolve or overcome them or see them through to their end’.7 He is a representative of human vulnerability. Alpers might not, however, recognize the texts I treat here as pastoral. The shepherd in the classical pastoral is living in a ‘locus amoenus’, a garden-like landscape with trees, grass, and water; an idealized location of safety and comfort. In the Arctic, landscape itself may constitute a danger. Nevertheless, there are several similarities in the sensibility towards nature. Ingstad writes from northern Canada in the late 1920s: ‘Thus I find the birth of spring as I fare through the forest’.8 What he celebrates is participating in the processes of nature, the passing of the day, the changing of the seasons and the weather, a type of transformation that has an underlying unity by being cyclical and not aiming for linear progression. The wilderness is seen as the opposite of the city and the progress of civilization, but with the simultaneous recognition that the development of society cannot be stopped. The tone is reminiscent of the pastoral. The reason the North activates these thoughts is due to the contrast it establishes. However, the ideal of rural tranquillity has been criticized for being a vehicle for sublimated bourgeois ideology, a nostalgic retreat into the past, or an imperial/colonial desire with fantasies of domination, more than a catalyst for the active transformation of established social structures. Some critics state the pastoral is heavily dependent on the very class system it claims temporarily to suspend, silencing less privileged groups. Huggan and Tiffin, however, point to the fact that pastoral might have an imaginative potential for the assertion of a new and better world, and that former settler colonies, like the Caribbean, seem to adapt the pastoral to their own interests, reimagining identity as conditioned by a dynamic interaction between place and displacement.9 Similarly, Terry Gifford in Pastoral (1999) sees an alternative pastoral emerge based on the idea of land as a collective resource, and not an individual luxury. Coining the term ‘Radical Pastoral’, Garrard investigates the possible utopian elements in the genre as well as the counterarguments: It may cloud our social vision, or open out a human ecological one; it may help in the marginalization of nature into ‘pretty ghettoes’ or engender a genuine

7 Alpers, What Is Pastoral?, p. 69. 8 Ingstad, The Land of Feast and Famine, p. 96. 9 Huggan and Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, p. 112.

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counter-hegemonic ideology. If pastoral can be radical, if it has been so, it is not as a finished model, exhortation or ideology, but as a questioning […] ‘radical pastoral?’ appears as the political, poetical question of be/longing, of the root of human being on this earth.10

Arctic Exploration and the Pastoral of Simplicity, Legibility, and Primordiality How might this ‘radical pastoral’ mesh with more traditional accounts? ‘At the root of pastoral is the idea of nature as a stable, enduring counterpoint to the disruptive energy and change of human societies’, Garrard writes.11 This is an aspect we find in many travelogues from the Arctic. In Eskimo Life, for instance, Fridtjof Nansen depicts Greenland thus: ‘It is strong and wild, this Nature, like a saga of antiquity carved in ice and stone’.12 In Alpers’s view, the hubris of man and civilization in the pastoral is scaled down to the shepherd, a figure of humility. The pastoral involves living in the world in an active and attentive manner. An expression Alpers uses that I find useful when it comes to the Arctic texts is ‘a life of conscious simplicity’.13 Simplicity is also projected by the huts in which the trappers in the Arctic live. One of the first women trappers and settlers of Svalbard, Norwegian Wanny Wolstad depicts her 1932 residence in Hornsund, Svalbard, in terms that resonate with Alpers’s formulations of ‘conscious simplicity’. Up here we build neither storehouse, brewery or boathouse. The chalet consists only of a low house, about eight meters long and three meters wide […] On the side facing the endless ocean is a large window — three square windowpanes wide and two high […] In stormy weather we cut and chop firewood indoors, as well as skinning the fox and thawing the polar bear and preparing meat and fur, everything is done in our living room.14 The importance of tending to one’s daily task with diligence is well described in an autobiography by Norwegian trapper, explorer, and renowned polar bear hunter Henry Rudi, from one of his reflections about the trapper-life in Svalbard: Freedom does not mean to relax for days in a cosy and warm cabin […] freedom means taking care of one’s tools and gear every single day, so you could say to yourself that now I have done what should be done, I have prevailed over the external forces, which is bad weather and darkness, I’ve prevailed over the inner problems, indifference and melancholy. I have won over powerful forces, therefore I am free. […] Up in the north they stand out in their stark reality: Keep on working or surrender.15

10 Garrard, ‘Radical Pastoral’, p. 186. 11 Garrard, Ecocriticism, p. 56. 12 Nansen, Eskimo Life, p. 2. 13 Alpers, What Is Pastoral?, p. 188. 14 Woldstad, Første kvinne som fangstmann på Svalbard, p. 7. My translation. 15 Rudi, Isbjørnkongen, p. 160. My translation.

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Explorer life in the Arctic is portrayed in terms of simplicity and unequivocalness, as a contrast to modernism’s complexity. In Rudi’s account, the pastoral emerges both as a way to redeem the environmental hardships of the Arctic and as a way to counter self-destructive tendencies that do not fit modernity’s premium on progress. While modernism postulates heterogeneity and change, the Arctic landscape in the pastoral is construed as its opposite: as continuous tradition from time immemorial. Writing about East Greenland, explorer John Giæver in Dyretråkk og fugletrekk på 74 º NORD (‘Animal Trails and Bird Migration’, 1955) understands this primordial landscape as not only static, but also legible. What made me come back to these lands behind sea and ice, year after year, was first of all the wildlife. There the Creator’s elementary laws lay naked and open on snow and rock, and they were easy to read and understand.16 Known in Norway and around the world as the explorer who, with his wife archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, discovered the Viking settlements in L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Helge Ingstad was a prolific writer in the genre of the Arctic Pastoral. During a stay with an Indian tribe in northern Canada in 1929, Ingstad experienced not only the landscape, but also the people to be part of an unbroken tradition from the beginning of time: ‘Here was the hard cold struggle for existence as it has developed amongst these Indians for thousands of years’.17 The time that clocks are designed to measure does not count here, the way of living in the northern wilderness follows the seasons, the daylight, and the weather. In East of the Great Glacier (1935) Ingstad describes wintering in East Greenland in 1932–33 as being in ‘a lonely landscape, in all its sober strength […] in the fairy light of stars and the shimmering aurora’.18 The landscape demands for Ingstad another way of living, ‘a life of conscious simplicity’, to use Alpers’s term. The rhetorical style matches its content: it is simple and without gestures or ornaments: ‘Here is a river, and I am tired!’.19 Daily life is characterized by similar simplicity: ‘For three days we strode on, slept in a tent, and boiled the water for our tea over a fire of fragrant heather. […] the silent joy of vagabond life in the mountains of Greenland’.20 Ingstad’s writings on numerous accounts resonates with what Garrard calls the pastoral’s celebration of ‘a bountiful present’.21 The Land of Feast and Famine (Pelsjegerliv, 1931), describes his hunter and trapper life in such terms: On the table in our cabin stand a pot of steaming venison stew, a bowl containing two thick beaver tails saved for this special occasion, and a cup of cranberry sauce. We begrudge ourselves nothing.22

16 Giæver, Dyretråkk og fugletrekk på 74 º NORD, p. 10. My translation. 17 Ingstad, The Land of Feast and Famine, p. 218. 18 Ingstad, East of the Great Glacier, p. 158. 19 The translation by Eugene Gay-Tifft reads: ‘Tired and worn out, I sit down on a stone by the river’ (Ingstad, East of the Great Glacier, p. 180), but this formulation does not do justice to Ingstad’s style. 20 Ingstad, East of the Great Glacier, p. 67. 21 Garrard, Ecocriticism, p. 37. 22 Ingstad, The Land of Feast and Famine, p. 89.

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Whereas civilization is characterized by words such as corrupt, impersonal, and hectic, nature is evoked as quiet and plentiful. The trapping and its outcome are not what it’s all about. As Ingstad puts it, ‘These people are not so much interested in hunting for its own sake as for the sake of the free and rugged life in the wilds it entails’.23 He gives a similar portrayal of his own life: I rambled about wherever I chose, and nothing required me to hurry. If my fancy prevailed upon me to sit down on some hillside for a rest and a quiet smoke, I did so; if it crossed my mind to climb a ridge far off in the distance for the sake of the vista which lay beyond, I did so.24 In the classical idyll the shepherds meet, have conversations and sing, recite verses, and talk about love. Is there any parallel in polar literature in this respect, is it not rather characterized by ‘silence and solitude’? In expedition life and hunting life there will, however, be conversations and gatherings in the evenings, among the men themselves and when they meet with other men or expeditions. In Helge Ingstad’s books from the Arctic there is a countless number of meetings and conversations, song and dance. Here are a couple of examples from The Land of Feast and Famine, both from meetings among the trappers themselves, and from meetings between trappers and Indians: It was a hard and fast custom which took me, each evening, over to my neighbors to pay them a visit. […] The hunters would assemble, and far into the night we would lie there, drawing on our pipes and chatting about hunting and distant lands.25 As the hours pass by, the mood of the party changes. Mac walks to the center of the floor and, in spite of his bow-legs, begins dancing a jig which would do credit to a youth of twenty. Then Bablet bursts into song. He knows hundreds of ballads.26 The trappers live separately, alone, and the Indians live in their extended families and tribes; however, as Ingstad writes: ‘In spite of the fact that we differ in many respects, the country seems to bind us together’.27 One can here draw a parallel to the shepherds in the classical idyllic, it’s the life in the landscape that unites them.

The Arctic Pastoral between Two Traditions The modern pastoral has largely evolved according to two traditions. Jonathan Bate shows in Romantic Ecology (1991) how British pastoral poetry is related to the development of a cultural landscape. For Bate, Wordsworth is a premier representative of this tradition,

23 Ingstad, The Land of Feast and Famine, p. 124. 24 Ingstad, The Land of Feast and Famine, p. 178. 25 Ingstad, The Land of Feast and Famine, p. 172. 26 Ingstad, The Land of Feast and Famine, p. 133. 27 Ingstad, The Land of Feast and Famine, p. 124.

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with his poems from the Lake District of northern England. In contrast, pastoral in American literature is more closely associated with concepts such as ‘wilderness’ or ‘frontier’. ‘The British tradition […] is much concerned with localness, with small enclosed vales; the American environmental tradition is far more preoccupied with vastness and with threatened wilderness’, Bate writes.28 A starting point for the American pastoral tradition is Henry David Thoreau’s autobiographical Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) — a tradition mapped by Lawrence Buell in The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (1995). While the preferred genre for the Pastoral is poetry in the UK, in the US it is rather the essay, autobiography, or documentary. Bate finds, however, a similarity between Wordsworth and Thoreau: ‘And as for Thoreau, the whole project of [Wordsworth’s] writing might be summed up as an attempt to develop a human economy that is responsive and responsible in its relationship with the economy of nature’.29 Yet it is in the American tradition of ‘wilderness’ my text examples belong: the Scandinavian explorers and hunters did not write poems and novels, but a personal form of documentary: while the British poetry has an aesthetic view of the landscape, the American non-fiction pastoral has more an atmosphere of living in the wilderness, which is due to a different historical background: ‘the frontier’. Like their American counterparts, the Nordic Arctic pastoralists are settlers and explorers: they are travellers far from home. A lot of their writing seems composed in reaction to a quickly modernizing civilization at home, where Northern environments appear as havens of simplicity. In this way, the Arctic pastoral connects to the genre of ‘Nature Writing’: ‘vivid and compelling chronicles of engagement with the perpetual mystery of human existence in a physical and biological universe’.30 The personal relationship to the environment is emphasized in this tradition. Tenets of ‘Nature Writing’ thus connect to Alpers’s statement that the ‘pastoral still seems to us to be defined by the problem of man’s relation to nature’.31 Similar assumptions are foundational to Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss, the founder of the Deep Ecology movement. Calling his philosophy an ‘ecosophy’, Næss arguably drew quite heavily on the Arctic pastoralists with which he was familiar from Norwegian literary history — Nansen and Ingstad among them. In 1974 Næss proposed nine points to reach a lifestyle that can put humans more in line with their natural surroundings. Næss’s emphasis on ‘minimal pollution’, ‘recycling of materials’, ‘high degree of self-reliance’, and ‘lifestyles that combine maximum enjoyment and realization of one’s own values ​​by using a minimum of complicating aids’32 — are characteristics that resonate with how Arctic explorers describe life in the Arctic. For Næss, and others, reading and working with these texts can thus be seen as an inspiration to live more in harmony with ecological ideals.

28 Bate, Romantic Ecology, p. 39. 29 Bate, Romantic Ecology, p. 39. 30 Finch and Elder, Nature Writing, p. 19. 31 Alpers, What Is Pastoral?, p. 31. 32 Næss, Dyp glede, p. 241.

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Bate’s helpful delineation of different pastoral traditions in English literature, the English vs the American models, so to speak, can also be complemented by other perspectives when addressing the significance of the Arctic Pastoral genre. Vitalism, with its worship of the life force, was an intellectual current at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth that was influenced by Nietzsche and Bergson and may be detected in much of the polar literature, both fiction and poetry. This is the case in Knud Rasmussen’s Min Rejsedagbog: Første Thule Ekspedition 1912 (My Travel Diary: The First Thule Expedition 1912). This work describes the crossing of northern Greenland from west to east and back again on dog sleds, an expedition on which they had to sustain themselves by hunting. Rasmussen feels as if he had been placed back in the Stone Age, and that it is the life force that connects him to his surroundings. He writes: It overwhelms me with a kind of muffled mysticism, this powerful white bosom that allows the fine, white snowstorm to swirl across it; this ocean of unwavering serenity, that has its own primordial breath with the scent of ancient heathenism.33 During the journey, when we get to read about ‘the lungs of the storm’ and ‘the great winter’s surge of forces in its powerful chest’,34 it is something more than a rhetorical flourish; it is an expression rather that everything and everybody is a part of the stream of life. The book begins: 6 April 1912 Today the journey begins, the great route north around Greenland, in the springtime sun and the joy of departing. Hello, comrades, happy men on the threshold of cheerful revelations! The mornings will lift the veil of the great unknown, and with the sun we run to meet our yearnings! Now we’re off, full of appetite for the dawning day! With muscles tensed, greedy like roving wild animals we greet the beginning of our journey toward the north! Clear of mind, ready to run into new worlds! […] Can anyone be richer?35 The exclamation marks, the salutations, the choice of adjectives, and the rhythm contribute to a celebration of life and power — an aesthetic vitalism, condensed into language. This style is remarkably different from the sparse prose of Ingstad. Vitalism builds on the thought that organic life does not just have physical and chemical causes, but is also underwritten by an unknown life force that is contained in the material of life. ‘Life’ thereby becomes a key word for a critique of civilization and culture around the turn of the century. Vitalism emerges as a representative for an 33 Rasmussen, Min Rejsedagbog, p. 40. My translation. 34 Rasmussen, Min Rejsedagbog, pp. 22, 63. 35 Rasmussen, Min Rejsedagbog, p. 11.

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optimistic emancipation of life’s own power. Vitalism manifested itself in different discourses — in the natural sciences as well as in philosophy — but also in concrete actions, such as a cultural prioritization of hiking, swimming nude, doing gymnastics, keeping communal gardens, etc. Rasmussen’s writings can be situated in this kind of discourse about wellness: ‘This roving life makes us lords over our bodies, and each day we feel the joy that accompanies the powers of health’.36 In 1907, Henri Bergson published L’évolution créatice (Creative Evolution) in which he describes the sympathy among all living things as one of the characteristics of the life force. He emphasizes that approaching the life force cannot occur with intellect alone, but must also involve intuition: that is a combination of intellect and instinct. Western rationalism has, however, suppressed the instinctual side. Rasmussen finds the latter among the Inuit; for example, his description of the expedition’s encounter with a seal on the ice in the Danmarksfjord: At the sight of it, both Eskimos were gripped by the mystical feeling of joy with which only the born hunter is familiar, in a way that can perhaps be compared to the war stallion’s rearing to familiar decampment signals.37 This observation does not mean that Rasmussen saw only the element of instinct in the Inuit: he was quite preoccupied with their intellectual culture and assembled a large collection of their legends, myths, and stories. Rasmussen grew up in Jakobshavn (Ilulissat) in West Greenland and learned as a boy to handle hunting weapons, kayaks, and dog sleds, in the tradition of the Inuit. From the age of twelve, however, he was schooled in Copenhagen. There have been indications of a tragic discord within him between his white and his Inuit identity, but it can just as easily be said that he demonstrated a competency in both cultures of which he makes use as a polar scientist.38 The union of instinct and intellect that he experienced among the Inuit guided him toward the life force with which the vitalism of the time was preoccupied. According to Rasmussen a polar scientist who travels and lives as the Inuit would be a happy and complete person: ‘Perhaps it’s because his risk is more obvious, more present, his effort is more tangible; and all of this simplifies existence into lines that go either with or against the grain’. And, he concludes: ‘He is constantly on his way toward the marvellous’.39 The term vitalism may today trigger a plethora of associations, some positive (health, natural presence, deep ecology) and some negative (reactionary ideology, irrationalism, fascism). The latter ones are dominant after the Second World War because of the use by Nazism of vitalist images. However, it is worthwhile exploring the influence of this way of thinking on literature.40

36 Rasmussen, Min Rejsedagbog, p. 95. 37 Rasmussen, Min Rejsedagbog, p. 153. 38 Thisted, ‘Voicing the Arctic’, p. 59. 39 Rasmussen, Min Rejsedagbog, p. 153. My translation. 40 See, for example, Vassenden, Norsk vitalisme.

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Conclusion The Arctic pastoralists I have addressed in this article, Ingstad and Rasmussen in particular, wrote expedition books with strong, and differentiated, literary qualities. As explorers, the aesthetic qualities of their writing, and the ways in which their texts speak to and engage with established literary traditions, have largely been overlooked. In the case of Rasmussen, it is clear that he influenced many younger writers, including Nobel Laureate Danish novelist Johannes V. Jensen. Rasmussen’s landscape descriptions in the major work Den 5. Thule-ekspedition (The Fifth Thule Expedition), about the 1921–24 journey from Baffin Bay to the Bering Strait on dog sleds, made a strong impression on Jensen, as it has on generations of Danish readers: Let me tell you now, that when I read your great work about the sled journey from Greenland to the Pacific Ocean, I felt obliterated, like a little student faced with an acclaimed and eminent literary arbiter; it was much worse, for it was certainly not literature that was speaking, but a quarter of all the earth, existence itself and the human, from a primordial state up until the appearance of culture, direct contact. And what can one write that can stand comparison with this?41 Given as a speech to Rasmussen on his fiftieth birthday, Jensen’s remarks signal the centrality of the Pastoral for Nordic views of the Arctic, and the significance of literary renditions for shaping and formulating those views for over a century. In this way, tenets of the pastoral live on as guiding principles for strands of ecocriticism, ecosophy, and nature writing.

Works Cited Primary Sources Giæver, John, Dyretråkk og fugletrekk på 74 º NORD (Oslo: Den norske bokklubben, 1967) Ingstad, Helge, East of the Great Glacier, trans. by Eugene Gay-Tifft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937) ———, The Land of Feast and Famine, trans. by Eugene Gay-Tifft (Montreal: McGillQueens’s University Press, 1992) ———, Øst for den store bre (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2006) Nansen, Fridtjof, Eskimoliv (Kristiania: Aschehoug, 1891) ———, Eskimo Life, trans. by William Archer (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003) Næss, Arne, Dyp glede: Med Arne Næss inn i dypøkologien, ed. by Per Inge Haukeland (Oslo: Flux forlag, 2008) Rasmussen, Knud, Min Rejsedagbog: Første Thule Ekspedition 1912 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2005)

41 Jensen, Mindets-Tavle, p. 47.

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———, ‘Radioforedrag for børn, d. 26. marts 1933’, in Kirsten Hastrup, Vinterens hjerte: Knud Rasmussen og hans tid (Copenhagen: Gad, 2010) Rudi, Henry, Isbjørnkongen, told to Lars Normann Sørensen (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1958) Woldstad, Wanny, Første kvinne som fangstmann på Svalbard (Skien: Vågemot Miniforlag, 2005) Secondary Works Alpers, Paul, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) Bate, Jonathan, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991) Buell, Lawrence, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) Finch, Robert, and John Elder, Nature Writing: The Tradition in English (New York: Norton, 2002) Garrard, Greg, ‘Radical Pastoral’, in The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. by Laurence Coupe (London: Routledge, 2000) ———, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004) Gaupseth, Silje, ‘Naive naturbarn eller ren klokskap? Inuittene i Vilhjalmur Stefanssons vennlige arktis’, in Reiser og ekspedisjoner i det litterære Arktis, ed. by Johan Schimanski, Cathrine Theodorsen, and Henning Howlid Wærp (Trondheim: Tapir, 2011), pp. 201–19 Grace, Sherill, Canada and the Idea of North (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007) Hastrup, Kirsten, Vinterens hjerte: Knud Rasmussen og hans tid (Copenhagen: Gad, 2010) Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (London: Routledge, 2010) Ingstad, Helge, Pelsjegerliv: Blant Nord-Canadas indianere (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2010) Jensen, Johannes V., Mindets-Tavle (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1941) Riffenburgh, Beau, The Myth of the Explorer: The Press, Sensationalism, and Geographical Discovery (London: Belhaven, 1993) Robinson, Michael F., The Coldest Crucible: Arctic Exploration and American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) Thisted, Kirsten, ‘Voicing the Arctic: Knud Rasmussen and the Ambivalence of Cultural Translation’, in Arctic Discourses, ed. by Anka Ryall, Johan Schimanski, and Henning Howlid Wærp (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), pp. 59–81 Vassenden, Eirik, Norsk vitalisme: Litteratur, ideologi og livsdyrking 1890–1940 (Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press, 2012) Wærp, Henning Howlid: Arktisk litteratur: Fra Fridtjof Nansen til Anne B. Ragde (Stamsund: Orkana Akademisk, 2017) ———, ‘The Arctic Pastoral’, in Arctic Modernities: The Environmental, the Exotic and the Everyday, ed. by Heidi Hansson and Anka Ryall (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2017)

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Lynn Powell

Jessie Saxby and Viking Boys Concepts of the North in Boys’ Own Fiction

Jessie Margaret Saxby (née Edmonston) (1842–1940) was a capable, intelligent, and often over-imaginative woman, with wide-ranging interests, strongly-expressed opinions and a deep concern to express her identity as a Shetlander. She published hundreds of books, articles, and stories in the popular press, for children as well as adults. She also wrote more scholarly articles and books, including the semi-autobiographical The Home of a Naturalist (co-written with her brother, Biot) and ‘Shetland Traditional Lore’, published when she was ninety. She has been described as Shetland’s first professional writer and as a smart, well-connected, and independent Victorian woman who knew how to operate in the literary marketplace.1 Much of the existing research on Saxby focuses on her work as an influential collector (and shaper) of Shetland folklore. However, her views on Shetland nationalism, coloured throughout with a strong Viking narrative, are revealed not just in her folklore accounts but also in her boys’ adventure stories. These stories emphasize the strength of Shetland’s Norse past and its unique northern identity and offer us a valuable insight into Saxby’s attitudes and beliefs. Saxby was born on 30 June 1842 at Halligarth on the small island of Unst in Shetland. She was the ninth of eleven children. Her parents were Dr Laurence Edmonston and Eliza Macbrair. Laurence qualified and practised as a GP, for many years the only doctor in Shetland.2 He was also a respected naturalist and writer. He produced the first catalogue of Shetland birds and pioneered early conservation efforts there. He had a keen interest in many other fields, including the history, culture, and language of Shetland.3 Several other members of the Edmonston family wrote books, showing a keen interest in science and nature. Her uncle was Arthur Edmondston, author of A View of the Ancient and Present State of the Zetland Islands (1809). Her mother was a contributor to Chambers’s Journal and wrote a book of folk stories and general descriptions of Shetland. Her brother Thomas wrote Flora of Shetland when he 1 Smith, The Literature of Shetland, p. 56. 2 Edmonston and Saxby, The Home of a Naturalist, p. 15. 3 Edmonston and Saxby, The Home of a Naturalist, p. 1. Lynn Powell’s Ph.D is in African history. Following retirement, she gained an M.Litt in Orkney and Shetland Studies in 2016. She is currently undertaking further postgraduate work in Scottish archaeology. What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 273–291 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120798

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was just twenty years old. Jessie was taught by her father, who encouraged a liberal upbringing for his children, and she had a happy childhood. She took advantage of a good family library and had a nurse who taught her old Norn ballads and told her stories about trows and fairies.4 Summers found Halligarth full of ‘wandering scientists’ and literary visitors.5 These visitors included: Adam Clarke, the Wesleyan missionary; Sir George Webbe Dasent, Scandinavian scholar and author; Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon, who had a scholarly interest in Norn; the French astronomer and physicist Jean-Baptiste Biot (after whom one of her brothers was named); Captain William Parry of Arctic exploration fame; and Henry Dryden, architect and artist.6 The young Jessie, despite being nicknamed Wildie because of her love for the outdoors, wrote often about being allowed to talk to such visitors and listen to their conversations. She became interested in writing from an early age — she was thirteen when her first poem was published by Chambers’s Journal.7 Aged seventeen, Jessie married ornithologist Henry Saxby, who later became a medical doctor, practising in Unst with her father. In 1871, they moved to Inverary in Argyll because of Henry’s poor health. He died there two years later, just after the birth of her sixth child, leaving Jessie a young widow with five sons to raise (their daughter Lallie had died in 1868). For the next twenty-five years, Jessie lived in Edinburgh with her children and it is during this period that she wrote most of her children’s books. By the end of her very long life, she had an enormous literary output which included children’s fiction, romantic novels, poems, articles, and more scholarly works. Much of what she wrote may fairly be described as lightweight; she admitted herself that her poetry wasn’t particularly good and, whilst it paid well ‘was done under pressure and necessity’.8 She was taken seriously by Shetland’s intellectuals, however, keeping in regular contact with many of them, even when she was living in Edinburgh and writing children’s books to make a living. Gilbert Goudie, for example, was, like Saxby, a member of the Edinburgh Orkney and Shetland Association and a leading light in ‘Shetland activities’ in Edinburgh.9 Saxby was very supportive of the Unst-born poet, Basil Anderson, supporting his application and writing him a reference for a post as librarian in Edinburgh.10 She was president of the Edinburgh Orkney and Shetland Society, a member of the Glasgow Orkney and Shetland Literary Association, and was involved from the beginning with the Viking Club in London, writing the opening address in 1892 on Norse raven mythology. She had wide-ranging interests and strong opinions: she was a Suffragette, believed in Irish Home Rule, supported the temperance movement,



4 Norn is an extinct language that was spoken in the Northern Isles. After Orkney and Shetland were pledged to Scotland by Norway in 1468/69, it was gradually replaced by Scots. Although dying out in the late eighteenth century, Unst is believed to have been one of the last places in Shetland where it was spoken. Trows are creatures akin to mischievous fairies but with far more ‘attitude’. 5 Edmonston and Saxby, The Home of a Naturalist, p. 199. 6 Johnston, Victorians 60° North, p. 196. 7 Saxby, ‘Jessie M. E. Saxby’, p. 641. 8 Lerwick, Shetland Archives, SA/D6/262/2. 9 Johnston, Victorians 60° North, p. 267. 10 Lerwick, Shetland Archives, SA/D20/5.

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criticized the Clearances, praised Faroese self-government, and was commissioned by The Scotsman newspaper to visit Canada in 1888 to research the possibilities of British women emigrating there to marry Canadian men.11 She was also a Justice of the Peace, probably the first woman to hold that post in Shetland.12 During the latter part of her life, Saxby returned to Unst, building a cottage on the family estate at Halligarth. She died at home on 27 December 1940, aged ninety-eight and was buried at Halligarth. What sort of stories did Saxby write? Although melodramatic and moralistic by today’s standards, they are typical of the time and genre and were available well into the twentieth century. Largely forgotten now, they nevertheless resonate in several important ways, particularly in Saxby’s insistence that Shetland has its own culturally significant identity. They were mostly written for boys during the period when her own sons were growing up. They fall firmly into the ‘ripping yarn’ or ‘rattling good adventure’ category, made popular in books and magazines in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Apart from her published novels, she was a regular and prolific contributor to popular magazines such as The Boy’s Own Paper where several of her books were serialized. Most of her children’s books and stories are set on remote Shetland islands, usually modelled on Unst, and are heavily influenced by her attitudes towards Shetland’s Norse past. Unlike other writers of Viking-themed fiction of the period, her books are set in the nineteenth century rather than in the Viking Age itself. Her characters, however, are fascinated by the Vikings and either want to emulate them or explain why Shetland’s Norse past is so significant to Shetland’s nineteenth-century identity. Often the same characters carry over from one story to another. The heroes are usually middle-class teenage boys, the sons of ministers or doctors, who get into mischief, live most of their lives outdoors and on the sea, and are left alone to get on with their adventures. There is a key distinction made between naughtiness and wickedness; Saxby’s youngsters fall into the former category. The Mitchell brothers, who feature in several books, are known to the entire community as ‘wild laddies’. Mrs Mitchell, however, disagrees and says, ‘My boys never did a mean or bad act; no one can accuse them, with justice, of acting from wicked motives. Heedless, forgetful, foolish they certainly are’.13 They are tough and heroic, simultaneous role models for Viking as well as British Imperial values. They are kind to their sisters, adore their mothers, and adopt a beneficent toleration of the local peasantry, with whose sons they play. They never use sustained Shetland dialect (that is reserved for the lower classes) but they often use dialect words, particularly for landscape features or the sea. They are knowledgeable about boats and love the sea; the very few who do not are accepted by their peers because of other virtues, e.g. knowledge about Shetland folklore or history. Garth Halsen, the Yarl’s son in The Yarl’s Yacht, is described as sensitive and delicate, preferring to wander around with his dog and a book to having adventures.14 Readers are told that he hates the sea

11 Lerwick, Shetland Archives, SA4/3000/10/8. 12 Johnston, Victorians 60°, p. 295. 13 Saxby, The Yarl’s Yacht, p. 3. 14 Yarl or jarl is the word for earl in Scandinavian languages.

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but is accepted by his friends because he knows all about Shetland’s old legends and folk tales. His father describes him as ‘a queer boy’ but is pleased about his historical knowledge.15 Quarrels between characters are fixed with a manly handshake and adversity met with a stiff upper lip. In one adventure, for example, several of the Mitchell brothers capsize in very rough seas: ‘“Oh, Eric”, Bill gasped, “if someone doesn’t come soon, it will be all up with us”. “This isn’t the queen’s highway, exactly”, said Harry, with a grim attempt at a joke’.16 They are fascinated by Vikings and all things Norse, and constantly hark back to the Viking past, arguing that it is more relevant than learning about ancient Greece and Rome. Erik Mitchell, in The Yarl’s Yacht, complains that it is a: ‘downright shame that fellows are not taught Norse Sagas as well as the Iliad, and all those Greek and Roman poems. I am sure we Britons ought to be more interested in the deeds of Ragnar Lodbrok and Harald Klak, of Gorm, of Olaf Tryggvason, and Rognvald the Orkney Yarl, than in the wanderings of Æneas and the adventures of Ulysses’.17 They keep pets — tough and adventurous dogs or semi-tame cormorants or ravens with names like Loki and Thor. Characters are invariably suspicious of outsiders who fail to understand Shetland folk and their ways — these are usually described as cockneys, ‘greedy’ Scots, or Americans. In some cases, they are right to be suspicious. During a sailing race involving the Mitchell brothers, their mother, female cousin, and several other chums, they suddenly encounter a fourareen coming from the entrance of a small cave and notice a large heap of slaughtered seabirds in the boat: Two men in ‘loud’ checked suits were seated in the stern. A third person, even more pronounced in dress and manner than the others, had a place in the bow, with a gun and dredge beside him. ‘Cockneys!’ whispered Kate to Nye. ‘Brutes!’ muttered Harry.18 ‘Every novel is a map, every map tells a story and every story is connected to a territory’.19 Literature is full of descriptions and explorations of spaces and places. In some cases, these are well-known real places, in others they are imaginary; usually they are both. These symbolic and real spaces can be mapped in innumerable ways, providing writers with a system of meaning to understand and transform their world. In fiction, the North is far more than a specific geographical place; it is also an imagined or emotional space, a direction rather than a location, a reflection of identity. In children’s literature, the mapping narrative of the North is perceived and represented

15 Saxby, The Yarl’s Yacht, p. 22. 16 Lerwick, Shetland Archives, SA4/3000/10/23. 17 Saxby, The Yarl’s Yacht, p. 24. 18 Saxby, The Lads of Lunda, p. 235. A fourareen is a four-oared boat. 19 Peraldo, ‘The Meeting of Two Practices of Space’, p. 47.

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in a variety of ways: frightening and evil; cold and bleak; magical and mysterious; unspoiled and wild; gritty and urban. As Peter Davidson argues, North is always a shifting idea, always relative, always going away from us; ‘everyone carries their own idea of north within them’.20 North is a space associated with certain characteristics: ‘To say, “we leave for the north tonight” brings immediate thoughts of a harder place, a place of dearth: uplands, adverse weather, remoteness from cities’.21 Charlotta Malm notes how the idea of ‘being north’ holds very special significance in Shetland, evident, for example, in tourist literature: ‘the most northerly post office, the most northerly bus stop, the most northerly golf club’. She says that the concept of north-ness should therefore be understood not solely in terms of geographical location but also as a reflection of a distinct sense of self and of identity.22 In this context, Shetland can be seen as an imagined or emotional space, what Robert Tally terms a ‘geographic condition of possibility’.23 For Jessie Saxby, the North meant Shetland, Thule, and a glorious Norse past; her ‘wild Norland home’.24 For her, Shetland was a special ‘on the edge’ liminal place, romantic, geographically isolated, and different from the rest of Scotland. Shetland was North; in her books, everywhere else in Britain is referred to by Shetlanders in vague terms as ‘the South’.25 Unst, as the most northerly island in Shetland, was the most beautiful, with ‘melancholy moors and lonely valleys’, where ‘the child’s lullaby was the hurricane, and his playground the ocean’.26 She claimed that Shetlanders are a distinct people, ‘quite alien to Celt or Saxon, and bound to Scotland by few ties of kinship’.27 Shetland’s roots lie with Scandinavia and Shetlanders acquire their ‘blue eyes and ruddy cheeks from long lines of Viking ancestors’.28 The Shetland accent, she says, is ‘quite unlike that of Celtic races, but nearly approaching the Icelandic’.29 Shetland, for Saxby, is ‘Northland’.30 Walter Scott, earlier in the nineteenth century, had referred to Shetland as ‘the Ultima Thule of the ancients’.31 Jessie Saxby similarly describes Shetland as ‘the melancholy isles of furthest Thule’.32 Thule is the ultimate representation of a symbolic and liminal space, a half-mythical island to the north of everything. It has been described as a ‘mysterious shifting point that marked the far north’ and is often used as a term for Shetland.33 When Saxby identifies Shetland as Thule, she is using the symbolic and emotional geography of ancient Thule as part of an attempt to make Shetland unique.

20 Davidson, The Idea of North, p. 9. 21 Davidson, The Idea of North, p. 9. 22 Malm, ‘A Place Apart?’, p. 84. 23 Tally, Geocriticism, p. 1. 24 Saxby, Daala-Mist, p. 1. 25 Saxby, Viking-Boys, p. 40. 26 Saxby, Heim-Laund and Heim-Folk, p. 49. 27 Edmonston and Saxby, The Home of a Naturalist, p. 181. 28 Saxby, Daala-Mist, p. 1. 29 Edmonston and Saxby, The Home of a Naturalist, p. 180. 30 Edmonston and Saxby, The Home of a Naturalist, p. 179. 31 Scott, The Pirate, p. 2. 32 Edmonston and Saxby, The Home of a Naturalist, pp. 122, 315. 33 Fielding, Scotland and the Fictions of Geography, pp. 131–32.

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Saxby believed that Shetland has a unique identity, one that set it apart from the rest of Scotland. Shetland is crucial to her writing, not only because it provides the setting for many of her adventure stories but because she identified herself as a Shetlander and remained a significant part of the community, even when living in Edinburgh. For Saxby, Shetland was romantic, geographically isolated, and different from everywhere else in Britain. In Saxby’s writing, the mapping narrative includes the experience of a real place as well as that of a symbolic or imaginary space such as Thule. For Saxby, the story’s setting is not expendable or the scenic background to the story’s action. Place is experienced as a primary event of the story and the action is shaped, at least in part, by the event of place. Her spaces are temporal as well as geographical. Her fiction is immersed in a powerful sense of what has gone before; readers are asked to consider ‘the place’ Shetland through the temporal lens of its Norse past. As well as occupying the physical space of Shetland, her characters also occupy cultural and historical space. By studying Saxby’s boys’ adventure stories, we gain insight into her personal reflections on Shetland’s place in the world. We can examine the ways in which she forms spatial and temporal maps of Shetland and, in reading those narrative maps, we can navigate her geographical and cultural landscapes. Interestingly, Saxby’s narrative map is not linguistic; she makes little sustained use of the Shetland vernacular in her children’s stories, hardly engaging with the dialect at all. She says this is because it would be unintelligible to English readers and therefore uses only enough of it to ‘colour the conversation’.34 Indeed, she admits that when she does use dialect, this is not always the ‘genuine patois’ of Shetland but ‘Scotticisms’, deemed by her to be akin to Shetlandic and more familiar to readers outside Shetland. In A Camsterie Nacket, she writes that she hopes this will satisfy Shetlanders who might worry that she has forgotten ‘the dear old dialect’. She hastens to reassure them that they will find she has not done so.35 In her stories, middle-class characters drop the dialect, whether Shetlandic or Scottish, the more educated they become — although they revert to it in moments of high emotion. One character in A Camsterie Nacket, for example, is accused of getting linguistic ideas above his station: ‘wir Shetland tongue is no’ gude enough for the nacket36 noo […] but he maun be knapping37 like ony English lord’.38 Saxby’s stories, then, contain examples of isolated Shetland words and phrases, used to add a bit of colour to a speech or to characters but most of her writing is in English. She does not use Shetland dialect to convey serious and meaningful communication or to express a wide range of thought or feeling. This runs counter to the upsurge in the second half of the nineteenth century in dialect writing in Shetland where writers such as J. J. Haldane Burgess and Basil Anderson wrote some of their

34 Saxby, The Lads of Lunda, preface. 35 Saxby, A Camsterie Nacket, p. 7. 36 Nacket: lad (Scottish). 37 Knapping: speaking with an educated accent (Shetland). 38 Saxby, A Camsterie Nacket, p. 49.

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best work in dialect. The arrival of local newspapers in the latter part of the nineteenth century boosted this process: by 1885 there were two Shetland newspapers regularly publishing pieces in Shetlandic. Further encouragement was provided by the Faroese scholar Jakob Jakobsen who visited Shetland between 1893 and 1895 and inspired Shetlanders to persevere with the dialect.39 Saxby’s insistence on writing in English, with the odd word or phrase in Shetlandic or Scottish dialect, might seem strangely inconsistent with Saxby’s beliefs about ‘oppressive’ Scotland or a unique Shetland. It is consistent, however, with the need to assure a wide readership outside Shetland; her adventure stories were written to make money to support herself and her five sons. Her vision of Shetland, as expressed in her children’s stories, has little to do with language. Her characters do not navigate their identities through the Shetland dialect. This does not mean that she knew nothing about the dialect or did not approve of other writers’ attempts to use it in their work. Saxby was very supportive of the work of her contemporaries for whom Shetland dialect formed one of the most significant features of their work. Basil Anderson, for example, turned to Saxby for support with his writing. In his obituary, in 1888, Saxby told readers that English was very much a foreign tongue to Anderson and that he had found great difficulty in expressing his ideas in it, ‘thus all his finer poems are in the Shetland dialect’.40 Saxby’s non-fiction writing shows the reader that she is knowledgeable and interested in the Shetland dialect. In The Home of a Naturalist, she writes about the custom among fishermen of using Norn words when at sea.41 Later, in the same chapter on Unst folklore, she provides the reader with information on Shetlandic pronunciation, together with an example of a paragraph containing words in common use.42 What is Saxby’s primary term of engagement with Shetland, if not language? She maps the Shetland she experienced by emphasizing its differences from the rest of Britain. Her symbolic and real spaces are not linguistic but can be mapped in innumerable other ways — culturally, geographically, and historically. Saxby’s emphasis on Shetland’s cultural differences is primarily apparent in her folklore accounts where she interprets heavily to fit things into her romantic belief in Shetland’s unique identity. Grydehøj cites The Home of a Naturalist as one of the first of Saxby’s books to show a distinctive Shetland romanticism. Here, he argues, for the first time in Shetland we hear a ‘blatantly anti-Scottish, anti-Celtic, anti-English tone’.43 Saxby carves out a conceptual space for a distinct Shetland identity where the Scots are Celts, the English are Saxons, and the Shetlanders are Norse.44 In Saxby’s folklore, he argues, she stresses the uniqueness of Shetland’s supernatural traditions and attempts to combine the disparate elements of Shetland folklore belief and history into a unified and Norse whole.45 39 D’Arcy, Scottish Skalds and Sagamen, p. 186. 40 Saxby, Heim-Laund and Heim-Folk, p. 55. 41 Edmonston and Saxby, The Home of a Naturalist, p. 181. 42 Edmonston and Saxby, The Home of a Naturalist. 43 Grydehøj, ‘Historiography’, p. 57. 44 Grydehøj, ‘Ethnicity’, part 2, p. 4. 45 Grydehøj, ‘Ethnicity’, part 1, p. 46.

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Grydehøj has shown how Saxby directly links Shetland’s supernatural traditions to the Viking narrative and thus heightens Shetland’s claims to cultural distinctiveness. An example of this can be seen in her writings about Shetland’s trows. Just as the Norse are superior to the Scots, in Saxby’s view, she sees Shetland’s trows as superior to Scottish, English, and Irish fairies.46 Shetland’s trows are, in Saxby’s view, unique; they are closely allied to Scandinavian trolls but more human-like and less inclined to mischief-making.47 In Saxby’s own words: Dainty little fairies of greenswards and woodlands, of moonlight dance, and gossamer wing never seem to have visited our Isles: frightened no doubt by the rude winds, the cold snow, and the uncertain climate; also the over-bearing, masterful character of all the native supernatural beings.48 These views are also evident in her fiction. Trows, for example, often feature in her stories. Garth, a character in The Yarl’s Yacht, is said to be like a trow — ‘the way he glides round corners and appears when least expected is very Trowie indeed’.49 Garth is the character most knowledgeable about Shetland’s folklore and its Norse heritage. He spends much of his time, for example, translating two ancient volumes of Norse lore into English.50 Shetlanders, according to Saxby, are culturally unique and their characteristics and customs are very different to those of people in Scotland. In Saxby’s adventure stories, as in her folklore accounts, culture and tradition provide a boundary between Shetland and the rest of the world. Shetlanders, we are told, don’t celebrate festivals in the same way as in the rest of Britain. Much is made of seasonal traditions; Yule, for example, is very different in Shetland because it is celebrated in the Viking way and is ‘dedicated to the warrior gods. There is not a vestige of the religious element in Yule as “kept” by the Shetlanders’.51 Two Shetlandic character traits are referred to frequently in her stories — the tradition of ‘true Northern hospitality’ and the custom of not locking your door because Shetland folk are honest and there is no tradition of burglary.52 Walter Scott also finds such customs worthy of notice and devotes a whole chapter to the bewilderment and anger felt by Mordaunt Mertoun during a storm when he attempts to gain entrance to a locked house owned by outsiders.53 An English girl is told, in Saxby’s The Yarl’s Yacht, that Shetlanders have free and easy ways, for example when visitors come to stay unexpectedly: people are ‘always delighted when a whole heap of people come like that’.54 When Tom, in Viking-Boys, comes across a mysterious house with a locked window, he is amazed. ‘Never heard

46 Grydehøj, ‘Ethnicity’, part 2, p. 6. 47 Grydehøj, ‘Ethnicity’, part 1, p. 45. 48 Saxby, Shetland Traditional Lore, pp. 141–42. 49 Saxby, The Yarl’s Yacht, p. 15. 50 Saxby, The Yarl’s Yacht, p. 238. 51 Saxby, Daala-Mist, p. 247. 52 Edmonston and Saxby, The Home of a Naturalist, p. 102. 53 Scott, The Pirate. 54 Saxby, The Yarl’s Yacht, p. 74.

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of such a thing in Shetland before’, he says, and wonders what the owner is afraid of. ‘One would think Bōden was the abode of thieves or pirates’, he exclaims.55 A further way in which Saxby maps her world is by emphasizing Shetland’s geographical isolation and unique landscape features. As Bernard Westphal argues, the perception of space and the representation of space do not involve the same things; there is no static reading of topological data and, historically, space has always been subject to symbolic readings.56 In Saxby’s stories, there is a constant emphasis on Shetland’s small island landscape, its unique topographical features, and its location in the far north. There are frequent references to Shetland as ‘Norland’, for example.57 Even the seasons are different from the rest of Britain, with frequent references to long winter nights and summer days. Special words are used for liminal times such as the ‘simmer dim’ when ‘the days are very long and night is banished from the Shetland Isles’.58 Like Walter Scott before her, Saxby seems to go out of her way to make Shetland seem remote and inaccessible. As in Scott’s The Pirate, there are few references to Lerwick. In Saxby’s view, modern towns do not really form part of Shetland’s unique identity. When Lerwick is mentioned, it is in the context of how far it is from the small islands inhabited by her characters. We are told, in The Yarl’s Yacht, that there is only one weekly steamer from Scotland to Shetland. This left Leith on Friday morning and arrived in Lerwick on Saturday evening. Passengers wanting to travel onwards to one of the islands would have to stay in Lerwick for a few days until the packet boats started on their rounds. They could spend days, even weeks, waiting, depending on the weather and the timetable.59 Edinburgh is significant only when boy heroes reach adulthood and leave Shetland for university. Characters otherwise rarely venture as far as Lerwick, or even to Scalloway, and if they do, they are unhappy. Marabel, for example, the seventeen-year-old heroine in Queen of the Isles, was taken aged ten from her idyllic island of Trondra to go to school in Tingwall; she immediately evaded those in charge, ran away to Scalloway, stole a boat, and rowed herself back to Trondra. On another occasion, she was persuaded to visit Lerwick, but no sooner had she got there than she climbed out of a window, ran along eight miles of road, and again helped herself to a boat.60 It is significant that Saxby’s Shetland stories are set on remote, rocky islands, probably modelled on Unst, the most northerly Shetland island. Saxby’s books are full of islands, inhabited and uninhabited — Trondra, Havnholme, Bōden, and Lunda, for example. From the small but inhabited island of Trondra, for example, ‘as far as the eye could see the Deep was studded with isles of varied size and shape’.61 Shetland is often called ‘Da Boannie Isles’ or ‘Da Auld Rock’ — Saxby uses these terms frequently in her writings. Her islands are small as well as remote. Bōden, for 55 Saxby, Viking-Boys, p. 95. 56 Westphal, Geocriticism, p. 1. 57 Saxby, Heim-Laund and Heim-Folk, p. 35. 58 Saxby, Queen of the Isles, p. 47. The ‘simmer dim’ is the twilight of a Shetland summer evening. 59 Saxby, The Yarl’s Yacht, p. 7. 60 Saxby, Queen of the Isles, pp. 15–16. 61 Saxby, Queen of the Isles, p. 48.

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example, the home of Yaspard Adiesen and his family in Viking-Boys, contains only three houses: the Ha’ (the Hall), the factor’s house, and Trullyabister, an ancient ruined dwelling. The nearest church is on another island, and stores are brought in only twice a year from Lerwick.62 On Lunda, there are only a few scattered hamlets on the shore of the Voe, ‘causing one to feel as though the world were shut out, with all its restlessness and strife’.63 Sometimes maps or descriptions are provided of the main features of the island and these usually include a Manse, a loch, a ruined castle or other dwelling such as a broch, and a standing stone, as well as a few scattered hamlets where poor people live. Lunda, for example, has a standing stone and an old ruin, Pech’s Castle, picturesquely situated near the shore.64 Like Enid Blyton’s islands in a later period, Saxby’s islands serve as convenient fictional locations for children’s adventures but also seem to be much more. On one level, they serve as places for adventure, shipwrecks, and fun. For her juvenile characters, they provide a metaphorical as well as a physical space in which they can assert themselves, show responsibility, and practise being adults. Islands are depicted as idyllic spaces, with amenable locals and excellent opportunities for children to explore and have character-building adventures before settling down into adulthood. But, as Maureen Farrell argues, an island is also a particularly effective motif, offering an evocative image of nation as island.65 Islands allow writers to explore aspects of community and otherness, location, belonging, and liminality as well as concepts of identity and close association with place. Inhabitants of islands define themselves against those who are not.66 In Saxby’s stories, outsiders are regarded with suspicion until they prove themselves. In The Yarl’s Yacht, Amy Congreve, an English girl who visits Shetland with her scientist father, is initially regarded as too clever for her own good. Mrs Garson, the Yarl’s mother, says she is annoyed at the prospect of entertaining a ‘strong-minded tourist’, and her daughter, Isobel, decides even before meeting her that she must be an unpleasant person who has come to Shetland ‘for the express purpose of seeing all there is to see; she means “to do” the islands, and she will’.67 Amy is eventually accepted, however, because she is pretty and kind and admires Shetland and its people. For Saxby, island settings allow her to express her opinions on Shetland’s unique cultural identity and Norse heritage. Fred, for example, a boy in The Lads of Lunda, attends an English public school but his school holidays are spent among ‘the wild rocks and rough waves’ of Shetland, and it is this landscape that provides him with the virtues of ‘fearlessness, courage and generosity of soul’.68 Such passages, focusing on island remoteness and ‘otherness’, emphasize the boundaries, both abstract and real, between Shetland and everywhere south of Shetland. They serve to map territories of mind as well as setting the scene for a story. 62 Saxby, Viking-Boys, p. 8. 63 Saxby, The Lads of Lunda, p. 6. 64 Saxby, The Lads of Lunda, p. 167. 65 Farrell, ‘Culture and Identity’, p. 69. 66 Stephanides and Bassnett, ‘Islands’, p. 7. 67 Saxby, The Yarl’s Yacht, p. 55. 68 Saxby, The Lads of Lunda, p. 45.

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The topography of Shetland is portrayed as wild and dangerous, full of reefs and crags. Seas ‘rage’ and ‘nor’west’ winds ‘turn ships into drift-wood’.69 Storms are frequent. Characters regularly encounter creatures such as sea-eagles and whales. The islands are studded with cliffs, caves, and dangerous bays where ships are wrecked. There are frequent references to the hardships faced by Shetland fishermen. In one story, an outsider criticizes whale-hunting as butchery but the reader is told in no uncertain terms to sympathize with the fishermen who lead a hard life and can’t be expected to ‘appreciate sentiment applied to a stranded whale’. Such sentiments belong to southern outsiders.70 Although landscape features are described as dangerous, they also serve as locations for adventures and picnics for brave and intrepid characters who are shaped both by their Norse heritage and Victorian values. Much is made of the romantic atmosphere provided by an island and there are frequent references to Robinson Crusoe and Mungo Park. The Manse boys, for example, ‘delighted in seaward expeditions or to some lonely uninhabited isle’. They carry out their seafaring adventures in a fourareen, built by themselves with the help of a local boat-builder.71 When the Lunda lads get shipwrecked on a tiny, uninhabited island, they immediately take heart at discovering sheep: ‘we won’t starve for want of mutton’, says one, and another adds, ‘a little bit of Crusoe life wouldn’t do us any harm’.72 Saxby’s adventure stories, although set in the nineteenth century, are immersed in a powerful sense of what has gone before; readers are asked to consider ‘the place’ Shetland through the temporal lens of its Norse past. Saxby maps Shetland and makes it real to her by constantly invoking its Viking past in her writings. Her young heroes care deeply about their Norse heritage and offer thoughtful, if romantic, insights about both this and about Shetland’s place in nineteenth-century Britain. As well as occupying the physical and cultural space of Shetland, therefore, they also occupy temporal space. From the beginning, Saxby’s writings show an enthusiastic interest in Shetland’s Scandinavian past, for example in two of her short stories based on King Harald Finehair’s expedition to the Northern Isles (‘Harold’s Grave’) and Norse mythology (‘Shetland Giants’).73 She wrote the opening address to the Viking Club in London and spoke at length about Norse raven mythology.74 She makes constant use of Old Norse themes to make points about the political and racial status of Shetland specifically and Britain more widely. In 1888, for example she was asked to give the opening address to the Edinburgh Orkney and Shetland Literary Association. In this, she clearly shows her attitudes towards the racial superiority brought about by Britain’s Norse inheritance, reminding the audience of the ‘sea-kings’ of Norway from whom the British have inherited the genes that made Britain great. She tells them that the 69 Saxby, Wrecked on the Shetlands, p. 22. 70 Saxby, The Lads of Lunda, p. 65. 71 Saxby, The Lads of Lunda, pp. 114, 116. 72 Saxby, The Lads of Lunda, pp. 141–42. 73 Saxby, Daala-Mist. 74 Saxby, ‘Birds of Omen’.

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Northern Isles are closely associated with the ‘most stirring annals of Scandinavian history’ and that she thinks of Shetland as a separate nation.75 Elsewhere, in terms that are unacceptable today, she referred to the Vikings as ‘the most virile race that ever existed, with the exception of the Jews’.76 She writes of the: connecting chain between the modern Shetlanders and the Norsemen, whose blood is the reddest drop of that mixed fluid which permeates British veins — or, as a Shetlander would express it, ‘Wir yatlin-blöd comes frae da Norne stock’ (‘Our reddest, readiest blood comes from the Norse ancestry’).77 In Saxby’s eyes, Shetland’s Norse past is something to be admired. In an article about a cruise she took to Scandinavia in 1910, she claims that Norway’s Viking Age ‘stands out as one of the most glorious pages of all records of a national progress’.78 When it was suggested that the Shetland Times should have a regular column about Shetland, Saxby wrote to the paper suggesting that Shetlanders abroad would prefer to read of their native land, language, and history than of ‘school board disputes and clerical differences’.79 Like other nineteenth-century writers, Saxby’s enthusiasm for the Vikings expressed itself in Viking-themed adventure fiction. Andrew Wawn describes such stories as promoting ‘images of stout-hearted masculinity for the schoolboys of middle England’.80 Boys’ adventure literature in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain has received considerable scholarly attention in recent years. During this period, adventure became the most popular kind of literature, aided by the rolling out of primary education and the consequent increase in working-class literacy.81 Throughout this period, adventure books and magazines, specifically intended for boys, became more accessible to popular audiences; they were cheaper to buy, easier to read, and more appealing to look at.82 Adventure stories were printed in large quantities and read by mass audiences.83 Books were often given as Christmas presents or prizes. A review of Saxby’s The Lads of Lunda described it as being ‘very suitable for a boy’s gift book’.84 Stories with Viking themes were particularly popular. Most of the novels are now long-forgotten or neglected; a few were republished over a generation or so and a handful, including Saxby’s, served regularly as school prizes or Christmas gifts.85 In all these stories, Norsemen were viewed as the epitome of 75 Saxby, Heim-Laund and Heim-Folk, p. 70. 76 Lerwick, Shetland Archives, SA4/2475/293; SA4/3000/17/25. 77 Edmonston and Saxby, The Home of a Naturalist, p. 186. 78 Lerwick, Shetland Archives, SA4/3000/17/25. 79 Cohen, ‘Norse Imagery in Shetland’, p. 330. 80 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, p. 313. 81 Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire, p. 11. 82 There is plenty of evidence, however, that girls read books intended for boys. 83 Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire, p. 46. 84 Lerwick, Shetland Archives, SA4/3000/17/57/133. 85 Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians, pp. 314–15. Several copies of Saxby’s novels owned by me were given as Sunday School or attendance prizes.

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the free man but with good Victorian values. Vikings were kindred spirits — they were the greatest sailors, traders, and explorers of their time, just like the Victorians. Viking raids and other unfortunate violent tendencies were seen as swashbuckling piracy and pirates romanticized as sea-kings. In Shetland, Sir Walter Scott’s novel, The Pirate, set in the Northern Isles in the seventeenth century, had helped to fuel interest in Shetland’s Norse connections earlier in the nineteenth century. It put Shetland on the map for an educated British public. At the time he was writing, understanding of the Northern Isles in the wider world was patchy and the Viking Age was regarded as barbarous and uncivilized. Scott’s vision of Shetland, on the other hand, is full of positive Scandinavian images and motifs and it set off a stream of influence that fed into novels such as Burgess’s The Viking Path (1894) and Saxby’s boys’ stories.86 Scott visited the Northern Isles for a few days in 1814 as a guest of the Commissioners of the Northern Lights on their inspection of Scottish lighthouses. Several years later, he talked to William Erskine, former Sheriff of Orkney and Shetland and companion on the 1814 trip, claiming that he wanted to talk to him ‘about the locale of Zetland, for I am making my bricks with a very limited amount of straw’. Erskine was knowledgeable about Shetland and supplied or checked much of the anthropological material and folklore used by Scott.87 Scott has been criticized for having done the minimum of research before writing the book, and for knowing little about Shetland’s history, leading one disapproving biographer to talk about Scott’s ‘day trip to the culture’ of Orkney and Shetland.88 Scott, however, owned a very large library of Scandinavian texts, including extensive holdings in Old Icelandic prose and poetry and other related works and included this research in his novel. He also kept a personal diary of his visit to the Northern Isles. Very loosely based on the story of John Gow, the Orkney pirate, the book tackles themes of oppression of udallers by greedy Scots landowners and hints at peace-loving Shetlanders returning to Viking warlike ways in the face of their grievances.89 It contrasts the older, Norse way of life, represented by Shetland’s remote landscape, language, and customs, with encroaching modernity, especially Scottish, going out of its way to stress that Shetland isn’t Scotland. The book appealed to Shetlanders not only for its romantic, if inaccurate and vague, exploration of Shetland but also because it assisted in shaping a more positive self-identity. It stimulated British interest in the Northern Isles and encouraged Victorian tourists to visit. As Cohen argues, Scott attached such positive virtues to its hero that claiming Norse ancestry became desirable.90 Saxby had certainly read The Pirate.91 There are several passages in Saxby’s stories that remind the reader of The Pirate. Mordaunt Mertoun, for example, has a 86 Smith, The Literature of Shetland, p. 33. 87 Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott, p. 251. 88 Sutherland, The Life of Walter Scott, p. 251. 89 Udal law, found in Orkney and Shetland, is an ancient Norse system of inheritance and law brought by the Vikings. It is totally different to Scots law as applied to property. 90 Cohen, ‘Norse Imagery in Shetland’, p. 318. 91 Jamieson, ‘Rock Bound’.

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housekeeper who taught him Norn ballads and ‘dismal tales concerning the Trows’, just as Saxby tells us that she had a Norn nurse who taught her Norn songs and told her stories about trows.92 Later Shetland writers, such as J. J. Haldane Burgess, made considerable use of the Vikings in their work. The most influential novel of the period was Burgess’s The Viking Path: A Tale of the White Christ (1894), set in Shetland and Norway at the time of the coming of Christianity. Burgess took enormous pride in his Norse ancestry although his real enthusiasm was for the Shetland dialect. He had a keen interest in Norse myth and saga, learning Danish, Norwegian, and Old Icelandic so he could read the sagas in their original language.93 Burgess was an enormously influential figure in Shetland’s intellectual life and his work had a significant impact on the local people, including Saxby, and gave a ‘great boost to the latent pro-Scandinavian sentiment which already existed’.94 Saxby’s young heroes identify strongly with their distinct Viking heritage. Her heroes are coloured by her romantic notions about the Vikings but shaped with ideals of Victorian manliness as well as sensible nineteenth-century liberalism. Her characters lament the fact that they do not study Viking history in school. Svein, in The Yarl’s Yacht, says this lack is shameful. His friend Harry agrees, adding that it is an insult to their forefathers ‘that we boys hear so little about them in school, and are crammed chokeful of those bumptious old Latins’, claiming loudly that the Romans had left little mark on Britain.95 There is always at least one character in her stories who acts as her mouthpiece in extolling the virtues of the Vikings compared to the ‘greedy’ Scots who replaced them in Shetland, or even the Picts who were there before them. In The Yarl’s Yacht, Garth explains that he has never been interested in the Picts and doesn’t like to think ‘that Scotland sent them here before the Norsemen’. He goes on to say that the Picts ‘are little, hairy, dark-skinned creatures who burrowed in the earth, and never went on the sea if they could help it’, thus causing their own demise, ‘for only a race that loved the sea […] was fit to exist in Shetland’. He adds that the Picts must have been exterminated or ‘absorbed’ since Shetlanders have no Pictish characteristics but are ‘Norske all over’.96 Saxby’s characters spend much time getting in touch with their inner Viking and even look like Vikings. Svein Holtum, for example, has eyes that ‘flashed with the deep liquid blue of Northern seas’.97 Another character runs over the snow, ‘merrily whistling a wild Norse tune […] right welcome to the unsophisticated ears of our Shetland friends’.98 The Viking period is portrayed as glorious and exciting: ‘such fighting and sailing and discovering new places; such heaps of adventures of 92 Scott, The Pirate, p. 21; Edmonston and Saxby, The Home of a Naturalist, p. 199. 93 Leslie, Borgar Jarl, p. 34. 94 Grónneberg, ‘Jakobsen and his Shetland Correspondents’, p. 123. 95 Saxby, The Yarl’s Yacht, pp. 24–25. 96 Saxby, The Yarl’s Yacht, p. 94. 97 Saxby, The Lads of Lunda, p. 73. 98 Saxby, The Lads of Lunda, p. 193.

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all sorts’.99 In Viking-Boys, fifteen-year-old Yaspard Adiesen yearns for a return to those days and finds modern Shetland boring and tame in comparison. His sister points out the benefits of modern life: regular mail, books, cups of tea. He dismisses books — the Vikings ‘had Scalds to sing their history — much nicer than your musty books’, concedes that regular mail and tea are a good idea but sighs, ‘why can’t we have all that and still be Vikings, live like heroes, roam seas and fight, discover and bring home spoil as well as go to church and drink tea?’. Yaspard spends the rest of the book recreating Viking adventures and raids with his friends. He wishes above all that he had lived hundreds of years ago, when the Vikings lived; ‘it must have been prime!’.100 He admires the heroic masculinity of the Vikings and wants to emulate it. Vikings are romantic and noble, relishing the challenges provided by their environment. In The Yarl’s Yacht, we are told that they had ‘set their faces to the sea, and flung back the challenges of the winds with mocking laughter’.101 Much is made of perceived Viking freedoms, which let men do as they please. In ‘Harold’s Grave’, Saxby describes Shetland’s Norse ancestors as ‘a race of people as brave, dauntless and free, as any that ever breathed’.102 It is interesting to look at some of the words peppered through this short story: fierce, savage hearted, angry, kingless, lawless, noble, proud, free. This freedom even extends to Viking rape and pillage, although Saxby dresses this up in suitably sanitized tones, with romantic images of piracy, swashbuckling, and sea-kings. Hascross is an old Viking pirate leader who has retreated to Shetland after a quarrel with the king of Norway. During his piratical raids, he fell in love with a beautiful girl but she didn’t care for him and so by force ‘the rude lover’ carried her off to this ship and, ‘heedless of her tears, compelled his captive to become his wife’. Eventually, we are told, she grew to love her captor but pined away and died through homesickness.103 Saxby, like others, had romantic notions about the Vikings and some of their more violent tendencies. In ‘Harold’s Grave’, we are told that ‘there is something noble in the character of the sea-king’ so that we sympathize with their ‘wild adventures, battles, conquests and defeats’.104 Physical violence is portrayed through the Victorian lens of a fair fight followed by a manly handshake. The boys in Saxby’s stories indulge in physical fights but to gentlemanly rules. When Yaspard goes off on his pretend Viking raids in Viking-Boys, he tells his friends that ‘we are Vikinger in search of glory and spoil’. He explains to his father that he wants to raid and have sham fights in order to emulate his ancestors, and wants to ‘make-believe to slaughter and capture each other’. He adds, however, that he is ‘nineteenth-century enough to fight fair’.105 Other troublesome aspects of Norse life, such as slavery and violent piracy, are brushed under the carpet. She compares Viking slavery to British press-gangs. 99 Saxby, Viking-Boys, p. 2. 100 Saxby, Viking-Boys, pp. 1, 3. 101 Saxby, The Yarl’s Yacht, p. 204. 102 Saxby, Daala-Mist, p. 138. 103 Saxby, Daala-Mist, pp. 140–41. 104 Saxby, Daala-Mist, p. 139. 105 Saxby, Viking-Boys, pp. 24, 38.

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She points out that some of Britain’s long-distance trade is little better than piracy. When Gibbie Harrison tells Yaspard, in Viking-Boys that Vikings were pirates, and his brother, Lowrie, condemns them for killing, robbing, and slaving, Yaspard merely explains that everyone else did the same and claims that it is ‘worse now when big armies use murderous machines for shooting […] and the press-gang can carry off any man it likes’.106 Saxby, like other nineteenth-century Scandinavian enthusiasts, held romantic notions of the position of women in the Viking Age. Women, according to her, were honoured in Viking times: they ‘honoured women, and never suffered their good name to be assailed’.107 As Lynn Abrams has argued, in the context of Saxby’s folklore accounts, Saxby painted a fictional picture of the past, one that presented women as equal to men. According to Saxby’s interpretation, Norse women were elevated to the status of heroines, with significant freedom to manage their own lives.108 This can be seen in one of her folklore accounts (‘The Shetlander’s Forbears’), where women played a key role in liberating themselves and their menfolk from the tyranny of Danish invaders. They did this by drugging the enemy with ‘strong liquor’ and then murdering them in their beds. As a reward, wives would henceforth occupy the honoured post at the ‘top of the board’.109 There were limits to this independence, however; there are no signs that the women continued with their warrior-like activities or turned into Viking shield-maidens. This romantic and chivalrous understanding of Shetland’s Norse past informed her views about the role of women in nineteenth-century Shetland, as evidenced in a letter she wrote to the Shetland Times. In this letter, Saxby contrasted the ‘lax’ courtship habits of Scottish young people to the morality of sexual behaviour as seen in Shetland.110 Females feature in Saxby’s adventure stories but as sisters, sweethearts, and mothers to the main, male, characters. Despite what Saxby says about gender equality in Norse society, her nineteenth-century romantic version of the Vikings is largely male. Although the females in her stories do not conform to Victorian stereotypes of passive and emotional women with little in their heads but domestic trivialities, their role in her stories is nonetheless tangential to the main plot. Shetland women, however, are shown as different from other British women.111 They do not take their husband’s surnames, for example. We are told that the women of Trondra can handle boats and even rescued a group of sailors on one occasion.112 Mrs Mitchell, mother of the Lunda lads, might be good at preparing picnics for her sons instead of worrying about them, but we are told that ‘she is never so happy as when

106 Saxby, Viking-Boys, p. 10. 107 Lerwick, Shetland Archives, SA/D1/134/Vol. 1, 13. 108 Abrams, Myth and Materiality, p. 34. 109 Saxby, Shetland Traditional Lore, pp. 88–96. 110 Lerwick, Shetland Archives, SA/D1/134/Vol. 1, 13. 111 Saxby’s boys’ stories were certainly read by girls. Copies of her books in my possession, for example, were donated as prizes to Elsie Joseland, Dulcie Carter, and Greta Love. 112 Saxby, Queen of the Isles, p. 52.

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she is on the sea flying before a gale’.113 The girls all know how to row and frequently take boats out to sea; girls have an outdoor childhood, just like their brothers. Saxby is also interested in more scholarly aspects of the Viking inheritance, such as place names. She points out to her young readers that Viking place names replaced Pictish names in Shetland.114 She uses Victorian ideas about racial purity when she states that the Vikings gave Norse names to every single landscape feature: each skerry, holm, daal, fiel, voe, vatn, saitor, burg, heogue, vik and aire bears a name bestowed by the masterful race which swept over Europe like a whirlwind, chasing away with its potent breath the impure and stagnant atmosphere of superstitious and luxurious pride that had gone before.115 Most of her stories provide explanations of Norse place names. We are told that: As is usual in the Shetland Isles, every crag of the reef had a name expressive of its position, or form, or incident connected with the rock which bore it. Thus – Swarta-skerry (black rock), Nord-bau (low, rounded rock lying to the north of others), Varstack (prominent rock acting as landmark or guide.116 My research has focused on the boys’ adventure stories of Jessie Saxby. Saxby is rarely mentioned in the critical literature, except as a folklorist. Her books, viewed in the context of children’s adventure literature, have not entered into our collective imaginations as, for example, ‘Swallows and Amazons’ or even Enid Blyton have done. Nevertheless, I hope I have been able to show that her stories resonate in several important ways, particularly in her insistence that Shetland has its own culturally significant, and northern, identity. Saxby’s adventure stories are primarily geographical: the key notion of territory permeates her work. I have attempted to shine a mirror on Saxby’s use of real and imagined spaces in order to examine the ways in which she carves out a conceptual identity for Shetland. This identity is both geographic (Northern) and temporal (Viking). Saxby undoubtedly painted a fictional recreation of a past and some have criticized her work in other contexts as racially-based romanticism, promoting Shetland nationalism and encouraging Shetlanders to feel they are different. Writers who have focused on her work as a folklorist have taken her to task for some of these views but her insistence that Shetland has an identity separate to the rest of the UK, and especially to the rest of Scotland, is worth examining and should not simply be dismissed. Reeploeg’s recent article is interesting. She argues that Shetland’s Nordic heritage is not just a nostalgic look back at times past but ‘a continuous choreographic activity that resists, or subverts, being a British or Scottish “national outpost”’.117 I hope I have been able to show that Saxby’s adventure stories should be seen as a significant part of this choreographic activity.

113 Saxby, The Lads of Lunda, p. 97. 114 Saxby, The Lads of Lunda, p. 116. 115 Lerwick, Shetland Archives, SA4/3000/17/25. 116 Lerwick, Shetland Archives, SA4/3000/10/23. 117 Reeploeg, ‘The Uttermost Parts of the Earth’, p. 215.

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Works Cited Manuscripts and Archival Sources Lerwick, Shetland Museum and Archives, SA/D6/262/2 ———, SA/D1/134/Vol. 1, 13 ———, SA/D20/5 ———, SA4/2475/293 ———, SA4/3000/10/8 ———, SA4/3000/10/23 ———, SA4/3000/17/25 ———, SA4/3000/17/57/133 Primary Sources Edmonston, Biot, and Jessie Saxby, The Home of a Naturalist (London: Nisbet, 1889) Haldane Burgess, James John, The Viking Path: A Tale of the White Christ (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1894) Saxby, Jessie, Daala-Mist: Or, Stories of Shetland (Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot, 1876) ———, The Lads of Lunda (London: James Nisbet, 1887) ———, Queen of the Isles (London: Partridge & Co, 1887) ———, The Yarl’s Yacht (London: James Nisbet, 1889) ———, Wrecked on the Shetlands: Or, the Little Sea-King (London: Religious Tract Society, 1890) ———, ‘Birds of Omen in Shetland: Inaugural Address to the Viking Club, London’, Kirkwall: Viking Club, 13 October 1892 ———, Heim-Laund and Heim-Folk: Sketches and Poems (Edinburgh: R & R Clark, 1892) ———, Viking-Boys (London: James Nisbet, 1892) ———, A Camsterie Nacket, Being the Story of a Contrary Laddie Ill to Guide (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1894) ———, Shetland Traditional Lore (Edinburgh: Grant & Murray, 1932) Scott, Walter, The Pirate (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1822) Secondary Works Abrams, Lynn, Myth and Materiality in a Woman’s World: Shetland 1800–2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005) Cohen, Bronwen, ‘Norse Imagery in Shetland: An Historical Study of Intellectuals and their Use of the Past in the Construction of Shetland’s Identity with Particular Reference to the Period 1800–1914’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Manchester University, 1983) D’Arcy, Julian, Scottish Skalds and Sagamen: Old Norse Influence on Modern Scottish Literature (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 1996) Davidson, Peter, The Idea of North (London: Reaktion, 2005)

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Farrell, Maureen, ‘Culture and Identity in Scottish Children’s Fiction’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Glasgow University, 2009) Fielding, Penny, Scotland and the Fictions of Geography: North Britain 1760–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010) Grónneberg, Roy, ‘Jakobsen and his Shetland Correspondents’, in Essays in Shetland History, ed. by Barbara Crawford (Lerwick: The Shetland Times, 1984) Grydehøj, Adam, ‘Historiography of Picts, Vikings, Scots and Fairies and its Influence on Shetland’s Twenty-First Century Economic Development’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Aberdeen, 2009) ———, ‘Ethnicity and the Origins of Local Identity in Shetland, Part 1: Picts, Vikings, Fairies, Finns and Aryans’, Journal of Marine and Island Cultures, 2 (2013), 39–48 ———, ‘Ethnicity and the Origins of Local Identity in Shetland, Part 2: Picts, Vikings, Fairies, Finns and Aryans’, Journal of Marine and Island Cultures, 2 (2013), 107–14 Jamieson, Robert, ‘Rock Bound’ (University of Edinburgh, 2016) [accessed 6 May 2016] Johnston, J. Laughton, Victorians 60° North: The Story of the Edmonstons and Saxbys of Shetland (Lerwick: The Shetland Times, 2007) Leslie, Brydon, Borgar Jarl: J. J. Haldane Burgess and Up Helly Aa (Lerwick: Shetland Amenity Trust, 2012) Malm, Charlotta, ‘A Place Apart? Debating Landscapes and Identities in the Shetland Islands’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Stockholm, 2013) Peraldo, Emmanuelle, ‘The Meeting of Two Practices of Space: Literature and Geography’, in Literature and Geography: The Writing of Space Throughout History, ed. by Emmanuelle Peraldo (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2016), pp. 1–20 Phillips, Richard, Mapping Men and Empire: Geographies of Adventure (London: Routledge, 2013) Reeploeg, Silke, ‘The Uttermost Part of the Earth: Islands on the Edge … and in the Centre of the North Atlantic’, in Islands and Britishness: A Global Perspective, ed. by Jodie Matthews and Daniel Travers (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), pp. 207–18 Saxby, Jane, ‘Jessie M. E. Saxby: An Appreciation by her Daughter-in-Law Jane’, Chambers’s Journal (1942), 652 Smith, Mark, The Literature of Shetland (Lerwick: Shetland Times Bookshop, 2014) Stephanides, Stephanos, and Susan Bassnett, ‘Islands, Literature and Cultural Translatability’, Journal of Global Cultural Studies, Hors Série (2008), 5–21 Sutherland, John, The Life of Walter Scott (London: Blackwell, 1995) Tally, Robert, ‘Geocriticism and Classic American Literature’ (2008, Texas State University) [accessed 17 May 2016] Wawn, Andrew, The Vikings and the Victorians (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000) Westphal, Bernard, Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)

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Claire Smerdon

‘Neath the Midnight Sun’ Imagining the Canadian North through School Readers

We are a country of the north — a nation which thrusts its jaw against the fierce odds of climate and geography. Once our forefathers used canoe and pack. Today the tools of science search for our wilderness wealth. […] Canada teems with adventure.1 Twentieth-century Canadian children first encountered The North not in geography or history lessons but in their school readers, lavishly illustrated anthologies designed not only to improve reading skills but also to introduce them to their country. These official textbooks, which represent the perspective of white middle-class educators of the day, present contrasting — and conflicting — views of The North as both the source of rich resources and the site of romantic adventure, influencing generations of children’s earliest ideas about Canada while establishing The North as a cornerstone of national identity.

The Readers From the early nineteenth century, readers were the principal tool for classroom instruction in North America and the British colonies, often the only textbook in one-room pioneer schools. These anthologies, designed to teach children to read and expose them to a variety of English literature, were graded from the Primer for tiny tots to the Fifth Reader aimed at university entrance students. In Canada, education is a provincial rather than federal responsibility, with provincial Ministries of Education deciding upon the curriculum and materials. Historically, the Ontario Readers were used in that province while the Alexandra Readers and Canadian Readers were used in other parts of the country. By the 1930s, educational reforms across Canada resulted in a change from rote learning to a more creative child-centred approach. Educational publishers anticipated increased profits by creating textbooks that would meet the new curriculum goals while appealing

1 Fisher, ‘A Canadian Speaks’, p. 383. Claire Smerdon, Teaching Fellow in Science Communication and Public Engagement, University of Edinburgh. [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 293–309 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120799

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to educationalists across the country; between 1946 and 1947, four rival firms each produced a new reading series for children in Grades Four through Six, aged nine to eleven at the beginning of the school year. Like their predecessors, these readers are compilations of prose, poetry, plays, and exposition. Unlike the earlier dull grey readers, the 1940s books are painstakingly produced with extensive illustrations especially commissioned to enhance the texts. Additionally, while earlier textbooks were primarily anthologies of extracts from English literature and classic mythology, the new series incorporated purpose-written Canadian material. The readers themselves are official publications, authorized by the Ministry of Education, reflecting the societal norms and values of English Canadian society of the time; these are the things that Canadians wanted their children to know about Canada. Canadian educational historians recognize the role of schoolbooks in imparting the type of learning referred to by the American educationalist Michael Apple as ‘official knowledge’.2 Penney Clark observes that, ‘A textbook carries the imprimatur of authority […] the approved version of the world considered acceptable for passing on to the youth of the nation’.3 Amy von Heyking agrees that ‘curriculum, textbooks and other teaching resources are expressions of “official” ideologies regarding identity, community and citizenship’.4 While the readers are designed to improve reading comprehension, the accompanying teachers’ guides reveal the editors’ intentions to reinforce Canadian identity through the creation of a common cultural heritage and values based upon a Canadian settler past, as von Heyking writes, ‘the reflection of the dominant values of the privileged groups who author them’.5 The readers for the Grades Four to Six were designed not only to appeal to children who had mastered basic reading skills, but also to create an interest in Canada. As the teachers’ manual for the Canadian Parade series states: ‘It is time to begin to awaken and develop those feelings of love for, and loyalty to, Canada, that rise out of a growing knowledge of her beauty, greatness, and lively history’.6 Four new reading series for Grades Four to Six were introduced between 1958 and 1962. The New World Readers series was revised, and the Canadian Parade series was discontinued, while The Canadian Reading Development series and Highroads to Reading series were retained, at least in Ontario, until 1968 and 1974 respectively. These new sets of readers were very similar in form and content to their predecessors, incorporating most of the same materials with updated artwork.

Imagining Canada through School Readers O Canada! Where pines and maples grow, Great prairies spread and lordly rivers flow.



2 Apple, Ideology and Curriculum, p. vii. 3 Clark, ‘Liberty of Trade from the Thraldom of the Autocrats’, p. 1067. 4 Von Heyking, Creating Citizens, p. 5. 5 Von Heyking, Creating Citizens, p. 5. 6 Dickie, Guide to Young Explorers, p. 51.

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How dear to us thy broad domain From east to western sea! Thou land of hope for all who toil! Thou true north strong and free!7 In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson introduces his theory where the ‘imagined community’ created through print media constructs national identity. He uses the example of the ‘mass ceremony’ of reading the daily newspaper: Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar.8 For much of the twentieth century, Canadian children participated in the ‘mass ceremony’ of reading together from their school texts, but unlike Anderson’s newspaper readers, they had no choice about participating in the ‘imagined community’ created through their readers.9 Public education was mandatory, and schools were required to use only readers authorized by the Ministries of Education. Also, unlike Anderson’s newspaper readers who could presumably choose from a variety of daily papers depending on their social class, geographic location, political leanings, budget, or personal taste, Canadian children’s books were ordained by the School Board. There cannot be many examples of similar common interactions with the same media; even the most popular films, television programmes, and fiction — for example, the Harry Potter books and films — are not guaranteed to be experienced by all children of a given age in a geographic region, whereas Canadian pupils used the same readers regardless of location, family income, or ethnicity.10 Children not only read the same textbooks across the country: the same readers were used across generations. For example, the Canadian Reading Development series, published in 1946, was used in Ontario schools until 1974, providing ample opportunity for teachers to teach the same texts they had studied as pupils. This intergenerational experience of using precisely the same school readers over almost thirty years illustrates another dimension of an imagined community created through the school readers and positions the readers as the creators of traditions that create a sense of national identity; the readers in this study become part of Stuart Hall’s ‘narrative of the nation’.11 In addition to serving as a tool that created an imaginary community for children through reading the same materials, often at precisely the same time, the reader also introduced children to identical concepts of ‘Canada’ by picturing for them the

7 Weir, ‘O Canada’, p. 386. 8 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 35. 9 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 35. 10 Private (‘independent’) schools were required to use the same textbooks and a parallel series of readers was used in the Roman Catholic (‘separate’) schools. 11 Hall, ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, p. 293.

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physical appearance of the country, describing the characteristics of its inhabitants and their activities, creating a shared history of traditions, symbols, and legends.

Imagining the Land Let us look at the land. What flashes through your mind when you picture Canada? Fresh, clean, northern, young, big, strong — do you think of muskeg, black lakes, sharp winters and intense summers? Do you see a spine of rock across the face of Canada and towering peaks in the west? Do you see northern lights and lonely trappers’ trails?12 The first thing a child learns about Canada is that it is ‘big’ and stretches ‘from sea to sea’. The few visual representations of the whole country suggest a vast empty land, as in the poem ‘Canada’: Two thousand miles of forest, A thousand miles of plain, A thousand miles of mountain, And then the sea again.13 Teachers are instructed that, ‘The map of the Dominion of Canada should be used in connection with the study of each selection’.14 Stories take place in specific locations and this naming of places both imparts familiarity and implies possession, as well as adding verisimilitude — a sense that the stories ‘really happened’. The readers also attempt to make ‘Canada’ ‘real’ by introducing pupils to children ‘just like you’ in other parts of the country, in real-life situations. To acquaint children with their country, each series of 1940s readers creates an imaginary trip across Canada, a series of stories that take the children invariably from east to west, visiting ‘friends’ in the different regions. The opening chapter of Young Explorers ‘has been arranged to assist the teacher in giving Grade Four pupils a bird’s eye view of our country […] the teacher may use the selections as readings in connection with a project or enterprise dealing with a Trans-Canada flight’.15 Similarly, the stated purpose of ‘Riding with the Sun’ is ‘to give the child the vicarious experience of flying across his own Dominion of Canada’.16 The editors of Under the North Star go a step further when introducing ‘The Land We Love’: ‘The aim of this unit is to increase children’s knowledge, experience and appreciation of their own country’.17 These virtual cross-Canada tours serve to create not only an imagined community through visits to children ‘just like you’ but also an imagined Canadian

12 Fisher, ‘A Canadian Speaks’, p. 380. 13 Gordon, ‘Canada’, p. 3. 14 Watson, Teacher’s Guide to ‘Riding with the Sun’, p. 1. 15 Dickie, Teaching Reading Today: A Guide to ‘Young Explorers’, p. 50. 16 Watson, Teacher’s Guide to ‘Riding with the Sun’, p. 195. 17 Norton and Boyce, Teacher’s Handbook for ‘Under the North Star’, p. 131. Italics mine.

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landscape. The Arctic is not part of these imaginary cross-country tours but subject of separate units on Canada’s Far North. While some of the ‘cross-Canada’ tours pay brief visits to cities — for example, ‘Riding with the Sun’ begins in Winnipeg and ends in Victoria — remarkably few stories are set in Canada’s metropolises, despite the 1951 Canadian census report that over 70 per cent of the population lived in urban settings.18 In Picturing Canada, librarians Gail Edwards and Judith Saltman see the preference for rural and wilderness settings as a defining characteristic: The rural roots of Canadian society and the imaginative pull of the northern wilderness in Canadian culture have played a role in shaping image and text in Canadian illustrated books for children […] locating a particularly idealized image of Canadian childhood within an environment from which urban settlement has been erased.19 The editors of Proud Procession arranged their selections ‘to suggest a background of the Canadian scene, the clean outdoor world of sea and sun, woods and rivers, that form our national home, the physical as well as the spiritual climate in which the Canadian personality is being moulded’.20 The guide for Young Explorers suggests: In discussion the teacher might help the children to build up in imagination a definite picture of a Canadian country scene. Begin with their own neighbourhood, and extend the picture beyond that to include mountains, rivers, — whatever is necessary to complete the scene. This picture should clarify and emphasize the ideas that Canada is beautiful, and a good country in which to live.21 The manuals suggest teachers compile a portfolio of illustrations from magazines, calendars, and postcards — or rely on personal experience: ‘The mountains are even more difficult than the prairies to picture in imagination […] Fortunately good pictures are easily obtained and many teachers will have seen the mountains’.22

Imagining Canada as North We sink at last to sleep. On every side, A grim mysterious presence, vast and old, The forest stretches leagues and leagues away, With lonely rivers running dark and cold, And many a gloomy lake and haunted bay. The stars above the pines are sharp and still. The wind scarce moves. An owl hoots from the hill.23 18 Statistics Canada. 19 Edwards and Saltman, Picturing Canada, p. 193. 20 Dickie, Teaching Reading Today: A Guide to ‘Proud Procession’, p. 60. 21 Dickie, Teaching Reading Today: A Guide to ‘Young Explorers’, p. 53. Italics mine. 22 Dickie, Teaching Reading Today: A Guide to ‘Young Explorers’, p. 69. 23 Lampman, ‘Night in the Wilderness’, p. 408.

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Despite the ‘sea to sea’ construction of Canada within the 1940s readers, the dominant setting for stories of adventure and resource extraction is the Canadian Shield country of the Group of Seven, the geographical area considered to impart the ‘Northern’ character to Canadian identity. Most children would have an image of the unpopulated Canadian Shield landscape, based upon daily exposure to the Group of Seven paintings on the classroom walls and school corridors, courtesy of the reproduction and distribution programmes of the National Gallery of Canada dating from the 1930s.24 Artist and educator Patti Vera Pente, exploring the influence of landscape images in Canadian education, ‘where the construction of nationalism through landscape and wilderness is persistent’, believes that these programmes ‘cemented’ the relationship between the images of the Group of Seven and education.25 She observes that, ‘Canadians’ repeated exposure to wilderness landscape images and the constructed associations about Canada that are taught in conjunction with such images shape collective identity’.26 The illustrations in the readers serve primarily as a background for the activities of the characters, leaving children to imagine the Northern landscape through sparse and clichéd written descriptions. Undergrowth is ‘dense’, forests ‘tower’, rocks are ‘rugged’, swamps ‘endless’ or ‘bottomless’, and the land is ‘lonely’ and ‘silent’. ‘The Canadian forest country was white with snow. North of Lake Superior the evergreen trees wore hoods and coats of white. A heavy blanket of cloud hung low across the hills. There was no sound. Nothing moved’.27 But this desolate landscape is inhabited: ‘Even a thread of grey smoke stood up like a pole, keeping the sky from falling on a log cabin in the valley’. In the 1960s readers, the site of wilderness adventure expands from the Boreal Forest of the Canadian Shield to include the Far North, the Canadian Arctic, as the site of trading post stories and tales of Arctic survival. It is the Northern wilderness setting that imparts a distinctly Canadian identity to the selections within the readers. The stories set in small towns, family farms, or even by the sea could be set in the United States, or, in many cases, Australia or Britain. These stories emphasize family values, fair play, and the virtues of hard work, qualities desirable in Canadians, but not unique. In contrast, the stories set in the wilderness reflect the main metanarratives of Canadian identity, constructing Canada as a Northern nation. These include tales of the inhospitable landscape cleared and transformed into a home by the brave British settler ancestors; survival — not only historic tales of explorers and voyageurs but also present-day stories of children lost — and found — in the bush; and the North as the future of Canada through exciting stories of resource extraction. The readers universally attempt to create enthusiasm for the economic possibilities of the natural resources of the Canadian North, a sentiment strongly felt in Canada after World War II. Progressive Conservative John Diefenbaker’s 1958 campaign ‘was fought, and arguably won, on his northern vision: “I see a new Canada”, he proclaimed

24 25 26 27

Zemans, ‘Establishing the Canon’, pp. 183–84. Pente, ‘The Hidden Curriculum of Wilderness’, p. 112. Pente, ‘The Hidden Curriculum of Wilderness’, p. 118. Holling, ‘Paddle-to-the-Sea’, p. 9.

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in his opening campaign speech […] “I see a new Canada — a Canada of the North”’.28 The economic approach to the North is neatly summarized in ‘A Canadian Speaks’: If you were asked to give a picture of Canada in a few words, what would you say? Would you tell of our cities, or the splendour of the outdoors? The outdoors would likely be chosen first, because our wealth comes from water, rock, wood and soil.29 The readers reveal the value of hidden mineral resources of the Canadian wilderness. In ‘Across the Ribbon of Steel’, even the monotonous Northern Ontario landscape conceals wealth: All that day and night they travelled through a lonely wild country of rocks and forest and streams […] ‘This Northern Ontario is mining country’, said the friendly waiter at breakfast. ‘Deep down in the earth here, is copper and nickel and gold. Gold for rings, and copper for kettles, and nickel for skates’. They had just left the town of Sudbury.30 The Northern wilderness is transformed by resource extraction (logging, mining) from ‘beautiful’ to ‘exciting’, as in ‘The Young Fire Warden’: ‘Here is a thrilling story of the “lumber country” of British Columbia, in which a Canadian brother and his sister play an important part in saving a stand of valuable timber from fire’.31 The fur trade opens the country for exploitation and development, followed by forestry, mining, and the transportation these industries require. The resource development stories have a great sense of urgency, men and machines battling against the relentless weather — or the rugged topography of the Canadian North. There do not appear to be any significant tensions between resource industries and wilderness recreation within the readers and it seems that the two coexist in harmony. No favourite beauty spots are destroyed by clear-cutting or the construction of hydro dams, although we see valuable timber damaged by careless recreational users starting fires, and virtually all the conservation efforts depicted are rooted in economic concerns rather than ecological interests. The vital importance of natural resources in Canada’s present and future economy is stressed and forests are replanted to provide materials and jobs for future generations. The role of youth and the resources of the North in the future of Canada is encapsulated in the teacher’s notes on the poem, ‘The Height of Land’: It made him [the poet] think, these lovely lonely lands, of the two parts of Canada: on the one hand, the crowded southern part; on the other, the lonely north, many times larger than the south, beautiful and rich, but empty still, waiting for men and women to come and use it. To do that may be the work of boys and girls now in Grade Six.32

28 Grace, Canada and the Idea of North, p. 69. 29 Fisher, ‘A Canadian Speaks’, p. 381. 30 Lewis, ‘Across the Ribbon of Steel’, p. 341. 31 Dobrindt and Brand, eds, Teacher’s Handbook for ‘My World and I’, pp. 24–25. 32 Dickie, Teaching Reading Today: A Guide to ‘Proud Procession’, p. 346.

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Imagining Canadians — a Northern People Canada is also people — the men and women who have driven back the forests. The brave adventurers of France and England came first. These coureurs des bois were jolly and wily. The toiling habitant loved his soil; the British and European carried the plough westward. The Indian and Eskimo showed us how to live with nature.33 Anthropologist Eva Mackey observes that, ‘Nationalism often depends upon mythological narratives of a unified nation moving progressively through time — a continuum beginning with a glorious past leading to the present and then onward to an even brighter future’.34 In the readers, these ‘mythological narratives’ are created though the stories of the European explorers and settlers. Every reader contains at least one account about Canada’s early settlers and most devote entire units to poems and stories about ‘Pioneer Days’. The process of creating a home in the northern wilderness is shown as a vital part of the formation of the Canadian character, as depicted in ‘The Saga of Shelter’: [The play] does not attempt to romanticize the initial difficulties of the pioneers, but shows how their courage and determination conquered all obstacles. The warmth of pioneer hospitality, the easy and democratic camaraderie of the woods, the premium placed upon resourcefulness, the love of freedom, the sense of individual worth, the forward-looking optimism tempered by a sense of present realities, all of which have gone into the amalgam of the Canadian character, are woven into this picture.35 Here the ‘democratic’ and ‘optimistic’ pioneer character exemplifies the ‘Better British’ imperial ethnicity outlined by John Darwin, the concept that constructing homes in the northern wilderness strengthens the character, that immigrants are stronger than those back in Britain.36 It also reflects the concept expressed by Ian Angus of ‘seeing ourselves as becoming ourselves through home-making’.37 Thus the settler becomes ‘Canadian’ through the very act of building a home unlike the transient voyageurs or explorers who seem to retain their identity as Scottish or French; explorers and voyageurs are never constructed as ‘our ancestors’. In addition to building homes in the wilderness, pioneers show courage in the face of predators — ‘marauding Indians’ and dangerous animals. Each set of readers has at least one tale of a pioneer family’s heroism and ingenuity in the face of a forest or prairie fire. Eva Mackey observes that, ‘These mythical stories require that specific versions of history are highlighted, versions that re-affirm the particular characteristics

33 Fisher, ‘A Canadian Speaks’, pp. 382–83. 34 Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 23. 35 Biehl, Barrett, and Davidson, Teachers [sic] Manual to Accompany ‘All Sails Set’, p. 160. 36 Darwin, ‘Empire and Ethnicity’, pp. 383–401. 37 Angus, A Border Within, p. 204. Emphasis in original.

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ascribed to the nation’.38 The Canadian identity constructed by the pioneer stories is based on courage, hard work, and ingenuity. Historian Gerald Friesen believes that the stories of brave settler ancestors carving homes in the wilderness ‘remove the pioneers from today’s world by making their feats unrepeatable […] story and song declare that the founders endured hard times, sacrificed, and worked very hard as they adapted to a new physical and cultural setting’.39 The readers encourage children to attempt to repeat, at least on a small scale, the feats described by Friesen, by ‘playing pioneer’. One teachers’ manual asks: ‘Almost everything today is ready-made. Do you think we are missing some of the fun of pioneer living?’40 Another expresses the idea of the excitement and appeal of pioneer life: ‘In this Unit, life is hard and exciting, but with some of the appeal of a prolonged camping trip, and there is a place in it for young and old’.41 The idea of ‘playing pioneer’ through camping appears in several stories where modern children attempt to recreate the exploits of early settlers, building shelters and cooking over fires. The teachers’ manuals also suggest that children attempt pioneer crafts based on the stories in the readers, for example, ‘Brooms for Sale’: ‘Make miniature brooms, preferably from some soft and manageable wood, like cedar, according to the directions in the story’.42 Other proposed activities include ‘whittling, carving, other types of woodwork, rug-hooking and sketching’.43 Group projects involve visiting heritage sites, followed by the creation of museum-style dioramas of pioneer life — ‘It is surprising what can be done with cardboard, crepe-paper, cellophane, lead, tea-paper, twigs, etc.’ — in addition to collecting and making displays of artefacts.44 Despite the notion that constructing a shelter in the northern wilderness might be viewed as ‘a prolonged camping trip’ within the readers, the editors did not trivialize the exploits of the settlers. Children are expected to develop a sense of gratitude to the pioneer ancestors who cleared the wilderness in the face of danger: ‘This unit of our Reader is intended to remind pupils of those earlier days and to inspire in them a pride in the pioneers who toiled for us, whose imaginations conceived, and whose courage developed, this great land’.45 The frequent repetition of phrases such as ‘the pioneers who toiled for us’ and ‘our ancestors’ create direct links to the British settlers and their activities, inventing both mythical pioneer ancestors and the settler tradition for young Canadians. Through immersive activities — plays, choral readings, museum visits, projects, and crafts — children are invited to ‘play pioneer’, vicariously taking on the identity of settlers and thus inheriting ‘Canadian-ness’.

38 Mackey, The House of Difference, p. 23. 39 Friesen, Citizens and Nation, p. 72. 40 Noble and Fisher, Teacher’s Manual for ‘Under the North Star’, p. 131. 41 Biehl, Barrett, and Davidson, Teachers [sic] Manual to Accompany ‘All Sails Set’, p. 140. Italics mine. 42 Barrett, Manual to Accompany ‘Wide Open Windows’, p. 204. 43 Biehl, Barrett, and Davidson, Teachers [sic] Manual to Accompany ‘All Sails Set’, p. 29. 44 Barrett, Manual to Accompany ‘Wide Open Windows’, p. 212. 45 Biehl, Teachers [sic] Manual to Accompany ‘Up and Away’, p. 168.

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In addition to the ubiquitous tales of pioneers making homes in the wilderness, all the readers contain tales of wilderness survival, a dominant theme in Canadian literature, as identified by Margaret Atwood, among others.46 In the 1940s readers, the trope is largely represented by tales of lost children surviving in the as-yet-uncleared forests of southern Canada or the desolate Prairies. By the 1960s, the site of wilderness survival shifts to the Far North, with present-day adventures of young people in the Arctic. The survival theme is particularly strong in Broad Horizons with five tales of Arctic survival, plus others set in southern Canadian wilderness landscapes. While Northern survival is a less dominant theme in other readers, each includes at least one story of humans triumphing over the Canadian wilderness environment. The teachers’ manuals stress the reality of the Northern survival stories: ‘Such instances are not uncommon in the modern scene, for rarely does a winter pass in which the Canadian wilds do not present the dramatic tale of such an occurrence’.47 Stories based upon real tales of survival, for example ‘Labrador Doctor’, the account of Sir William Grenfell’s experience adrift on an ice flow, are included, although only Young Canada Readers: 5 features selections on the ill-fated Franklin expedition. Because the readers are designed for children under twelve, they include few of the gruesome deaths so characteristic of the tales that typify the Canadian survival theme for Atwood. The Canadian North portrayed in the readers is not malevolent, but the site of adventure, where young Canadians triumph and survive, often assisted by their faithful dogs or Aboriginal friends.

Imagining Others Sitting here In our usual chairs Its pleasant to think Of polar bears, Of polar bears Amid ice-floes, Dog sleds. And flat-faced Eskimos.48 Indigenous people are central to the North imagined in the school readers. While consistently acknowledged as predating Europeans in the land that became Canada, Indigenous children are — and remain — distinctly Other, not only through depictions of their clothing, activities and geographical locations, but also through their place within the readers. Typically, stories of Inuit are placed in units on ‘Other Lands’ or ‘In the Far North’, while First Nations appear in ‘Days of Old’ as people of a distant past; the rare stories of contemporary First Nations children are set on remote reserves. 46 Atwood, Survival, Strange Things. 47 Turner and others, ‘Story Caravan’: Teachers’ Guide, p. 68. 48 Coatsworth, ‘Sitting Here’, p. 386.

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In ‘Days of Old’ units, First Nations are frequently characterized as untrustworthy savages although this imagery is largely overridden by the trope of the Vanishing Indian, as described by historian Daniel Francis: ‘The Vanishing Indian was a very expedient notion. It was reinforced by the perception that Indians seemed to serve no useful purpose in the modern world’.49 This romantic image is promoted throughout the readers, where the First Nations are typically portrayed as people of Canada’s distant past, superseded by modernity. Once the pioneers have established themselves and communities begin to develop, First Nations effectively disappear — reflective of the fact that, as settlers colonized the land, Indigenous people moved to less inhabited parts of the country — or were assimilated: Where we walk to school today Indian children used to play — All about our native land, Where the shops and houses stand. And the trees were very tall, And there were no streets at all; Not a church and not a steeple — Only woods and Indian people. Only wigwams on the ground, And at night bears prowling round — What a different place today, Where we live and work and play!50 This poem, ‘Indian Children’, appears multiple times in the readers, introducing children to the fact that North America was inhabited by Indigenous people before the arrival of the Europeans and that Europeans have had a significant effect on both the landscape and the earlier inhabitants. The references to familiar buildings in the child’s real world — school, shops, houses, churches — give the poem credibility, enforced by realistic illustrations. There is no suggestion within the poem that ‘Indian people’ exist today, no explanation for their absence. Most readers include passages from ‘The Song of Hiawatha’, enforcing the romantic image of the Vanishing Indian of the distant past. The readers also invite children to imagine contemporary First Nations reserves. Francis reminds us that: Few children in Canada had any direct knowledge of Native people, who were pretty much confined to their reserves at the margins of society. Instead, White kids were exposed to images of the Indian created by various White writers and educators. These images were not all negative. On the contrary, many were very positive. But they were not authentic.51 49 Francis, The Imaginary Indian, p. 59. 50 Wynne, ‘Indian Children’, p. 138. 51 Francis, The Imaginary Indian, p. 145.

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The young narrator of ‘Nehemiah Teaboy, Trapper’ describes his home in the North: In the summer we live on our reserve. It lies on a large lake in northern Manitoba. Some of our families have houses, others live in wigwams. We have a church, a school and a trading post on our reserve. It is a hundred forty miles from a railway.52 The teachers’ manual offers an explanation of ‘reserves’: When the Canadian Government bought the lands of Western Canada from the Indians, they set aside, in each province, large tracts of good land to be the homes of the different tribes forever. These lands are called ‘reserves’.53 In ‘Next Door Neighbours’, a story written specifically for On the Beam, David describes a reserve he has seen: ‘I drove through an Indian reserve one summer. It looked as if they were all so poor’.54 David does not realize that his new friend is First Nations precisely because they meet outside the boundaries of the reserve. In her examination of Canadian children’s books about ‘modern Indians’, librarian Sheila Egoff writes: ‘In all these stories the cultural difference becomes a “problem” and it is the raison d’être of the novel — that is, the problem provides the only plot mechanism’.55 She notes that ‘one would not say “this is the story of a friendship between two boys”, but between a white boy and an Indian boy’. Daniel Francis considers that these stories ‘represented the concerns and prejudices of White adult society instead of actual Native Canadians’.56 Unlike the First Nations, Inuit are imagined as people of the present-day, living in the Far North of the readers. While the Canadian Reading Development series gathers Arctic stories in units such as ‘Under the Northern Lights’, stories about Inuit children are more usually found in ‘Friends in Far-off Lands’ or ‘Children around the World’ amid tales about Sumatra, China, and Kashmir. This placement supports cultural historian Renée Hulan’s statement that in children’s literature, ‘Inuit culture has been used (among other aboriginal cultures) to teach difference, and now tolerance of differences’.57 Unlike imaginary visits to other parts of Canada, there is no suggestion that children might visit the remote Arctic. Only the one teacher’s handbook asks: ‘Does this story make you wish that you could visit the Eskimos?’58 Inuit daily life is so far removed from the child reader that the ‘Eskimo’ is constructed as a very remote and distant Other. Throughout the readers, Inuit are depicted as highly resourceful and competent, with four different stories of children building snow shelters to save themselves and their siblings repeated across different editions of the readers, dominating Canadian children’s ideas about Arctic life. Hulan observes that, ‘The difficulty with outsiders’ 52 Clay, ‘Nehemiah Teaboy’, p. 221. 53 Dickie, Teaching Reading Today: A Guide to ‘Young Explorers’, pp. 166–67. 54 Boyle, ‘Next Door Neighbours’, p. 59. 55 Egoff, The Republic of Childhood, p. 171. Italics in original. 56 Francis, The Imaginary Indian, p. 145. 57 Hulan, Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture, p. 72. 58 Norton and Boyce, eds, Teacher’s Handbook for ‘Under the North Star’, p. 56.

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versions of Inuit life is not that they are more or less authentic, but that they have been received as authentic. Images of Inuit have been controlled, historically at least, by non-Inuit’.59 The readers play a definite role in the presentation of Inuit life by non-Inuit, establishing ‘authentic’ representations of Inuit life from a position of authority. ‘The Canadian Eskimo’ is a lengthy exposition with headings including ‘His House and Furnishings’, ‘His Habits of Dress, Eating and Travel’, and ‘He Learns from the White Man’, an account more typical of nineteenth-century travelogues than textbooks used across Canada until the mid-1970s. The selection stresses the inventiveness and ingenuity of the Inuit, but also is rife with British settler value judgements: ‘If an Eskimo had the chance, he might like to live in a wooden house’.60 The selection portrays the Eskimo as primitive and superstitious — characteristics that are not prominent in the fictional accounts of Inuit throughout the readers — yet carrying far more authority than stories like ‘Kak’s Snow House’. The account concludes: As Eskimos learn more about the white man, we might imagine they would like to leave the cold northland, and come down here to live. But that isn’t very likely. A few have been brought south by missionaries or the Mounties, but they have been very unhappy. They couldn’t get used to our food, and some of them were so homesick they became quite ill. Then, too, many diseases which affect us only slightly, are fatal to them. So the Eskimo is much better off in his own northern land, and no doubt will be quite content to stay there.61 The activities described in both fiction and non-fiction — hunting seal or caribou, making fur clothing, carving walrus tusks — are far beyond the scope of classroom projects, although one teacher’s guide ambitiously suggests a possible group activity: ‘If this lesson is studied in winter, and there is enough snow, the children might enjoy building an igloo, after carefully studying the method the Eskimos use’.62 This is the only project that might allow children to ‘play Eskimo’; the preferred activity is the construction of dioramas to illustrate Inuit life. The manual for Up & Away provides detailed instructions to accompany ‘The House that Kak Built’, written in the days before schools were concerned with Risk Assessment: Make a sand-table model of an Eskimo village. Snow and ice may be modelled from asbestos paste power. Paraffin wax poured in a bowl for a mould will make an igloo. Seals, polar bears, Eskimo igloos may be carved from plasticine, paraffin wax, or soap. Weapons, kayaks, etc., may be whittled from wood. Blue cellophane makes open water. A sheet of Bristol board may be coloured to form a background of the northern lights.63

59 Hulan, Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture, p. 81. 60 Kelly, ‘The Canadian Eskimo’, p. 280. 61 Kelly, ‘The Canadian Eskimo’, p. 288. 62 Watson, ed., Teacher’s Guide to ‘On the Beam’, p. 92. 63 Biehl, Teachers [sic] Manual to Accompany ‘Up and Away’, p. 162.

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Rather than immersive activities that might allow children to emulate — and thus identify with — the Inuit, the creation of museum-style dioramas serves to emphasize the differences between Inuit life and that in the southern parts of the country and situates the Inuit firmly as a distant and unknowable Other.

Imagining Canada Today By the late 1960s, educators across Canada realized that the readers lacked relevance for Canada’s multicultural urban society. Pedagogical styles changed, different types of learning materials were used, ‘reading’ was replaced with ‘language arts’, and children learned at their own pace or in small groups. With the demise of the readers — and group classroom reading and discussion — Canadian children were no longer encouraged to imagine children ‘just like them’ reading the same stories across the country. Without common readers — and communal reading experience — schoolchildren imagined different official versions of Canada, largely based upon their classroom teacher’s interest and experience — and the local school board’s budget. For over thirty years the readers in this study influenced Canadian children’s ideas about themselves and their nation, long before they studied history, geography, and civics. By reading the same materials at the same time, Canadian children participated in an ‘imagined community’ created by their school readers. The readers provided an official narrative about Canada — the approved view of Canada for young citizens. Throughout the 1940s readers, Canada is constructed as North not only through text but also images depicting a vast unpopulated wilderness, primarily the Canadian Shield country portrayed by the Group of Seven. By the 1960s, the main site of imagined adventures is the Far North, the Barren Lands beyond the Arctic Circle. The North is not only a site of daring exploits but also the source of Canada’s wealth, full of valuable resources to be harvested or extracted. Children imagined travelling across their country through virtual journeys from east to west, meeting not only children ‘just like them’ but the exotic Others of the Canadian North. While there is little interaction with indigenous peoples who remain distinctly Other, Canadian children are depicted as travelling by dog-team, canoe, or bush plane to remote trading posts, competently surviving blizzards by building shelters. They are seldom lost in the forest but ‘at home’ in the Canadian North, the legacy of ‘their’ pioneer ancestors who tamed the forests and constructed homes in the wilderness; the North is the birthright of young Canadians. The influence of these readers persists to this day. The textbooks were used in Grades Four to Six by all children attending English-language public schools in Canada between 1946 and the mid-1970s. While the oldest in this cohort have long been retired, the youngest are just approaching fifty and have numbered among Canada’s leading politicians, educators, and journalists from the late 1950s to the present day. Educationalist David Pratt believes that, ‘For some social and cultural questions, the influence of the textbook may remain decisive’.64 While 64 Pratt, ‘The Social Role of School Textbooks in Canada’, p. 292.

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later education and adult experience have doubtless shaped opinion-makers’ ideas about Canada over the decades, many likely retain a vestige of the ‘Canada of the North’ pictured in their school readers, the books that inspired their earliest ideas about their country.

Works Cited Primary Sources Barrett, Franklin L., Teachers [sic] Manual to Accompany ‘Wide Open Windows’ (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1948) Biehl, Fred C., Teachers [sic] Manual to Accompany ‘Up and Away’ (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1948) Biehl, Fred C., F. L. Barrett, and True Davidson, eds, Teachers [sic] Manual to Accompany ‘All Sails Set’ (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1949) Boyle, Joyce, ‘Next Door Neighbours’, in On the Beam, ed. by Stanley Watson, Lucy Bate, and Joyce Boyle (Toronto: Nelson, 1950), pp. 50–64 Clay, Charles, ‘Nehemiah Teaboy’, in Young Explorers, ed. by Donalda Dickie (Toronto: Dent, 1947), pp. 221–24 Coatsworth, Elizabeth, ‘Sitting Here’, in Over the Bridge, ed. by Margaret A. Robinson (Toronto: Ryerson, 1958), p. 386 Dickie, Donalda, ed., Teaching Reading Today: A Guide to ‘Young Explorers’ (Toronto: Dent, 1947) ———, Teaching Reading Today: A Guide to ‘Proud Procession’ (Toronto: Dent, 1948) Dobrindt, G. H., and Martha Brand, eds, Teacher’s Handbook for ‘My World and I’ (Toronto: Ryerson, 1950) Fisher, John, ‘A Canadian Speaks’, in My World and I, ed. by G. H. Dobrindt and others (Toronto: Ryerson, 1958), pp. 378–84 Gordon, R. K., ‘Canada’, in Young Explorers, ed. by Donalda Dickie (Toronto: Dent, 1947) Holling, Holling C., ‘Paddle-to-the-Sea’, in Riding with the Sun, ed. by Stanley Watson, Lucy Bate, and Dorothy Ryan (Toronto: Nelson, 1946), pp. 9–13 Kelly, Nora, ‘The Canadian Eskimo’, in Wide Open Windows, ed. by Franklin L. Barrett (Vancouver: Copp Clark, 1947), pp. 280–88 Lampman, Archibald, ‘Night in the Wilderness’, in Under Canadian Skies, ed. by F. Henry Johnson (Toronto: Dent, 1962), p. 408 Lewis, Gladys Francis, ‘Across the Ribbon of Steel’, in Up and Away (Toronto: Nelson, 1947), pp. 327–68 Noble, George, and Harry Fisher, Teacher’s Manual for ‘Under the North Star’ (Toronto: Ryerson, 1961) Norton, Miriam, and Eleanor Boyce, eds, Teacher’s Handbook for ‘Under the North Star’ (Toronto: Ryerson, 1950) Turner, Alexander, and others, ‘Story Caravan’: Teachers’ Guide (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963)

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Secondary Works Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006) Angus, Ian, A Border Within: National Identity, Cultural Plurality, and Wilderness (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997) Apple, Michael W., Ideology and Curriculum, 3rd edn (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2004) Atwood, Margaret, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: House of Anansi, 1972) ———, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) Clark, Penney, ‘“Liberty of Trade from the Thraldom of the Autocrats”: Provision of School Textbooks in Ontario, 1850–1909’, Canadian Journal of Education, 29.4 (2006), 1065–96 Darwin, John, ‘Empire and Ethnicity’, Nations and Nationalism, 16.3 (2010), 383–401 Edwards, Gail, and Judith Saltman, Picturing Canada: A History of Canadian Children’s Illustrated Books and Publishing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010) Egoff, Sheila, The Republic of Childhood: A Critical Guide to Canadian Children’s Literature, 2nd edn (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1975) Francis, Daniel, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture, 7th edn (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992) Friesen, Gerald, Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication, and Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000) Grace, Sherrill E., Canada and the Idea of North (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001) Hall, Stuart, ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in Modernity and its Futures, ed. by Stuart Hall, David Held, and Tony McGrew (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), pp. 273–325 Heyking, Amy von, Creating Citizens: History and Identity in Alberta’s Schools, 1905–1980 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2006) Hulan, Renée, Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (Montréal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2002) Mackey, Eva, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada, University of Toronto Press paperback edn (Toronto: Routledge, 1999) McKay, Gerald, and L. A. Code, eds, Young Canada Readers: 5 (Toronto: Nelson, 1963) Pente, Patti Vera, ‘The Hidden Curriculum of Wilderness: Images of Landscape in Canada’, Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 7.1 (2009), 111–34 Pratt, David, ‘The Social Role of School Textbooks in Canada’, in Cultural Diversity and Canadian Education, ed. by John R. Mallea (Ottawa: Carlton University Press, 1975), pp. 290–312 Statistics Canada, ‘Population Urban and Rural, by Province and Territory (Ontario)’ (2009) Watson, Stanley, ed., Teacher’s Guide to ‘Riding with the Sun’ (Toronto: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1947) ———, ed., Teacher’s Guide to ‘On the Beam’ (Toronto: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1950)

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Weir, R. Stanley, ‘O Canada’, in Beyond the Horizon, ed. by W. John McIntosh and H. Elizabeth Orchard (Toronto: Ginn, 1962), p. 386 Wynne, Annette, ‘Indian Children’, in Over the Bridge, ed. by M. A. Robinson and M. B. Tomey (Toronto: Ryerson, 1946), p. 138 Zemans, Joyce, ‘Establishing the Canon: Nationhood, Identity, and the National Gallery’s First Reproduction Programme of Canadian Art’, in Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art, ed. by John O’Brian and Peter White (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), pp. 7–35

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Anna Heiða Pálsdóttir

The Image of the North as the Home of Evil in English Children’s Books

The fact is that a sense of place plays a profound part in the emotional structure of most people, not only of writers, and the various ways in which that sense can be recognized, developed, related to other kinds of awareness and in general cultivated can help to make our lives more interesting.1

My PhD thesis (2002) on the difference between national and cultural identity in English and Icelandic children’s books revealed a notable disparity between the viewpoint of the subject of an imperial nation and one from a small island in the arctic region, that had been subjugated for centuries.2 First, the national histories of the two countries are remarkably different; the most important factor being that England has been an imperial power for three centuries, and that Iceland lost its independence to Norway in 1262, was relinquished to the Danish in 1387, and remained colonized by them until 1944, when the nation finally acquired full independence. Second, whereas England’s population is large and multicultural, counting around fifty million people, Iceland’s is small and mostly homogenous, consisting of roughly three hundred thousand people. English is spoken by millions all over the world, but Icelandic is spoken almost exclusively by the Icelanders, few as they are. Literature from the two nations reflects those differences, and this article focuses on the image of the North, and Iceland in particular, in English books, particularly those aimed at children or young adults. There has been an interrelationship between England and Iceland for centuries. The English have fished off the rocky coasts of Iceland, and, as Terry Lacy points out, they ‘were so busy fishing in Icelandic waters that the fifteenth century is known in Icelandic history as the English Century’.3 The English also made many attempts, some 1 Daiches and Flower, Literary Landscapes of the British Isles, p. 7. 2 Anna Heiða Pálsdóttir, ‘History, Landscape and National Identity’. 3 Lacy, Ring of Seasons, p. 53. Anna Heiða Pálsdóttir, Adjunct Lecturer in Literature, Literary Theory and Creative Writing, Faculty of Languages and Cultures, School of Humanities, University of Iceland. [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 311–323 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120800

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successful, some in vain, to defy the trade bans issued by the Danish and sell goods to Icelanders. Iceland was occupied by the British in 1940 and a year later handed over to the USA. Literary connections are also strong, as William Morris’s Icelandic Journals, written in the early 1870s and Auden and MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland, from 1937 show. My study involved an analysis of a selection of children’s books from England and Iceland, conducted in order to determine the importance of children’s literature in the composition and preservation of national identity. It evaluated the correlation between children’s literature, a particular place, and the culture which produced it. I used literature written for children to examine the bond, or the assumed bond, between the child as a literary construct, the culture that nurtured it, the surrounding landscape, and the nation to which the child belongs. The central premise is that a nation’s landscapes and its history have an important part in the formation of the pattern of its members’ national identity: these are the major factors for establishing the bond between an individual and his or her nation. The study therefore concentrated on the representation of landscape and history in children’s literature in order to evaluate the roles of these as differentiating factors in the development of national identity. It concentrated not only on physical landscapes as represented in children’s literature, but on imagined landscapes, too, or the role of representative landscapes in the construction and preservation of national identity. Furthermore, the relationship between landscape and history was studied: how the national landscape has affected the nation’s history and how history has in turn wrought the national landscape in both countries. Why Iceland and why children’s literature? Iceland is considered part of the Arctic and for that reason it has often been placed at the boundary of the civilized world. Hugh Crago explains in ‘Children’s Literature: On the Cultural Periphery’: ‘Tradition’, I was told as an undergraduate, a propos of the British Empire in Australia and the culture of pagan Scandinavia as preserved in Iceland, ‘survives longest on the periphery’. Now children’s literature could be argued to be on the cultural ‘periphery’ in several senses.4 Hugh Crago may recall learning that Iceland is on the cultural periphery of the world, but Icelanders certainly do not regard themselves as subordinate to other nations or far away from the hub of the world (no more than children’s literature scholars wish to regard themselves as ‘on the periphery’). In general, the Icelandic nation is immensely proud of its culture, history, landscapes, and clean air. Children’s literature is, on these grounds, one of the most advantageous sources to study ‘how a nation thinks’. Maria Nikolajeva formulates the following question in her introduction to Aspects and Issues in the History of Children’s Literature: ‘Is there such a thing as national children’s literature that reflects national mentality, specific social history, views on education, and so on?’5 My study should show that there is indeed such a thing — and that children’s literature is an ideal source for viewing ‘national mentality’.

4 Crago, ‘Children’s Literature’, p. 61. 5 Nikolajeva, Aspects and Issues in the History of Children’s Literature, p. xi.

the image of the north as the home of evil in english children’s books

England: The Centre of the World England has often been displayed in English children’s books as the hub to which other cultures are placed as subordinate; the country is placed very firmly at the midpoint of the world, referring to Asian countries as ‘the East’ (or ‘the Orient’), to America as ‘the West’, to Spain and other sunny countries as ‘the South’, and to an indefinite area north of England as ‘the North’. The rest of the world has adopted this dichotomy. Part of the conceptualization comes from the fact that England was a seafaring nation, and therefore travellers must be aware of direction for trade purposes, with England perceiving itself as the world’s centre. This construct of centring England in the world of nations has found its way into many children’s books which tend to associate ideas with each of these concepts, for example, the exotic East; the Wild West; the passionate, idyllic South; and the cold, dark, merciless, and evil North. A number of associations is tied with each, but here, I focus on the North, using examples from English children’s books, in order to show how English national identity is defined against this English conceptualization of ‘the North’. Before moving on to children’s books, it may be appropriate to look at writing for adults in the late nineteenth century, which could have laid the foundation for the image of the north. William Morris wrote journals about his explorations, including his travels in Iceland in 1871–73. On the way to Iceland, Morris’s ship moored in Thorshaven in the Faroes. He wrote in his diary: I confess I shuddered at my first sight of a really northern land in the grey of a coldish morning: […] it was not savage but mournfully empty and barren, the grey clouds dragging over the hill-tops or lying in the hollows being the only thing that varied the grass, stone, and sea: yet as we went on the firth opened out on one side and showed wild strange hills and narrow sounds between the islands that had something, I don’t know what, of poetic and attractive about them.6 Morris’s first impression of a country north of England is thus characteristic for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explorers of the North: the new territory is wild, but fascinating, even ‘poetic’. However, after Morris has gone further north and seen Iceland, he changes his view about the Faroes, as he explains in a footnote to the text above: ‘The Faroes seemed to me such a gentle sweet place when we saw them again after Iceland’.7 It is no wonder that his opinion has changed, as his first impression of Iceland is described thus in his journal: On our left was a dark brown ragged rocky island, Papey, and many small skerries about it, and beyond that we saw the mainland, a terrible shore indeed: a great mass of dark grey mountains worked into pyramids and shelves, looking as if they had been built and half-ruined.8

6 Morris, The Collected Works of William Morris, pp. 10–11. 7 Morris, The Collected Works of William Morris, p. 10 n. 1. 8 Morris, The Collected Works of William Morris, p. 19.

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The landscapes of England offer a remarkable contrast to those of Iceland. Whereas much of rural England has lush meadows and cultured fields, Iceland’s landscapes are, for the most part cruel, wild, untamed. About a decade before William Morris wrote his journals about Iceland, the Irish-born American John Ross Browne wrote an account of his first impression of the country in his book, The Land of Thor: It would be difficult to conceive of anything more impressive than this first view of the land of snow and fire. A low stretch of black boggy coast to the right; dark cliffs of lava in front; far in the background, range after range of bleak, snow-capped mountains, the fiery Jokuls dimly visible through drifting masses of fog; to the left a broken wall of red, black, and blue rocks, weird and surf-beaten, stretching as far as the eye could reach — this was Iceland! All along the grim rifted coast the dread marks of fire, and flood, and desolation were visible. Detached masses of lava, gnarled and scraggy like huge clinkers, seemed tossed out into the sea; towers, buttresses, and battlements, shaped by the very elements of destruction, reared their stern crests against the waves; glaciers lay glittering upon the blackened slopes behind; and foaming torrents of snow-water burst through the rifted crags in front, and mingled their rage with the wild rage of the surf. All was battle, and ruin, and desolation.9 Although this account was written in the late 1860s, it could still be applied to describe large parts of Iceland. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, only 23.3 per cent of the country is cultivated, and another 19.4 per cent cultivable, which leaves the main, central part of Iceland, practically uninhabitable.10 For children who are brought up in green pastures, man-made flourishing sceneries, sunshine and yellow beaches, these grey or black barren landscapes certainly offer a playfield for the imagination — and literature provides for the young a foundation of negative impressions.

‘The North’ in English Children’s Books For some people, when you say ‘Timbuktu’ it is like the end of the world, but that is not true. I am from Timbuktu, and I can tell you we are right at the heart of the world.11 As my thesis surveyed how national identity is reflected in English and Icelandic children’s books and constructed through these, it was of particular interest to examine how the North is displayed in English children’s books — considering that, from an English viewpoint, Iceland belongs to ‘the North’. Edward Said’s ground-breaking Orientalism12 offers a fundamental insight into spatial connotations from a European — and particularly English — point of view. 9 Browne, The Land of Thor, p. 426. 10 Icelandic Agriculture, ‘Economical Figures of 1999’. 11 Ali Farka Toure, sleeve notes, Talking Timbuktu. 12 Said, Orientalism.

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Said claims that ‘The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences’.13 He adds that ‘the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture’.14 Said brings attention to the fact that before ‘the Orient’ was ‘discovered’, Europe had nothing to contrast with. After the Orient was ‘found’, Europe became the ‘Occident’, as he calls it. Said comments: I have begun with the assumption that the Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not there either. We must take seriously Vico’s great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural entities — to say nothing of historical entities — such locales, regions, geographical sectors as ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ are man-made. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West.15 Having acquired all these connotations as a place of romance, mysteriousness, and quaint landscapes, the Orient as such became a popular setting for a number of books, including Kipling’s Kim (1901) and Forster’s A Passage to India (1924). Both Kipling and Forster had lived in India and both books deal with the notion of being caught between two cultures. The English concept of ‘the North’, I would suggest, has developed among similar lines as ‘the Orient’, placing England at the Imperial centre. Said’s comments about the Orient not merely being there, could as well be applied to the North, which has been bestowed with a number of connotations, especially so in children’s books. The English passion for exploration of the unknown and dangerous territory of the North is recollected by Jeannette Mirsky in her book from 1934, To the Arctic! In the beginning of Arctic explorations, men went to the North very reluctantly, to find a route to the East. The idea of the awe-inspiring North seems to derive from their tales of its darkness, cold, and harshness. Mirsky writes that men would only undertake Arctic voyages in the period just following the discovery of the New World if they had a very strong motive: Men were as fearful of the dangers of the Arctic as they were of the terrors of hell. They dreaded its terrible ice and its terrifying darkness. They ventured within the Arctic only in the hope of finding there a short, direct route to the Spice Islands of the East […] This initial phase had two results: the wealth of the north was noted and exploited, and the romantic strangeness of its regions was broadcast.16 13 Said, Orientalism, p. 1. 14 Said, Orientalism, pp. 1–2. 15 Said, Orientalism, pp. 4–5. 16 Mirsky, To the Arctic! p. 9.

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And the image of the Arctic was firmly set. It had, like the Orient, been ‘discovered’ by European explorers, who gradually came to refer to it as ‘the North’. Like travellers to the Orient, arctic explorers returned with both material riches and colourful tales of the North that stirred the English imagination. Mirsky points out: ‘It is little wonder that the north was to have such a hold upon the imagination of the English — they who fed and grew upon its bounty’.17 She refers to the Arctic regions as ‘the attic of the world’.18 The secrets kept in the attic of the world were waiting to be ‘discovered’. And much like Charlotte Brontë’s madwoman in the attic in Jane Eyre, who apparently was not really mad, but came from a different culture (the Caribbean), the North was assigned qualities by the observers — especially by children’s authors — which it did not possess. English children’s books’ writers have assigned evil: witches, death, destruction, to the North. In the nineteenth-century tale, At the Back of the North Wind (1871), George MacDonald’s uses the undefined image of ‘North’ to give a sense of place to that which has no place. The North Wind, as kind as she is to the protagonist, Diamond, brings death. The North Wind tells the young boy that it is hard for her to take him to the back of the north wind, and he cannot understand why it is impossible for her to blow northwards: ‘You little silly!’ said North Wind. ‘Don’t you see that if I were to blow northwards I should be South Wind, and that is as much as to say that one person could be two persons?’ ‘But how can you ever get home at all, then?’ ‘You are quite right – that is my home, though I never get farther than the outer door. I sit on the doorstep, and hear the voices inside. I am nobody there, Diamond’.19 The North Wind has accepted the fact that she can never return ‘home’ because then she would be ‘nobody’. If there was no ‘north’ she would not have an identity, but she has an identity as the North Wind, and the cost of that identity is the acceptance of no return. She appears to little Diamond because he is just about to die, and she carries him to his death. Although MacDonald is assigning a landscape to the abstract, he plays on the idea of the North as a place, with other stereotypical conceptualizations attached. Ideas of the North as evil do not only appear in original English children’s books. The translation of a particular Danish fairy tale, H. C. Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’ — originally written in 1844 — first appeared in English (trans. by H. P. Paull in 1872), gaining popularity among British children. ‘The Snow Queen’ relates the story of an evil queen from the North. The Snow Queen abducts young Kay and carries him to her cold castle. Kay’s friend, Gerda, travels to the arctic to save

17 Mirsky, To the Arctic! pp. 10–11. 18 Mirsky, To the Arctic! p. 13. 19 MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind, p. 102.

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him. ‘The wolves howled, and the ravens screamed; while up in the sky quivered red lights like flames of fire’.20 Gerda finally comes to Lapland to find the ‘Empty, vast, and cold’ halls of the Snow Queen and manages to find Kay and bring him back home.21 Almost a century later, the children in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, first published in 1950, find Narnia under the spell of the evil White Witch who has this land covered with snow and ice: she has turned it into a hellish place. When the four children put on heavy fur coats for their trip through the wardrobe, Lucy says: ‘We can pretend we are Arctic explorers’.22 Later, when the children have become the two Kings and two Queens of Narnia, ‘they drove back the fierce giants […] in the north of Narnia when these ventured across the frontier’.23 The land north of Narnia is the evil North. Alan Garner’s The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, first published in 1960, also presents the North as a source of death and destruction. The clouds in the north of Cheshire mean that ‘Fimbulwinter’ is approaching.24 Fenrir comes upon the children from the north as a wolf head in the sky, with hungry, yellow eyes and a huge mouth. When the children come out of the fir plantation, they see all of the sky: The blue sky and brilliant sun had vanished. From horizon to horizon the air was black and yellow with unbroken clouds, like monstrous, bloated, land-locked seals, bad-tempered and complaining, whose swollen weight seemed scarce able to clear the tree-tops as they humped and rolled before the raucous thunder of the seal-herding, north-wild wind.25 Note the ‘seal-herding’ qualities of the wind, assigning it to the North. The ‘north-wild wind’ is a precursor of Ragnarok, and after the destruction, the snowy ground is ‘as empty of life as a polar shore’.26 The North can also, in the case of England, stand for Scotland; and the implication of evil from the North could derive from the past when the rebellious Scots could unexpectedly flock in from the North and attack England. The North could also signify Iceland or Norway, where Vikings came from to raid England, which is, for example, reflected in Roald Dahl’s The Witches (1983), suggesting that all witches originate in Norway, as discussed later. Here, however, the North is understood to pose an allegory of dangerous and unknown territory, similar to the ‘Orient’. Elleke Boehmer points out: ‘Yet, even if their occurrence was purely incidental or ornamental, exotic objects in circulation in novels — and also characters with colonial connections — carried associations of either the fascination or the fear of the forbidden’.27

20 Andersen, ‘The Snow Queen’. 21 Andersen, ‘The Snow Queen’. 22 Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, p. 53. 23 Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, p. 168. 24 Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, p. 156. 25 Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, p. 176. 26 Garner, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, p. 224. 27 Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, p. 27.

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The ‘role’ of the English is to explore and ‘map’ the unknown territory and bring back souvenirs as tokens of their knowledge. The British Museum in London becomes a centre where the public can view those trophies. Hugh Scott’s Why Weeps the Brogan? (1989) is set in the British Museum in a post-holocaust London, where two children, Saxon and Gilbert, go on expeditions within the museum. In a division called ETHNOGRAPHY, the children pass the armour of a Samurai, and then ‘plastic eskimoes naked in a shattered case; Saxon and Gilbert were wearing their clothes’.28 Dressed as Arctic explorers and armed with Eskimo spears, they roam the museum, killing spiders and facing unknown dangers. In a ‘new world’ of their own, they continue the imperial tradition, surrounded by literal artefacts which serve as trophies from their nation’s history.

The North as a Playfield for the Imagination The North is used as an allegory for the imagination in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997). When young Harry Potter has received his summons to go to study at the Hogwarts School of Magic, he takes a train and moves from the lush English landscape into the darkness and the cold of the North: The countryside now flying past the window was becoming wilder. The neat fields had gone. Now there were woods, twisting rivers and dark green hills […] Harry peered out of the window. It was getting dark. He could see mountains and forests under a deep purple sky.29 When November comes to Hogwarts School, the weather turns very cold: ‘The mountains around the school became icy grey and the lake like chilled steel. Every morning the ground was covered in frost’.30 Magic seems more at home in the cold, barren, and ‘unknown’ landscape of the North. The North as an image has its climax in Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy: Northern Lights (1995), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2001). Northern Lights tells the story of Lyra Belaqua, who is brought up in Jordan College of Oxford. Lyra despises female scholars and thinks that no institution in the world (or in other worlds) can aspire to the greatness of Jordan College. Mrs Coulter, Lyra’s mother, Lord Asriel, Lyra’s father, and John Parry, Will’s father, have travelled all over the world, especially to the Arctic, to observe other cultures and collect objects. John Faa, a gyptian leader, says the ‘child-thieves’ are taking the children ‘to a town in the far North, way up in the land of the dark’.31 Lyra ends up going to Norway. When she meets Iorek, a talking polar bear from the island of Svalbard, north of Norway, he, of course, speaks English. There is no need to ask him if he does: his first utterance

28 Scott, Why Weeps the Brogan? p. 46. 29 Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, pp. 78, 83. 30 Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, p. 133. 31 Pullman, Northern Lights, p. 116.

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is in Modern English, no explanations needed. As Lyra approaches the harbour, she smells ‘the North’: The smell was of fish, but mixed with it came land-smells too: pine resin and earth and something animal and musky, and something else that was cold and blank and wild: it might have been snow. It was the smell of the North.32 Strangely, ‘the North’ does not conceive of itself as being ‘the North’ with its own smell and a doubtful character. For instance, my English-Icelandic dictionary defines the term as a direction (cold winds from the north), North-Iceland, or the northern part of England or America. According to the dictionary, there is no such thing as ‘the North’ up in the Arctic, with a capital N.33 ‘The North’ is an imaginary, allegorical term. Rob Shields examines how writers use spatial and geographical metaphors to describe a state of mind (e.g. ‘the Far East’ and ‘Darkest Africa’) in Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (1991). He points out that the North, in Canada, for example, ‘is not just north but a zone of the social imaginary: an unconquerable wilderness and zone of white purity’.34 Shields quotes A. S. Bailly, who comments: Contrary to what is often stated, studies on representations do not focus on the particular characteristics of images, but show instead that a place is nothing by itself, but depends on other places and practices to imbue it with meaning.35 Authors of English children’s books have developed a tradition of imbuing ‘the North’ with meaning in order to define and fortify ‘the English character’ against this image. In Pullman’s Northern Lights, children are not cruelly cut away from their dæmons in England: this happens in the unforeseeable North. Little children are generally not turned into mice in England, but in Norway, where anything can happen, they are. In Roald Dahl’s The Witches (1983), Mr Jenkins, Bruno’s father, is furious after a witch has turned Bruno into a mouse. The Norwegian grandmother soothes him: ‘I can very well understand your anger, Mr Jenkins’, she said. ‘Any other English father would be just as cross as you are. But over in Norway where I come from, we are quite used to these sort of happenings. We have learnt to accept them as part of everyday life’.36 Although Dahl is of Norwegian origin, he writes into the English tradition of displaying the incredibility of the North. The North as a place in the English ‘world view’ is reflected in English children’s books as a place where the end of the world ‘begins’: the origins of Ragnarok reside in the cold and darkness of an imaginative North, which seems to hover somewhere 32 Pullman, Northern Lights, p. 168. 33 ‘The North’, Snara.is. 34 Shields, Places on the Margin, p. 30. 35 Bailly, ‘Subjective Distances and Spatial Representations’, quoted in Shields, Places on the Margin, p. 30. 36 Dahl, The Witches, p. 180.

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on and beyond the Arctic Circle. In Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy, the great war — Lord Asriel’s war against the Authority, with the aid of rebellious angels — is fought in the North.

The North as Hell Opposed to Eden Quite contrary to the concept of the North, Simon Schama reveals that the New World came to be, for the English Puritan settlers, a kind of Eden: But the exploration of the New World, with the discovery of a marvellous range of hitherto unknown species, had created a rich new topography of paradise. Eden, it was speculated, not least by Columbus himself, might be in the Southern Hemisphere.37 Eden, as pictured in the imagination, is a lush, warm garden, ripe with fruit, where Man and Woman can reside, needing nothing except what Nature provides. The North, on the other hand, would polarize Eden: as a place where one needs fur clothing to keep warm, where one must kill seals, bears, and reindeer for food, and Nature provides nothing except endless ice, snow, and gloomy darkness. Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy is an outstanding example of the mourning of empire, of the revival of imperialism and colonialism, Englishness, and the concept of the North as an opposition to Eden. The name of the trilogy is based on a quotation from Milton’s Paradise Lost (‘Unless the almighty maker them ordain | His dark materials to create more worlds’, in book 2), and all three books allude to Milton’s poem in numerous ways. Anthony Easthope calls Milton’s Paradise Lost ‘a foundational text for Englishness’, and comments: I surmise that English empiricist discourse maintains itself on the back of a metaphysical opposition between the real and the apparent reproduced and reworked in many directions: objective/subjective; concrete/abstract; in practice/ in theory; clear/obscure; serious/silly; common sense/dogma; sincere/artificial; and amateur/professional.38 I would add Arctic/North as one more metaphysical opposition: the Arctic as real and the North as a reproduced and reworked concept. Pullman’s trilogy abounds with such oppositional concepts, representative of an English empiricist discourse. The first chapters of Northern Lights (1995) — the first book in Pullman’s trilogy — are set in the very centre of Englishness, metropolitan Oxford, in a male-dominated college. Jordan College is the core for research on the North, and Lord Asriel has to depend on the college for financing his expeditions. At the end of the first book, Lord Asriel epitomizes the English position by ‘walking into the sky’ in order to found a new Eden. Icelanders, on the contrary, would not cherish the idea of founding a new Eden

37 Schama, Landscape and Memory, p. 537. 38 Easthope, ‘Writing and English National Identity’, p. 153.

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except if they had nowhere to go. They would travel off to make a new place for their family only on the basis that their world had been totally destroyed and they could not remake it.39 Finally, the North is the place where the ultimate war between the worlds is fought in the last book of the trilogy, The Amber Spyglass (2001). Pullman brings the polarities of Eden and the North to a culminating Ragnarok, where the destiny of the world depends on two English children, Lyra — the new Eve — and Will. The books and tales I have listed show the tendency to show the North, or the arctic, as an evil place where witches and deadly winds reside. Is this image changing? The reviewer of a children’s book by author Nick Dawson, Finding True North, Chasing Elusive Bigfoot (2011), appears pleased that this particular book points in a new direction: Environmental gloom has become so commonplace in children’s books that it’s a surprise and a delight to find a book about the Arctic that does not drag young readers into the dark potentials of global warming. Instead, in the pages of ‘North: The Amazing Story of Arctic Migration’ (Candlewick, 53 pages, $16.99), author Nick Dowson invites 7- to 12-year-olds to wonder at the desolate splendor of the northern realms and to marvel at the mystery of migration that draws millions of creatures there from across the globe every summer.40 On that note, I hope that the true notion of the Arctic has finally found its way into children’s books.

Works Cited Primary Sources Ali Farka Toure, sleeve notes, Talking Timbuktu (World Circuit Records, 1994) Andersen, Hans Christian, ‘Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales and Stories’, trans. by H. P. Paull (1872), original illustrations by Vilhelm Pedersen and Lorenz Frølich [accessed 26 May 2017] Anna Heiða Pálsdóttir, ‘History, Landscape and National Identity: A Comparative Study of Contemporary English and Icelandic Literature for Children’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Coventry University, 2002) Auden, W. H., and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (New York: Random House, 1969) Boehmer, Elleke, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) Browne, John Ross, The Land of Thor (New York: Harper, 1867) Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, A Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 1991)

39 This disposition is reflected, for example, in Kristin Steinsdottir, Vestur i blainn (‘Westwards into the Blue’), which tells the story of Icelanders who left their country for Canada with a sinking heart, after their livelihood had been terminated by a series of volcanic eruptions at the end of the nineteenth century. 40 Gurdon, ‘Children’s Books’, C. 6.

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Dahl, Roald, The Witches, illustrated by Quentin Blake (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983) Daiches, David, and John Flower, Literary Landscapes of the British Isles: A Narrative Atlas (London: Paddington, 1979) Forster, E. M., A Passage to India, ed. by Oliver Stallybrass [1924] (London: Penguin, 2000) Garner, Alan, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen: A Tale of Alderley (London: Collins 1960; repr. 1974) Kipling, Rudyard, Kim, ed. by Alan Sandison, Oxford World’s Classics [1901] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) Kristin Steinsdottir, Vestur i blainn (‘Westwards into the Blue’) (Reykjavík: Vaka-Helgafell, 1999) Lacy, Terry G., Ring of Seasons: Iceland – Its Culture and History (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998) Lewis, C. S., The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe [1950] (London: Collins, 1998) MacDonald, George. At the Back of the North Wind [1871] (London: Scripture Union, 1978) Milton, John, Paradise Lost, ed. by John Leonard, Penguin Classics (London: Penguin, 2000) Mirsky, Jeannette, To the Arctic!: The Story of Northern Exploration from Earliest Times to the Present, introd. by Vilhjalmur Stefansson [1934] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) Morris, William, The Collected Works of William Morris, viii: Journals of Travel in Iceland: 1871– 1873 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1911) [accessed 20 January 2020] Nikolajeva, Maria, ed., Aspects and Issues in the History of Children’s Literature: Contributions to the Study of World Literature, published under the auspices of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (Westport: Greenwood, 1995) ‘North’, online English-Icelandic dictionary, Snara [accessed 10 May 2019] Pullman, Philip, Northern Lights (London: Scholastic, 1995) ———, The Subtle Knife (London: Scholastic, 1997) ———, The Amber Spyglass (London: Scholastic, 2001) Richter, Gudlaug, Jora og eg (‘Iora and I’) (Reykjavik: Mal og menning, 1988) Rowling, J. K., Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (London: Bloomsbury, 1997) Said, Edward W., Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) Scott, Hugh, Why Weeps the Brogan? (London: Walker, 1989) Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995) Shields, Rob, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991)

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Secondary Works Bailly, A. S., ‘Subjective Distances and Spatial Representations’, Geoforum, 17.1 (1986), 81–88 Crago, Hugh, ‘Children’s Literature: On the Cultural Periphery’, in Signposts to Criticism of Children’s Literature, ed. by Robert Bator (Chicago: American Library Association, 1983), pp. 61–65 Easthope, Anthony, ‘Writing and English National Identity’, in Contemporary Writing and National Identity, ed. by Tracey Hill and William Hughes (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 146–57 Gurdon, Meghan Cox, ‘Children’s Books: Finding True North, Chasing Elusive Bigfoot’, Wall Street Journal, eastern edn, 3 December 2011, C. 6 Icelandic Agriculture, ‘Economical Figures of 1999’, The Icelandic Farmers Association

[accessed 11 October 2000]

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Jim Clarke

Northernity Inventing the North in Fantasy Literature

North and Northernness in Literature North is a cardinal point on the compass. In other words, it is fundamentally a vector, a direction moreso than a destination. This signifies north as a single though notable bearing among a potential infinitude, commonly distinguished from the three other cardinal points by increments of ninety degrees of angle. North is also a spatial concept, functioning in three dimensions, one half of a binary in opposition to the South, however conceived. North is also epistemologically relative. One geographic point may be relatively northerly to another, despite being more generally southerly. It is therefore conceptually related to geography, simultaneously local, regional, and global in perspective. This does not always tally neatly with empirical understandings of fixed points such as ‘true’ or ‘magnetic’ north. Northern Ireland does not, for example, include the most northerly parts of Ireland, nor does the Northern Territory include the northernmost territory of Australia. The North therefore is a concept which seems initially empirical before unpacking into relativities of uncertainty, many of which are contextual or cultural. For example, many economists use the North as a shorthand term to collectively define richer, more industrially developed nations. In this sense, the geographically southern nations of Australia and New Zealand are described as Northern. This geopolitical bifurcation sits alongside, and partly in contrast to, a similar global binary of conceptual geography, the East–West dichotomy. Northernness, therefore, is simultaneously an empirical geographical descriptor and also an imagined and relative conceptual space. In terms of cultural distinction, understandings of northernness emerge from collective regional identifications which may bear only partial resemblance to actual geographical considerations, therefore. In Britain, the North generally refers not to the actual north of the island, which is politically distinguished as the historic nation of Scotland, but to the North of England, a contiguous but culturally distinctive component of the English nation. Similar, if not even more acute, north–south divides characterize the nations of, inter alia, the United States, Italy, and Nigeria.

Jim Clarke, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Journalism, Coventry University. [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 325–351 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120801

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Concepts of northernness in literature therefore tend to reflect these localized cultural constructions. Though Italian literature is primarily characterized by a notable regionality, deriving in part from the dialectal forms which fed into the institutionalization of Italian as a national language, nevertheless the concept of letteratura meridionale, or Southern literature, somewhat defined as literature originating from those regions of Italy once under Bourbon rule, has received some critical attention as a category distinct from the remaining Italian literature, which by a process of elimination could be termed northern, or settentrionale. More notably, the north–south divide in Nigerian literature is a reflection and cultural manifestation of a geographic, religious, and linguistic (not to mention complex tribal) divide between the two halves of the nation. Geographically, the Nigerian south features the coastline and major urban centres, and falls culturally within the interlinked spheres of Christianity and Anglophonia, arising from its history as British colony. By contrast, the north is landlocked, rural, Islamic, and its lingua franca is Arabic, with many Hausa speakers. Though the area of Northern Nigeria contains nineteen separate states, there persists a sense of collective Northern identity, which manifests as literature both in terms of Hausa writing, and also writing in Arabic and increasingly in English, which deals with themes and subjects relating to that geographic region.1 What is a cultural distinction in Nigeria is a political one in Ireland. In Irish literary production, northernness designates thematic content which addresses the political entity of Northern Ireland, the six counties of Ireland administered as part of the United Kingdom. Specifically, academic understanding of northernness as it applies to Irish literature identifies fiction which thematically addresses the sectarian conflict known as the ‘Troubles’, and poetry and theatre by writers originating from the statelet of Northern Ireland as being Northern Irish literature. In other words, the political qualifier of ‘Northern’ cannot be meaningfully sundered from its context as a descriptor of the statelet and hence does not primarily apply as a cultural signifier, except insofar as northernness in Irish literature designates cultural outputs from or relating to the entity of Northern Ireland. This political distinction is obviously historical, arising from the political partition of Ireland. The distinction of Northern literature in the United States of America is similarly a product of historical understandings of the nation. The concept of northernness in America is already problematized by the fact that the geographic construct of North America includes territories to the south of the USA, yet to many of these primarily Hispanophone communities the United States is commonly referred to simply as ‘El Norte’, or the North. Within the cultural confines of the USA, however, notions of northernness relate primarily to the historical civil war between Union and Confederate forces in the nineteenth century. The concept of the North in US literature therefore is not merely geographic or cultural, but also highly historicized to this period of hostilities between Union states, which were primarily located in the north-east of the US, and Confederate states to the south-east. ‘Northern literature’ and ‘the North’ in US literature therefore carries connotations

1 Femi, ‘Literature and Culture in Northern Nigeria’.

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of this particular historical period, and the context of the American Civil War, its prelude and its legacy. By inevitable contrast, in Canada, to the geographical north of the US, northernness in literature carries entirely different connotations. Canada did not experience the north–south politico-historical divide of the American Civil War, is not politically partitioned into separate jurisdictions as Ireland is, and, despite being a multicultural nation, does not possess the geographic cultural distinction which marks Nigeria. In Canada, the Northern in literature, and in other cognate narrative art forms like cinema, is generic. The Northern arose in the early twentieth century as a pulp form, a localized reaction to the Western genre already popularized in the neighbouring United States, featuring similar tropes of heroes and villains functioning in untamed wilderness and relatively lawless environments. The Northern is distinguished from the Western not merely by its Canadian rather than American milieu, but also certain tonal shifts, particularly in relation to the depiction of indigenous First Nations peoples, and the usual selection of Mounties, rather than sheriffs or cowboys, as protagonists. The Northern also influenced US literature, in particular that located in Alaska, such as novels like Call of the Wild or White Fang, by Jack London. Hence there are multiple forms of northernness operating in literature, largely localized by context, whether that is historical, political, cultural, or even generic. This is additionally complicated by transnational concepts of the North. Within Europe, the Scandinavian peninsula and its cognate current or former territories, such as Denmark and various North Atlantic isles from Greenland to the Faroes, are often characterized as geographically and, due to a collective civilizational history, culturally northern. However, the term ‘Nordic’ is also often used to designate the same cultural sphere, as is, in some historico-cultural contexts, ‘Norse’. These cultural signifiers overlap notably, especially in reference to the body of pagan mythology which emerged from North Germanic peoples from the commencement of the runic period, in the third century ad, to the post-Christianization period of Scandinavia in the late Middle Ages. However, while ‘Norse’, which also signifies the antiquated North Germanic language, does not often signify literature other than this mythos, both ‘Nordic’ and ‘Northern’ have been used to signify literature emanating from the Scandinavian peninsula and cognate territories, such as the popular literary sub-genre of ‘Nordic noir’, which has also been referred to as ‘Scandinavian noir’ and ‘Northern noir’. Just as northernness and ‘the North’ can signify different distinctions depending on geographic context, so can it co-locate with other terms in signifying the same or similar bodies of literature within a specific geographic context.

Northernity and World-Building in Fantasy Literature All of these literatures emerge from, and depict, actual real-world locations however. This fixes understandings of northernness within existing ontologies whether cultural, political, historical, or most importantly geographical. By contrast, the conceptualization of North, or indeed any other cardinal vector or

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spatialized referent, when depicted in fantastikal literature2 is divorced from such mimetic associations. Any attempt to understand how the concept of the north is reconceived when sundered from a strict association with the real world must therefore commence with an understanding of what fantasy literature is. This leads into the thorny area of definitions of fantasy. Fantastika has multiple sub-generic forms which themselves have developed separate lineages and generic tropes which in turn have led to a subdivision of critique. Broadly, fantastika envelops science or speculative fiction (SF), horror, and fantasy. It is the latter which is of interest here. What all the various sub-sub-genres of fantasy literature share, as do other forms of fantastikal literature, is a radical disconnect from the requirements of realist literature. This takes different forms, from the novum which estranges the reader in SF,3 to the suspension of the universal laws of physics in terms of the supernatural in horror, or magic in fantasy. Additionally, there is no requirement in fantastika for the in-world topos to reflect our own world, though many iterations of SF seek to extrapolate fantastikal futures from our actual present, and some iterations of horror root themselves against a backdrop of seeming realism, and many iterations of fantasy appear to evoke, in forms of technology or modes of governance, previous eras of human history, typically but not exclusively medieval European history. Brian Stableford4 has identified the two main schools of thought in relation to defining fantasy literature, as opposed to fantastika generally or the fantastic (which, as he notes, carries additional critical connotations across from French concepts of le fantastique). According to Stableford, some critics while admitting that genre fantasy takes its definitive themes and images from myth, legend, and folklore — raw materials older than literature itself — they nevertheless insist that ‘fantasy literature’ is something relatively new that needs to be distinguished from the literature of earlier eras despite the many elements they have in common.5 For such critics, fantasy literature is an inherently post-Enlightenment genre which is defined in part in a dialectical opposition to notions of a realistic or naturalistic literature, which was only beginning to emerge in that period. This facilitates Clute’s understanding of fantasy as one component within a broader literary form of fantastika, since horror is deemed to have emerged as the Gothic in this era, and SF, arising out of a utopian tradition and also in response to the development of professional science, a little later.



2 The term ‘fantastika’ was coined by John Clute to generate in English a cognate term to that common in European languages to designate non-realistic literary forms collectively. He says ‘Fantastika consists of that wide range of fictional works whose contents are understood to be fantastic’. — Clute, ‘Fantastika in the World Storm’. 3 As defined by Darko Suvin. See Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. 4 Stableford, Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature. 5 Stableford, Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature, p. xxxix.

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However, not all critics are so keen to divorce fantasy literature from the many fantastikal forms of literature which predate the Enlightenment. Stableford notes that such critics take it for granted that the history of ‘fantasy literature’ should begin with the origins of writing. A strong case can be made for this assertion by considering the formation of the reputation of the first significant author of fantasy literature thus defined, Homer.6 In a sense, this position is unarguable, but also not especially helpful. Homer’s literary construction of the interaction between the divine, the mythical, and the historical functions as literature of fantasy perfectly well, but it does not necessarily aid generic examination to construe most if not all literature predating the Enlightenment as fantasy, even if it bears fantastikal components. Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz have noted how ‘fantasy resists, and indeed mocks, the elaborate classification systems of academia that have grown up around it, just as it defies the view that its huge popularity is a sad reflection on the state of contemporary culture’.7 This paper endorses Hunt and Lenz in this regard. Some taxonomists have disputed the borders of fantasy literature even down to sub-generic levels, attempting to negotiate the porous boundaries between high fantasy and swords-and-sandals texts. Instead, this paper operates on the assumption that fantasy can be broadly distinguished from other forms of fantastika by its engagement with what J. R. R. Tolkien referred to as ‘sub-creation’.8 This is another way of thinking of fantasy literature which offers greater opportunity to explore how issues like invented cardinal geography might function in fantasy. If we accept that all forms of fantastika operate at a remove from aesthetic attempts at literary realism, then it follows that this may be the introduction of supernatural components in horror literature, the futuristic nova of SF, or the baroque scale of secondary worldbuilding in some fantasy literature. This conception of fantasy assists in the examination of how fantasy authors envisage and encode northernness without primary reference to existing concepts drawn primarily from history, culture, or natural geography as it manifests in our world. Tolkien’s conception of sub-creation insists on a world-architecture radically different from our own. These literary environments are known as secondary worlds, as opposed to primary worlds, which still retain some direct semantic connection to our own world. Therefore, it is proposed to distinguish between the concept of northernness which expresses iterations of the north in mimetically-driven art and the concept of inventing the north, as occurs in fantasy literature. To describe this invention of north, I propose the term northernity. According to Gary Wolfe, secondary worlds are fantasy worlds distinct from any attempt to replicate our own, whereas primary worlds function as fictional constructs

6 Stableford, Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature, p. xli. 7 Hunt and Lentz, Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction, p. 2. 8 Tolkien, ‘On Fairy-Stories’.

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which attempt to macroscopically emulate our own.9 This is far from a simple binary distinction however. As Mark Wolf notes, the quality of ‘secondariness’ is a matter of degree.10 It is better envisaged as a continuum from verisimilitudinous attempts to depict narratives as existing in a realistic depiction of our own world, adhering to existing history and physical properties as far as possible, all the way to narratives which depict a world identifiably different from our own in terms of personages, history, geography, and even the physical laws of the in-text universe. This is not entirely a generic distinction, though some genres, such as the thriller, tend to value details which signify the real world in an attempt to persuade as to the plausibility of the fiction. Partly it is also an historicized distinction, with the emergence to dominance of realism in the nineteenth-century novel in Britain in particular, but also France and Russia, later partially but far from completely superseded by the experimental narrative forms and structures of Modernist fiction. This opens up yet another taxonomical dispute, wherein high fantasy is marked particularly by its creation of such an imaginary secondary world, as distinct from low fantasy, which posits fantastikal intrusions into the ‘real’ world. This entails a process of ‘world-building’, including the imagining of fantastikal sentient species (such as orcs, hobbits, or elves), the laws which govern the world (such as magic, invisibility, immortality, or unaided human flight), topography, and geography. As a result, what emerges from high fantasy are a series of iterations of imagined norths, which in turn reflect the perceptions of the author and the era of a text’s creation in relation to an abstracted concept of northernity. Though Mark J. P. Wolf has authoritatively delineated previous critical perspectives on worlds and worldbuilding, this has not prevented a lack of clarity in terms of what worldbuilding actually entails.11 As Stefan Ekman and Audrey Taylor note, the term suffers from semantic drift, depending on context and usage and perspective: In scholarship on the imaginary worlds that are created in genre texts, the term ‘world-building’ has a tendency to creep into the discussion. As common as that term is, it is also problematic, because it has been applied by a wide range of people — critics, fans, authors, and creative-writing teachers to name but a few — to a wide range of processes, describing anything from the craft of the creator (author, director, or game-designer) to the cognitive work carried out by the audience (reader, viewer, or player). Sometimes ‘world-building’ is used with a very particular meaning, sometimes it is a vague catch-all.12 Ekman and Taylor have attempted to structure the concept of worldbuilding by coining the term ‘critical worldbuilding’ to denote two methods for examining the (sub)creation of secondary worlds. These methods are to explore ‘a world’s “architecture” — its structural and aesthetic system of places — and the form, function,

9 Wolfe, Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy, p. 115. 10 Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds, pp. 27–28. 11 Wolf, Building Imaginary Worlds. 12 Ekman and Taylor, ‘Notes toward a Critical Approach to Worlds and World-Building’, p. 8.

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and meaning of those places’.13 In examining northernity in fantasy literature, both of these approaches are relevant, since the iteration of a created or invented north is part of the structure and system of place in a body of literature, but also functions as part of the form and meaning of the text. It is important to note that the very presence of any cardinality in a fantastikal text automatically renders it less than entirely secondary in terms of the world created. Edwin A. Abbott’s late Victorian fantastikal novel Flatland, for example, envisages a world predicated on differing numbers of dimensions. In the two-dimensional iteration of this world, for example, any concept of cardinality is rendered impossible.14 Therefore fantasy texts which feature a north, or cardinality in any form, inevitably slide somewhat down the cline away from a pure secondariness. If, as George Slusser suggests, the ‘very idea of world implies a complex set of laws and relationships’, then fantasy texts which feature the characteristic of northernity imply not merely an imagined north but also cardinality in general, and a set of geographic qualities which to some extent reflect the geographic reality of our own world.15 Northernity in fantasy literature thus inevitably signifies an imaginative extrapolation of real-world qualities, and hence in examining how the north is iterated in such texts, it may be possible to derive a quiddity of northernity which simultaneously adheres to and escapes from real-world geography, history, and culture. In short, northernity reveals what aspects of real-world northernness inform the abstract concept of north which they create, and what aspects are invented. Within Sabrina Klein’s guide to worldbuilding for writers, Chanté McCoy has identified the geography and ecology of secondary world invention as a key component, equivalent to character construction in terms of narrative importance. ‘All stories are set in a particular place and time’, McCoy notes. ‘Geography matters in creating that place, even if you’re going to superimpose buildings and roads. It’s not simply the backdrop; geography interacts with the story, almost a character unto itself ’.16 For fictions which include an imagined north, therefore, northernity becomes an inherent quality, more than mere backdrop, but also a semantic summative blend of assumptions about real-world northernness and imaginative flights of fantasy into secondariness. Both of these function to summarize and extrapolate new hybrid understandings of relative geography as key to the fantastikal process, forming part of a creative strategy to delineate an invented world. Ekman and Taylor note that this process, which we might summarize as ‘mapmaking’, becomes part of the overall creative process: ‘For authors, world-building is a sequential, iterative, and segmental process: the adding, changing, or developing of elements by various strategies. Such strategies may comprise mapmaking, extrapolation, and designing a world along certain ideological lines (such as creating a matriarchal society)’.17

13 Ekman and Taylor, ‘Notes toward a Critical Approach to Worlds and World-Building’, p. 7. 14 Abbott, Flatland. 15 Slusser, ‘Reflections on Style in Science Fiction’, p. 3. 16 McCoy, ‘Geography and the Evolution of your World’, p. 67. 17 Ekman and Taylor, ‘Notes toward a Critical Approach to Worlds and World-Building’, p. 10.

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Hence embodiment of northernity in fantasy literature might be expected to emulate the processes if not the actuality of northernness in the real world. One might expect, in other words, to find what Tolkien and others call mythopoeia embodied in the idea of northernity, or what the architect Yi-Fu Tuan calls the ‘personality’ of places, which not only links to what McCoy means by the ‘character’ of geographical designation, but also expresses components of identity, cultural expression, and ideology via the invented landscape. This suggests that invented norths can, no less than actual norths in ‘realist’ literature, mediate notions of history, culture, and politics as well as simple boreality of landscape.

The Corpus Linguistic Approach Traditionally, literary critics have tended to take a qualitative approach to understanding how fantasy literature functions. Alternatively, some critics are driven by various ideological forms of theory in their work. Increasingly, however, some critics have chosen to borrow methodologies from linguistics, especially corpus linguistics, to unveil aspects of literary function which are not easy to identify clearly through close reading. Adopting some methodologies from corpus linguistics permits the opportunity for a quantitatively driven analysis which can unveil patterns of usage in relation to terms like north and its derivatives, in other words. While corpus linguistics is a set of quantitative methodologies, it also carries with it a certain theoretical component. As Hans Lindquist notes, corpus linguistics is thus a methodology, comprising a large number of related methods which can be used by scholars of many different theoretical leanings. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that corpus linguistics is also frequently associated with a certain outlook on language. At the centre of this outlook is that the rules of language are usage-based and that changes occur when speakers use language to communicate with each other. The argument is that if you are interested in the workings of a particular language, like English, it is a good idea to study language in use. One efficient way of doing this is to use corpus methodology.18 According to Winnie Cheng, ‘Corpus linguistics is concerned not just with describing patterns of form, but also with how form and meaning are inseparable’.19 This suggests that corpus methodologies can be married to traditional qualitative close reading analyses, or output into a form which permits questioning on a qualitative basis. In this sense, somewhat contrary to the sense evoked by Lindquist, corpus linguistics as utilized in this study is less a theoretical approach than a simple research methodology. This particular question has been an issue of some dispute among corpus linguists, but Sandra Kuebler and Heike Zinsmeister conclude that

18 Lindquist, Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English, p. 1. 19 Cheng, Exploring Corpus Linguistics, p. 6.

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‘the answer to the question whether corpus linguistics is a theory or a tool is simply that it can be both. It depends on how corpus linguistics is applied’.20 In this study, a trial for a larger examination of how items are imagined in fantasy literature, a small corpus of prominent fantasy novels was chosen in order to facilitate the quick identification of potential patterns in the genre as a whole, as they relate to the concept of north and northernity. Yet as Biber et al. state, a crucial part of the corpus-based approach is going beyond the quantitative patterns to propose functional interpretations explaining why the patterns exist. As a result, a large amount of effort in corpus-based studies is devoted to explaining and exemplifying quantitative patterns.21 In this instance, the intention was to extract broad usage patterns for north and its derivations, examine frequency and collocations, and then subject the results to qualitative assessment. This mixed method approach is endorsed by many leading corpus linguists, including Leech et al.: In corpus linguistics quantitative and qualitative methods are extensively used in combination. It is also characteristic of corpus linguistics to begin with quantitative findings, and work toward qualitative ones. But […] the procedure may have cyclic elements. Generally it is desirable to subject quantitative results to qualitative scrutiny — attempting to explain why a particular frequency pattern occurs, for example. But on the other hand, qualitative analysis (making use of the investigator’s ability to interpret samples of language in context) may be the means for classifying examples in a particular corpus by their meanings; and this qualitative analysis may then be the input to a further quantitative analysis, one based on meaning.22

The Corpus It is not possible to be comprehensive about how northernity iterates in fantasy literature. As a highly popular genre, hundreds of new novels are published in the genre each year, alongside countless short stories, and other literary forms, not to mention cinematic fantasy, televisual fantasy, graphic novels, comic books, or audio drama fantasy, and a vast panorama of fan-derived fictions largely to be found online. It is also an ever-expanding genre. In 2008, Locus magazine listed some 436 new fantasy novels published in the United States alone. To attempt to extrapolate a definitive usage of northernity from this growing genre would be a nigh on impossible task. Instead, this paper focuses on ten prominent fantasy novels in the English language, chosen primarily because they qualify against two key criteria. Firstly, they all express and feature northernity as a geographical construct within the 20 Keubler and Zinsmeister, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistically Annotated Corpora, p. 14. 21 Biber and others, Corpus Linguistics, p. 9. 22 Hundt and others, Change in Contemporary English, p. 32.

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mapmaking component of their invented world-architecture, and secondly because they have remained popular since their dates of publication. This does not mean that all have attracted similar levels of critical attention, needless to say. Some of these texts have been picked over by critics, while others have largely been dismissed as pulp or populist trash. However, the intent of this paper is to sample iterations of northernity in the Anglophone fantasy genre, and given the unmeasurability of influence as a metric, simple popularity has to sit as proxy. These novels also span a publishing era of eighty-five years, from 1922 to 2007, allowing for an exploration for those connotations of northernity within the genre which have lasted through evolutions of the genre as a literary form. In other words, this paper will examine in particular those connotations of northernity which have persisted in the corpus during that period. A further attempt to acknowledge diversity within what can be, on occasion, a genre with tight and restrictive narratological and thematic tropes has also been pursued. Hence texts which might be considered as ‘Swords-and-sandals’ fantasy sit alongside more experimental or radical narratives. I have identified ten texts over the past century of high fantasy literature, focusing on the most popular or typical texts of approximately each decade, in order to track changes of use of imaginary topography over time. The aim, in part, is to track any changes in the imagined attributes associated with northernity in high fantasy literature as it has developed since the 1920s. This in turn aims to test certain cultural or critical assumptions about high fantasy literature: because the genre tends to rely on ‘pseudo-medieval’ secondary worlds, it has been accused of implicit racism and sexism. Additionally, it has also been suggested that British high fantasy in particular derives some of its worldbuilding forms from the pre-existing geography of Europe, or from proto-fantastikal literature of Europe (such as mythology, e.g. those relating to the Nordic, Celtic, and Graeco-Roman pantheons). The collocation of positive or negative terms with ‘north*’ terms may therefore shed some light on the validity of such assumptions. However, the existence of imaginary places brings with it imaginary place names, which means that collocations may be somewhat skewed by many terms which have no significant meaning other than to designate an imagined place. The corpus thus conceived is made up of ten texts, all generally considered as key moments in the history and development of fantasy literature, from its emergence out of pulp fiction and the Victorian folklore revival in the early twentieth century, to the early twenty-first century. It commences with E. R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, published in 1922, and proceeds via Robert E. Howard's influential Conan mythos to Mervyn Peake’s neo-gothic big house fantasy Titus Groan. This facilitates an examination of northernity in fantasy literature that precedes the publication of the genre’s (and perhaps twentieth-century literature’s) most popular and possibly most influential novel, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. The long aftermath of Tolkien is examined via Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea mythos, written partly against the codifications which emerged in high fantasy following Tolkien, the derivative Shannara mythos by Terry Brooks, and the harder-edged Legend by David Gemmell. More recent, and arguably more imaginative, responses to Tolkien are explored via Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and

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Fire cycle, and Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles. In all instances of multi-novel cycles, only the initial novel of the series was examined, as it is postulated that northernity will, if present, be introduced and encoded in the first of the series. It is entirely accepted that this limited corpus cannot represent the entirety of Anglophone fantasy literature and does not address non-Anglophone texts. It is hypothesized that other linguistic cultures may well generate a different set of referential meanings associated with northernity.

The Worm Ouroboros, E. R. Eddison, 1922 Eric Rücker Eddison’s heroic fantasy novel embodies the transition into a formal fantasy genre out of its precursor lineages within Victorian fairy tales, the Gothic, European mythology and pulp literature of the early twentieth century. Eddison’s later Zimiamvian trilogy, set in the same broad milieu and written between the 1930s and 1950s, more fully iterates the form of the fantasy genre in the twentieth century, but The Worm Ouroboros, despite its immature genre characteristics, remains the most influential of his fantastikal novels, and possesses an invented geography, complete with in-world politics, races, and a certain proportion of mythopoeia, or invented mythology embedded in the narrative. It is a quest narrative resulting in success, which leaves the protagonists, the Lords of Demonland, yearning for challenge. By praying to the Gods for more great deeds to perform, they manage magically to reverse the previous four years of their quest and begin anew. As a result the novel becomes a circular narrative, thus justifying the title, which refers to the image shared between Egyptian, Greek, and Gnostic traditions of a serpent eating its own tail. However, somewhat curiously, the novel is also an incomplete nested narrative in that it commences with a frame narrative that is never subsequently closed again. This frame narrative locates the action of the novel on the planet Mercury, and hence in the known universe. However, Eddison did not include any of the physical features of the actual planet Mercury that were known at the time of writing. Furthermore, critical opinion that the novel is situated in a secondary as opposed to primary world has support from within the text, where characters refer to their locale as ‘Middle Earth’, in the sense of meaning the known world, rather than a specifically Tolkienian sense. This means that the geography of The Worm Ouroboros is invented and hence its construction of northernity is also, despite the strong influence of Nordic literature, especially the Icelandic sagas, upon Eddison’s mythic narrative. The first physical map was drawn three years after publication, in consultation with Eddison, which indicates both Demonland and Witchland in the invented North. An examination of collocates of north* (which includes all derivations of north, such as northern or northerly, as well as ordinals beginning with north, such as north-east) would be expected to produce a list of less common terms which are found in close proximity to expressions of northernity within the text. However, due to Eddison having written The Worm Ouroboros in a highly stylized mock-Elizabethan form of English, this mode of analysis simply identified the idiosyncratic nature of

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Concordance-Hits: 99 Hit KWIC 1 every side without the garden, with a gap north-eastward opening on the desolate lake and th 2 the meadow were booths set up, to the north the booths of them of Witchland, and to 3 llow and rare homesteads showing above the flats. Northward above the bend a bluff of land fell 4 uments of doubtful and unlawful aspect. Under the northern window over against the doorway was a mas 5 war-horse impatient for battle. Her prow swung north and so round eastaway, and her sail broidere 6 -luces smote the mast and filled to the northwest wind, and those other six fared after he 7 ships on the lonely shore some two leagues north of Tenemos, whence it was but two hours’ 8 ommand, bidding them march warily round the walls northward, for no way was betwixt the lofty walls 9 on the south and east, but to the north-east was he hopeful to find a likely 10 they on the rising ground that ran back north and west from the bluff if Carcë to 11 hundred feet in length was the terrace from north to south, and at either end a flight 12 .‘Therewith came Gro along the terrace from the north, clad in a mantle of dun-coloured velvet 13 near the zenith, and Acturus low in the north-west, beaconing over Demonland. In the remot 14 to view, stretching fifty miles and more from Northhouse Skerries past the Drakeholms and the lo 15 faring to ♀Carcë. In such wise came they north past the harbour, and so over Havershaw Tong 16 plunges in waterfall after waterfall. Only on the north-east may aught save a winged thing come 17 the birch-clad slopes to the east and north and the bare rugged ridges of Strathfell and , a little beyond the watershed, under the sheer northern wall of Ill Drennock. Before them the pas 18 19 the heat-haze. Nearer at hand in the northwest lay Rammerick Mere, bosomed among the sm 20 and scree shutting in the prospect to the north. High on the left towered the precipices of Table 18.1. A concordance of ‘north*’ sample in The Worm Ouroboros.

the narrative. However, the presence of signifiers such as ‘watershed’ and ‘hyghte’ indicate that usage is predominantly geographic or topographic, in the sense of describing the physical landscape. A concordance examination, which exposes use of north* in situ, tends to confirm this conclusion (see table 18.1).

Conan the Cimmerian and Other Stories, Robert E. Howard, 1932 The Conan mythos has been significantly influential over the fantasy genre as a whole, spawning comic books, movies, and other adaptations as well as a secondary body of literature written in the Conan universe and often featuring Conan as a protagonist written by authors other than Howard. The influence extends further across the genre as a whole, with the signifiers ‘Swords-and-sandals’ being used to identify and summarize the sub-genre of fantasy literature iterated first by Howard and subsequently emulated by many other authors. Originally published as short stories in a range of US pulp magazines, most commonly Weird Tales, the Conan mythos began to coalesce with the publication of collections such as Conan the Cimmerian and other Stories in 1932.

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However, despite Conan’s perennial popularity and influence within the genre, like some other pulp authors of the era who subsequently developed a cult following, such as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard has attracted significant criticism primarily directed at what is perceived as implicit or even explicit racism in his work. This has been identified in the invention of Hyboria, the imagined world in which Conan’s adventures are located. Howard’s Hyboria is an invented distant past of our own planet, variously dated to between 32,500 bc and 10,000 bc, at a time following the alleged sinking of the mythical continent of Atlantis. Howard detailed this invented history in an essay, ‘The Hyborian Age’, in order to align his Conan mythos with an early collection of stories, featuring the warrior Kull, which he had set during a mythical age of Atlantis. The Conan mythos is therefore somewhat of a primary world though one heavily augmented by a completely invented history. Robert B. Marks has identified the implicit racism in how Howard repurposed actual geography and cultural history to create the Hyborian kingdoms through which Conan adventures: The young, vibrant civilizations of the Hyborian Age, like Aquilonia and Nemedia, are white – the equivalent of Medieval Europe. Around them are older Asiatic civilizations like Stygia and Vendhya, ancient, decrepit, and living on borrowed time. To the northwest and the south are the barbarian lands – but only Asgard and Vanaheim are in any way Viking. The Black Kingdoms are filled with tribesmen evoking the early 20th century vision of darkest Africa, and the Cimmerians and Picts are a strange cross between the ancient Celts and Native Americans – and it is very clear that the barbarians and savages, and not any of the civilized people or races, will be the last ones standing.23 Marks goes on to note that though Howard considered Conan and his Cimmerian tribespeople to be the distant ancestors of the Irish and Scots, nevertheless Conan is described as physically resembling a Native American warrior, with long black hair and swarthy skin. Additionally, Conan’s Cimmeria is located to the east of a land called the ‘Pictish Wilderness’, inhabited by a race of people who closely resemble the historical tribal confederation, also called Picts, who lived in Scotland until the early Middle Ages. There is therefore little consistency, in terms of historicity, geographical mapping, or cultural continuity, in terms of how Howard adapted real-world attributes for his Conan mythos. As Conan roams the Hyborian age, progressing from beginning as a slave to eventually becoming a king, he criss-crosses an imaginary landscape of interlocking kingdoms, moving in different vectors, including an imaginary north, but nevertheless an invented landscape which bears some distant resemblance, in keeping with its imagined history, with our own world. An examination of collocates for ‘north*’ in the Conan stories (see table 18.2) reveals this connection with the real world. Signifiers like ‘Nile’, ‘Baltic’, and ‘Vanaheim’ drawn from real-world geography and mythology abound. Other terms, such as ‘traverses’, ‘boundaries’, and ‘wanderer’ are suggestive of the kind of incessant travelling typical of Conan’s adventuring. A concordance examination reveals how ‘north*’ 23 Marks, ‘Robert E. Howard, Conan, and Subverting Racism’.

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Total No. of Collocate Types: 559

Total No. of Collocate Tokens: 1480

Rank

Freq

Freq(L)

Freq(R) Stat

Collocate

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 4 3 2 2 1 1 1 1

1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 2 1 2 0 1 1 0

0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 1 1 0 1 0 0 1

traverses stairsteps retains pigs nile neanderthal mazy faulty bickering bellying baltic abut boundaries vanaheim wanderer unclassified turns tousle torrential tasks

12.26793 12.26793 12.26793 12.26793 12.26793 12.26793 12.26793 12.26793 12.26793 12.26793 12.26793 12.26793 11.68296 11.53096 11.26793 11.26793 11.26793 11.26793 11.26793 11.26793

Table 18.2. Collocates of ‘north*’ sample in the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard.

functions in situ within the text, and this does cast some light on the suggestions of an implicit racism within Howard’s mythos. In close proximity to ‘north*’ are terms like ‘Neanderthal’, ‘tribes’, ‘warrior’, ‘blonde savages’, and ‘golden-haired, blue-eyed barbarians’.

Titus Groan, Mervyn Peake, 1946 Titus Groan is the first of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast cycle of novels, a trilogy plus a novella whose canonicity is undetermined. Set almost entirely in the sprawling Gormenghast castle, the novel owes much of its tone to the Gothic genre. Unlike other texts in this corpus, Peake’s novel therefore does not significantly feature a sense of geographic world-building or invented landscape, focusing instead on the claustrophobic internal spaces of the castle. A concordance examination appears initially to confirm this, with many references to the ‘north wing’, ‘northern wing’, ‘northern halls’, and ‘north wall’ of the castle. However, collocates for ‘north*’ indicate a broader sense of geography that looks beyond the walls of Gormenghast (see table 18.3).

no rt he rni t y

Total No. of Collocate Types: 185

Total No. of Collocate Tokens: 380

Rank

Freq

Freq(L)

Freq(R) Stat

Collocate

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 4 2 2 1 1 1

0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 2 0 1 1 1

1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 0 1 3 0 2 0 0 0

welcomed tranquil quilled outhouses gauging wholly wastelands stretches solitary shores rayless presided marshlands fastness cave storey slope prospect drive basked

13.46370 13.46370 13.46370 13.46370 13.46370 12.46370 12.46370 12.46370 12.46370 12.46370 12.46370 12.46370 12.46370 12.46370 12.29377 12.14177 12.14177 11.87873 11.87873 11.87873

Table 18.3. Collocates of ‘north*’ sample in Titus Groan.

A natural geography of wastelands, shores, marshlands, and fastnesses emerges, bleak in tone but nevertheless a naturalistic counterbalance to the claustrophobic environs of Gormenghast castle and its northern wing. Though these collocates of ‘north*’ suggest an austere and desolate landscape, they also include some surprisingly positive terms like ‘tranquil’ and ‘welcoming’, hinting at a sense of freedom beyond the oppressive confines of the castle.

The Fellowship of the Ring, J. R. R. Tolkien, 1954 It is impossible to ignore the importance of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth mythos and in particular the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the development of fantasy literature in the twentieth century. Such is its significance that Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey was driven to name Tolkien as the ‘author of the century’.24 The Middle-Earth cycle, with its multiple sentient races, battles of good and evil, institution of magic and wizardry,

24 Shippey, J. R. R. Tolkien.

339

340

j im c l a r k e

and medieval technology level, largely set the template for most fantasy literature which has followed it. In the opening book of the trilogy, Tolkien sets his hobbit heroes and their fellowship companions on a quest eastwards to destroy Sauron’s ring of power in the land of Mordor, where it was created. This opens up an east–west dichotomy which has exercised many critics. Indeed, Russian reactions to Tolkien’s epic have even included a rewriting of the narrative from the perspective of an Eastern Orc, through whose eyes the campaign of the fellowship and ultimate crowning of Aragorn as king of Gondor is seen as little more than the suppression of Mordorian technology by Elvish fascism.25 This east–west paradigm is read by revisionist Russians as a cline of modernity in which the pastoral Shire, Saxon Rohan, and medieval Gondor become the conservative reactionary foil to a modernized Mordor.26 However, some critics have also sought to identify a north–south axis, not dissimilar to that levelled at Robert E. Howard’s Conan mythos, which is racially driven. Marjorie Burns, who has examined the influence of Norse mythology upon Tolkien’s epic, is one such: ‘It is not difficult to pick out Tolkien’s likes and dislikes’, she suggests, his values and preferences, and his sense of who belongs where. This remains so even though there is more complexity to Tolkien than would at first appear evident in a fictional world where social and cultural roles are firmly specified and where creatures seem all too often to be created either unredeemably evil or unwaveringly good, and where all the usual clues apply to mark the moral and hierarchical extremes: light and dark, ugly and fair, black and white, high and low, up and down (plus a few that are somewhat more peculiar to Tolkien: the superiority of North over South, West over East, and the unadorned over the Ornate).27 However, this perspective is not supported by a concordance examination of ‘north*’ in the quest narrative of The Fellowship of the Ring. This details primarily geographic relativities, such as the North Farthing of the Shire, the former North Kingdom, and mountains to the north. Furthermore, a collocation analysis (see table 18.4), far from exposing some inherent north–south racial axis, instead suggests the inherently dangerous nature of the fellowship’s quest. Terms like ‘ravening’, ‘prowl’, ‘precipice’, ‘misleading’, and ‘forbidden’ can be identified amid more geographic or meteorological signifiers like ‘fringes’, ‘fogs’, and ‘ettendales’. In this volume of the trilogy at least, there is little indication that northernity signifies anything positive. By contrast, it tends to connote danger. It would potentially be worth examining the credibility of Russian claims of an East–West cline by using similar methodologies.

25 Yeskov, The Last Ringbearer. 26 Clarke, ‘Tolkien, the Russians and Industrialisation’. 27 Burns, ‘J. R. R. Tolkien’, p. 49.

no rt he rni t y

Total No. of Collocate Types: 542

Total No. of Collocate Tokens: 1700

Rank

Freq

Freq(L)

Freq(R) Stat

Collocate

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 0

0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 0 1

unexplored twentyfirst tilling snuffed sixth ravening prowl precipice outlier orald nimrais misleading lodes hastening harmlessly fringes forbidden fogs ettendales ered

13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317 13.43317

Table 18.4. Collocates of ‘north*’ sample in The Fellowship of the Ring.

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1968 Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series of novels is considered to have broken new ground for high fantasy literature, due to its more progressive politics. In a genre which has been heavily influenced by the predominance of tropes initiated by either Robert E. Howard or J. R. R. Tolkien, complete with their somewhat conservative expressions of masculinity, race, and power, Le Guin’s Earthsea mythos was consciously constructed to address this imbalance by rendering most of the actors ‘reddish-brown’ in skin colour and having female protagonists for two of the novels, an innovation directly inspired by second-wave feminism. The locale of Earthsea is an archipelago of islands, ranging from tropical to temperate in climate, and it is this unconventional geographical backdrop which is evoked by iterations of northernity in A Wizard of Earthsea, rather than any of the political progressiveness of Le Guin’s narrative. North* collocates with a wide series of natural and geographic signifiers, including ‘whales’, ‘upwind’, ‘spinybacked’, ‘pelts’, ‘peaks’, ‘pass’, and ‘floes’. A concordance analysis unveils Le Guin's usage of ‘north*’ in the text, and it can be found qualifying many geographic descriptors such as sea, vale, ocean, isles, port,

341

342

j im c l a r k e

Concordance Hits: 67 Hit KWIC 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

peak a mile above the storm-racked Northeast Sea, is a land famous for wizards. the mountain at the head of the Northward Vale. Below the village the pastures and as smith in other towns of the Northward Vale, there was no one to bring he could see the sea, that broad northern ocean where, past Perregal, no island went from town to town of the Northward Vale and the East Forest he had four great lands that lie between the Northern and the Eastern Reaches: Karego-At, Atuan of redsailed ships. News of this came north to Gont, but the Lords of Gont from the enchanted place. Farther down the Northward Vale those warriors got their fill of of shadows was told all down the Northward Vale, and in the East Forest, and ll winter from the west and north. In the dark warmth of that house among corded rolls of pelts from the northern isles and watched the stars of spring lay over one night at Kembermouth, the northern port of Way Island, and the next Bay, and the next day passed the northern cape of O and entered the Ebavnor heard men speak of the shoal waters north of Roke, and of the Borilous Rocks Roke, making the magnet follow not its north but their need. That skill is a of the storm. Clouds hung dark to north and east and south a mile off on a wooden bridge and went on northward among woods and pastures. The path boys across Roke Island to the farthest northmost cape, where stands the Isolate Tower. Th the Tower. Grim it stood above the northern cliffs, grey were the clouds over th above the spitting, hissing seas of the northern cape. Inside, it was dark as he

Table 18.5. Concordance of ‘north*’ sample in A Wizard of Earthsea.

cape, and cliffs (see table 18.5). Given the largely maritime geography of Earthsea, the number of sea-related signifiers is not surprising. Again, as in other texts within the corpus, north* tends to identify vector-driven geographic components within the narrative and evades historical, political, or cultural signification.

The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks, 1977 Terry Brooks’s Shannara mythos is a lengthy series of high fantasy novels which have on occasion been critically attacked for what is perceived as their derivative debt to the work of J. R. R. Tolkien. Despite this, or perhaps even because of it, the novels and associated short stories have remained popular and even gained a new audience with the launch of a television adaptation, The Shannara Chronicles, in 2015. As with the work of Howard and Tolkien, which both posit themselves as being located in a dim and distant mystical past of our own world, Brooks’s oeuvre is not located in a secondary world, though it bears little resemblance to our own. Instead, it is set in a far-flung future, long after an apocalyptic event has damaged and distorted the land. Evidence from the Genesis of Shannara trilogy suggests that the locale is loosely based on the geographical area of the Pacific North-West of

no rt he rni t y

Total No. of Collocate Types: 1151

Total No. of Collocate Tokens: 38

Rank

Freq

Freq(L)

Freq(R)

Stat

Collocate

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

0 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0

1 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 1

10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930 10.54930

veer vanguard undertaken unaltering unaccountably transport touches steer steeply spawning scores rout rougher representative rediscovered recklessly receding principally likelihood incline

Table 18.6. Collocations of ‘north*’ sample in The Sword of Shannara.

the United States. However, this apocalyptic origin does not adequately explain the existence of other sentient humanoid beings in the novels, such as elves, trolls, dwarves, and gnomes. Notably, the ‘Four Lands’ of Shannara are named for the cardinal compass points in whose direction they are located. Hence, references to the trolls, who inhabit the Northland, might be expected to predominate in searches for ‘north*’. A concordance examination demonstrates that this is correct. The vast majority of iterations of ‘north*’ relate to either ‘Northland’ or ‘Northlanders’, and occasionally to ‘great rock trolls’. A collocation analysis identifies the less common terms found in close proximity to North and allows for a different granularity of examination. An unusual number of adverbs emerge, such as ‘unaccountably’, ‘steeply’, ‘recklessly’, and ‘principally’, which suggests a stylistic reliance on what Stephen King has condemned as the mark of a timid writer. As with other texts in this corpus, many of the terms which thus emerge in collocation with ‘north*’ relate to travel, as befits a genre predicated all too often on quest narratives. ‘Veer’, ‘transport’, ‘steer’, and ‘incline’ all express north’s quality as vector and say little about the politics, history, or culture of the Northland’s denizens, the trolls.

343

344

j im c l a r k e

Total No. of Collocate Types: 252

Total No. of Collocate Tokens: 470

Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Stat 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957 11.87957

Freq 1 4 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 1 1 1 1 1 1

Freq(L) 0 4 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 3 0 0 1 0 1 0

Freq(R) 1 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 1

Collocate wildfire warden veered truce seas sap pigeon patches overlord marshes liquors kingdoms gazes galloped flash farmland controls consuming cantering bids

Table 18.7. Collocations of ‘north*’ sample in Legend.

Legend, David Gemmell, 1984 Gemmell’s opening novel in what later became the Drenai Saga depicts the siege of the fortress of Dros Delnoch by a half million strong army marching from the north. Legend details the defence of the fortress by Druss the Legend against the hordes of northern Nadir tribesmen. A concordance analysis identifies ‘the north’ as a geographic space from which the nadir threat emerges. The antagonists of the war are respectively the ‘Warlord of the North’ and the ‘Lord Warden of the North’, indicating the contested nature of the location. A collocation analysis by contrast is curiously unmilitarized. Though terms like ‘warden’, ‘truce’, and ‘overlord’ suggest the wartime setting of the novel’s action, terms such as ‘seas’, ‘pigeon’, ‘farmland’, and ‘cantering’ instead evoke nature (see table 18.7).

Northern Lights, Philip Pullman, 1995 Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is set in an alternative version of the real world which later expands into a multiverse. Therefore, it is not a secondary world

no rt he rni t y

Total No. of Collocate Types: 391

Total No. of Collocate Tokens: 970

Rank 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Stat 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203 10.69203

Freq 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Freq(L) 0 0 1 2 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 2 1 1 0 1 0 0 0

Freq(R) 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 1 1

Collocate windsuckers snows shimmering puffing pretends phantoms petersburg peopled penetrated obscurity numberless muscovy journeys invaded intoxicated icebergs happiness frisked dowdy daily

Table 18.8. Collocations of ‘north*’ sample in Northern Lights.

and its geography largely emulates our own, though with significant fantastikal amendments, such as sentient polar bears and witches. The opening novel of the trilogy is named Northern Lights after the phenomenon of the aurora borealis, which features significantly as a plot device in the text. This requires the protagonist Lyra to quest northwards during the novel. The second chapter of the novel is entitled ‘The Idea of North’, and a subsequent prequel novella is called Once upon a Time in the North. Northernity thus pervades the entire narrative. A concordance examination of ‘north*’ in the novel reveals a predominance of north as a noun, a destination. Lyra and others travel north towards ‘the north’ to encounter the northern lights. However, a collocation analysis exposes a range of nouns and adjectives that unveil the curious form of northernity depicted in Pullman’s novel (see table 18.8). Fantastikal terms like ‘windsuckers’ and ‘phantoms’ evoke the alternate ontology of Pullman’s multiverse, while ‘Petersburg’, ‘Muscovy’, and ‘Svalbard’ signify the real-world geographical basis of the novel. Geographic associations of north with coldness and inhospitality, such as ‘snow’ and ‘icebergs’ also add to a sense of eerie verisimilitude. In Pullman’s text, located on an alternate earth, a certain adherence to geographic and meteorological reality is required. In other fantasy texts set in more secondary worlds, there is no such innate need to associate northernity with the cold or with desolate snowscapes.

345

346

j im c l a r k e

A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin, 1996 Martin’s multi-novel series A Song of Ice and Fire has been the most successful fantasy epic in recent decades. Set in a large secondary world, it includes an iteration of the north as a specific historic, cultural, and political space, one of a number of territories from which power-hungry potentates emerge to pursue the increasingly disunified throne of the continent-wide kingdom of Westeros. Hence there are at least two geographical axes at work in Martin’s mythos — an east–west axis between the land masses of Westeros and Essos; and a north–south axis functioning within Westeros. The first novel in the series, A Game of Thrones, gave its title to the television adaptation of Martin’s work by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss on behalf of HBO. Within the novel, the Starks, a family who rule the semi-autonomous northern region of Westeros, are drawn into and subsequently largely destroyed by the political machinations surrounding various factions’ attempts to accede the throne. Westeros is also split by a literal wall, which severs the governed land from a territory further to the north again, ‘beyond the wall’, which is known to harbour existential dangers. Therefore, one might expect a conflicted range of signifieds associated with ‘north*’ in A Game of Thrones, by turn expressing both the virtuous attributes of the Starks, their subjects, and the territory they rule, but also the lawless and threatening attributes of the various dyscivilizational elements north of the wall. Instead, a collocation analysis unveils a different range of registers associated with northernity in the novel. Verb terms relating to travel, such as ‘veered’, ‘ventured’, and ‘sailing’ underline the quest format that is common to so much fantasy writing, as do nouns like ‘pathway’ and ordinal vectors like ‘northeast’ and ‘northwest’. A concordance approach exposes the predominance of north as territory, primarily signifying the northern section of the Westeros kingdom over which Ned Stark is warden (see table 18.9).

The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss, 2007 Rothfuss’s first volume of the Kingkiller Chronicle, The Name of the Wind, was published to significant critical acclaim and has led to one sequel with another planned to complete the trilogy at the time of writing. It functions narratologically as a nested narrative, in which a chronicler in one time frame quizzes a renowned warrior and musician on the events of his life, which then form the bulk of the nested narrative, and take place in an earlier time frame. The chronicle takes place in an entirely secondary world, which Rothfuss has named Temerant, but is only referred to within the novels as the ‘Four Corners of Civilisation’. A geopolitical map reproduced by Rothfuss on his blog indicates that four different political territories abut the northern edge of the map. A concordance analysis of The Name of the Wind reveals a large predominance of ‘north*’ as vector, including terms like ‘road north’, ‘to the north’, and ‘going north’. A collocation examination reveals a curious range of adjectives in proximity to ‘north*’

no rt he rni t y

347

Concordance Hits: 172 Hit KWIC 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

hackles rise. Nine days they had been riding, north and northwest and then north again, farther . Nine days they had been riding, north and northwest and then north again, farther and farth had been riding, north and northwest and then north again, farther and farther from the Wall, h . A cold wind was blowing out of the north, and it made the trees rustle like living the ice wind comes howling out of the north, but the real enemy is the cold. It Stark, Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, I do sentence you to die.” He lifted came after. The found Robb on the riverbank north of the bridge, with Jon still mounted beside decreed be given to all those in north unlucky enough to be born with no name she reflected on what a strange people these northerners were. “The man died well, I’ll giv heroes, when the Starks were Kings in the North. “He was the fourth this year,” Ned said choice but to call the banners and ride north to deal with the King-beyond-the-Wall for golden banners whipped back and forth in the northern wind, emblazoned with the crowned stag o forests and fields, and scarcely a decent inn north of the Neck. I’ve never seen such earth. “Kings are a rare sight in the north.” Robert snorted. “More likely they were no man, styling themselves the Kings in the North. Ned stopped as last and lifted the oil ‘You must have wondered why I finally came north to Winterfell, after so long.’ Ned had hi foreboding. This was his place, here in the north. He looked at the stone figures all around command great armies as the Warden of the North. Bran and Rickon would be Robb’s bannermen can see it. You have more of the north in you than your brothers.” “Half broth must not.” “My duties are here in the north. I have no wish to be Robert’s

Table 18.9. Concordance analysis sample of A Game of Thrones.

(see table 18.10). Geographic terms like ‘cliffs’, ‘bluffs’, ‘ridge’, and ‘quarry’ can be identified which tend to signify mountainous or rocky terrain. However adjectival terms such as ‘especial’, ‘humble’, and ‘delightful’ suggest a more positive range of associations.

Conclusion Northernness within fantasy texts must be distinguished from its equivalent in more realist forms of narrative, since the invented component of secondary worlds inevitably creates a disconnect with empirical geography as we know it. For this reason, the term Northernity has been preferred. We can therefore speak of a cline running from the Northernness expressed in factual writing about the real world to North, which obviously iterates in a range of historical, cultural, political, and other contexts, all the way to an entirely invented Northernity with no point of reference in relation to the real world other than the existence of the concept of cardinality itself. Indeed, we can extend that cline further, to fantastikal texts which eschew even that notion, such as Flatland.

3 48

j im c l a r k e

Total No. of Collocate Types: 187

Total No. of Collocate Tokens: 360

Rank

Freq

Freq(L)

Freq(R)

Stat

Collocate

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 6 1 1 1 2 1

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 6 1 1 0 1 1

13.32353 13.32353 13.32353 13.32353 13.32353 13.32353 13.32353 13.32353 12.32343 12.32343 12.32343 12.32343 12.32343 12.32343 11.82103 11.73856 11.73856 11.73856 11.32353 11.32353

tries thrush somethen quarry obscuring especial dandled cliffs temfalls signpost ridge marrow humble delightful bluffs unseen religious eighty picking drover

Table 18.10. Collocations of ‘north*’ sample in The Name of the Wind.

In the prominent fantasy texts used in this preliminary study and, by likely extension, in the large bulk of fantasy literature which is to varying degrees of extent derivative of these highly influential texts, the concept of North exists as a cardinal geographic point of reference in a world at least partly invented from the author’s imagination. This again operates on a cline from the alternative Earth of a parallel universe in which Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is set, via invented Earths which claim a relationship to our own, such as the invented prehistory of Howard’s Hyboria and Tolkien’s Middle-Earth or the invented future of Brooks’s Shannara novels, to entirely secondary worlds such as Le Guin’s Earthsea or Gemmell’s Drenai world. However, despite these ranges of relationships to the actual empirical global north(s), it can be seen that in this representative sample of fantasy literature, North primarily functions as a vector. It is a direction in which people travel on their various quests in high fantasy literature. It is thus mostly collocated with landscape terms, ‘real’ and imagined. In some prominent earlier high fantasy literature, in which worldbuilding is in part predicated upon real-world mythography and geography, approximations of real-world norths can be discerned in the fantasy worlds, and this closer relationship can also be identified in the desire to stylistically approximate realism which drives the nuanced fantasy of Pullman’s work also.

no rt he rni t y Concordance Hits 934

349

Total Plots 10

HIT FILE: 1 FILE: 1. E.R. Eddison (1922) - The Worm Ouroboros.txt No. of Hits = 95 File Length (in chars) = 924865 HIT FILE: 2 FILE: 2. Robert E. Howard (1932) - Conan the Cimmerian and other stories.txt No. of Hits = 157 File Length (in chars) = 1917864 HIT FILE: 3 FILE: 3. Mervyn Peake (1946) - Titus Groan.txt No. of Hits = 36 File Length (in chars) = 1066771 HIT FILE: 4 FILE: 4. J.R.R. Tolkien (1954) - The Fellowship of the Ring.txt No. of Hits = 111 File Length (in chars) = 1013546 HIT FILE: 5 FILE: 5. Ursula La Guin (1968) - A Wizard of Earthsea.txt No. of Hits = 53 File Length (in chars) = 343935 HIT FILE: 6 FILE: 6. Terry Brooks (1977) - The Sword of Shannara.txt No. of Hits = 163 File Length (in chars) = 1331187 HIT FILE: 7 FILE: 7. David Gemmell (1984) - Legend.txt No. of Hits = 46 File Length (in chars) = 632189 HIT FILE: 8 FILE: 8. Philip Pullman (1995) - Northen Lights.txt No. of Hits = 46 File Length (in chars) = 651280 HIT FILE: 9 FILE: 9. George R.R. Martin (1996) - A Game of Thrones.txt No. of Hits = 178 File Length (in chars) = 1615324 HIT FILE: 10 FILE: 10. Patrick Rothfuss (2007) - The Name of the Wind.txt No. of Hits = 49 File Length (in chars) = 1403509

Figure 18.11. Comparative density of appearance of “north*” across the corpus.

A comparative concordance illustrates the relative density of northernity as expressed in these novels. It can quickly be discerned (see Fig. 18.1) that the relative positivity of northern associations in, for example, Titus Groan or Legend occurs in those novels which least feature an exposition of northernity. While the prevalence of ‘north’ and its associated terms in The Sword of Shannara might be expected due to the fact that a major territory is unimaginatively named simply ‘Northland’, the similar levels of density in the Conan mythos, Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring,

3 50

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and George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, is less expected and indicates that fantasy literature is inclined to encode the North as a spatial summation of historical, political, and cultural connotations which are often left to the reader to surmise. In some of these texts, the associations with real-world norths (of myth or history) are both positive and negative, even while being primarily geographic in function. In others, the perception that there is a north–south supremacist divide, which by extrapolation might be related to assumptions about real-world North–South relations, is not generally borne out by the corpus analysis. (Indeed, in The Fellowship of the Ring, an east–west divide is much more identifiable.) Notably progressive high fantasy texts (such as Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea) do not appear to encode northernity in a particularly different way to more reactionary texts like Conan, in other words. Later high fantasy texts are notable for the complicated and nuanced associations attributed to the North. For example, the North in A Game of Thrones encompasses not only positive attributes such as the noble, honourable warrior type which enjoys a lineage all the way back to Robert E. Howard, but also negative attributes signifying danger and terror (lawless ‘wildlings’ and undead ice zombies). What most, if not quite all, of these texts have in common is an association of the north with cold, and sometimes desolate or threatening landscapes. The extended secondariness, or imaginative function, of generating an iteration of northernity which possessed characteristics of heat, sunlight, or other characteristics at significant variance with the real-world north is not something which has been explored in these novels and stories, even including Le Guin’s Earthsea. A sample corpus like this has obvious limitations in terms of its remit and also the conclusions which can be drawn. More acute analysis would be possible via an author-focused corpus examination, allowing individual fantastikal associations with northernity to emerge. This approach would help to clarify definitively any lingering concerns about, for example, racial components in the encoding of northernity in the oeuvre of some writers. A narrower analysis focusing on unique invented worlds, could also be used to examine how northernity is identified in those specific secondary worlds, or to explore which real-world elements of northernness are successfully transmitted across into more primary invented worlds. Finally, while this introductory study sought to examine some of the most popular and influential Anglophone fantasy texts of the long twentieth century, the genre itself far exceeds these authors and texts, and a large-scale study which sought to compare broad expressions of northernity, or indeed other cardinalities, in fantasy literature against a general usage corpus might help to identify how the genre itself encodes invented geography.

Works Cited Primary Sources Brooks, Terry, The Sword of Shannara (New York: Del Rey, 1977) Eddison, Eric Rücker, The Worm Ouroboros (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922) Gemmell, David, Legend (London: Century, 1984)

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Howard, Robert Ervin, Conan the Cimmerian: The Complete Tales (Greenville: Trilogus, 2011) Le Guin, Ursula K., A Wizard of Earthsea (Berkeley: Parnassus, 1968) Martin, George R. R., A Game of Thrones (London: Voyager, 1996) Peake, Mervyn, Titus Groan (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1946) Pullman, Philip, Northern Lights (London: Scholastic Point, 1995) Rothfuss, Patrick, The Name of the Wind (New York: DAW Books, 2007) Tolkien, J. R. R., The Fellowship of the Ring (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1954) Secondary Works Abbott, Edwin A., Flatland (London: Seeley, 1884) Abodunrin, Femi, ‘Literature and Culture in Northern Nigeria: The Novels of Ibrahim Tahir and Zaynab Alkali’, in Essays on Northern Nigerian Literature (Zaria: Hamdan Express Printers, 1990), pp. 40–48 Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad, and Randi Reppen, Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) Burns, Marjorie, ‘J. R. R. Tolkien: The British and the Norse in Tension’, Pacific Coast Philology, 25.1/2 (1990), 49–59 Cheng, Winnie, Exploring Corpus Linguistics: Language in Action (London: Routledge, 2012) Clarke, Jim, ‘Tolkien, the Russians and Industrialisation’, in The Return of the Ring: Proceedings of the Tolkien Society Conference 2012, ed. by Lynn Forest-Hill (Edinburgh: Luna, 2016), pp. 111–22 Clute, John, ‘Fantastika in the World Storm’, talk delivered in Prague, 2007 [accessed 10 May 2019] Ekman, Stefan, and Audrey Isabel Taylor, ‘Notes toward a Critical Approach to Worlds and World-Building’, Fafnir, 3.3 (2016), 7–18 Hundt, Marianne, and others, Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) Hunt, Peter, and Millicent Lentz, Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction (London: Continuum, 2001) Kuebler, Sandra, and Heike Zinsmeister, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistically Annotated Corpora (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) Lindquist, Hans, Corpus Linguistics and the Description of English (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009) Marks, Robert B., ‘Robert E. Howard, Conan, and Subverting Racism’, The Escapist, 14 October 2015 [accessed 1 March 2020] McCoy, Chanté, ‘Geography and the Evolution of Your World: Logical Flora et. al.’, in Eighth Day Genesis: A Worldbuilding Codex for Writers and Creatives, ed. by Sabrina Klein (Dayton: Alliteration Ink, 2012), pp. 67–98 Shippey, Tom, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (London: HarperCollins, 2000) Slusser, George, ‘Reflections on Style in Science Fiction’, in Styles of Creation: Aesthetic Technique and the Creation of Fictional Worlds, ed. by George Edgar Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), pp. 2–23 Stableford, Brian, Historical Dictionary of Fantasy Literature (Oxford: Scarecrow, 2005)

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Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) Tolkien, J. R. R., ‘On Fairy-Stories’, in ‘The Monsters and the Critics’ and Other Essays (London: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 109–61 Wolf, Mark J. P., Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (London: Routledge, 2012) Wolfe, Gary K., Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy: A Glossary and Guide to Scholarship (New York: Greenwood, 1986) Yeskov, Kyrill, Последний кольценосец (The Last Ringbearer), 1999, unpublished in English

John W. Dyce

Narrating Norden Legacies, Links, and Landscape and their Symbolic Significance for Nordic Identity and Community Read through Nordic Noir Crime Fiction

The Notion of the Nordic The notion of the Nordic region, of Norden, has a long, if variable, history. Its nations have been together in a variety of configurations and differing relationships — colonizers and governors, colonized and governed, collaborators and competitors, at war and at peace, in alliance and as enemies, or on the sidelines, sharing a common heritage and yet affirming their cultural distinctiveness, held together often by distancing from ‘Europe’ though engaging with European institutions and even with European identity in differing ways. These ‘distinct but intertwined histories’ affirm both commonality and distinctiveness.1 The boundaries of the North may be defined geographically or politically or linguistically or culturally or in many other different ways, and each approach points to different delineation and some elasticity. As Hilson acknowledges, ‘We need to understand Norden as a historical region that is not fixed or bounded […], an unstable concept, the meaning of which has fluctuated over time’.2 To use the term ‘Nordic’ requires at least an awareness that the term is not some perennial and unambiguous given but sits somewhere between being an historical region and ‘a mental construct’.3 Viewed from outside the region, the perspective is often blurred by a tendency to ‘generalise and see the countries in a very similar way’,4 an ‘amorphous mass of Scandinavia […] principally dominated by people’s perception and knowledge of Sweden above all else’.5 There are linguistic commonalities with mutual intelligibility across the main closely-related Scandinavian languages (less so with Faroese and Icelandic, and

1 Arvas and Nestingen, ‘Introduction Scandinavian Crime Fiction’, p. 6. 2 Hilson, ‘Norden – An Intertwined History’, p. 35. 3 Østergård, ‘Nordic Identity between “Norden” and Europe’. 4 Sadler, Lawrence, and von Teeffelen, ‘Hans Rosenfeldt and Anders Landström on The Bridge III’. 5 Forshaw, Death in a Cold Climate, p. 161. Jack Dyce, former Principal and currently Emeritus Professor in Nordic Theology, Scottish United Reformed and Congregational College. [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 353–386 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120802

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not with Finnish, Greenlandic, or Sámi), but oral communication and even written translation are not always problem free,6 and even small differences in vocabulary and patterns and sounds are often ways in which differentiation is signalled. The linguistic relationship reflects Nordicness, of affirming a sibling relationship, while reminding one another and others of their distinctiveness from one another. Some nationalism studies recognize the myth of common ancestry as often one of the founding and sustaining myths in the cause of nationhood and national identity. This is not necessarily based upon assumptions concerning biological descent; rather, as A. D. Smith proposes, What counts here are not blood ties, real or alleged, but a spiritual kinship, proclaimed in the ideals that are allegedly derived from some ancient exemplars […] The aim is to recreate the heroic spirit (and the heroes) that animated ‘our ancestors’ in some past golden age; and the descent is traced, not through family pedigrees, but through the persistence of certain kinds of ‘virtue’ or other distinctive cultural qualities, be it of language, customs, religion, institutions, or more general personal attributes.7 For Norden, there is an evident and available ‘ancestry’ — the Vikings. In the cause of creating a useful past, as Roesdahl observes, ‘the Vikings were to prove particularly serviceable’.8 While this Viking past is available to more than a single modern nation, this shared history with mythic qualities supports the notion of a familial relationship between the Nordic peoples. While some parts of that supposed Nordic family may lie beyond the Viking heritage, it is not unusual for the mythic past of a particular, dominant ethnie9 and golden age to be used more widely.10 An heroic shared past can serve in different ways. It can be affirmative, asserting that the nation is rightful heir to its history and values; it can be an assertion of an aspiration to nationhood in the absence of political nationhood; or it can be a moral call to the people, especially in a time of decline or decay, to return to the heroic virtues that bind them together and express their truest identity. Recollection of the Viking Age affirms an idea and ideal of a golden time of heroic virtues. ‘Is there any period in our distant past that fascinates us more than the Viking Age, I wonder’, wrote Queen Margrethe of Denmark in the foreword to the book accompanying the 2013 Vikings, Life and Legend exhibition11 in Copenhagen.12 The modernity of Norden that Nordic Noir so persistently questions is similarly rooted in the notion of another common ‘heroic’



6 Norberg and Stachl-Peier, ‘Translating between Closely Related Languages’, p. 65. 7 Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, p. 58. 8 Roesdahl, ‘Vikingerne i dansk kultur’, p. 165. 9 A. D. Smith defines ‘an ethnie as a named human population with myths of common ancestry, shared historical memories and one or more common elements of culture’ in Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, p. 13. 10 Smith, National Identity, p. 39. 11 Margrethe of Denmark, ‘Foreword’, p. 6. 12 The exhibition was shared with the British Museum in London and Museum fűr Vor- und Frűhgeschicte, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

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age, but in the twentieth century, when the distinctive virtues of the Nordic model were shaped and asserted.13 There is shared history, albeit of long periods of territorial contestation, of rule of one nation by another, and of shifting alliances in wider European conflicts and in competition for dominance of the Baltic Sea. Yet, is it true that this contestation has been ‘virtually obliterated from the institutionalized historical memory’14 or, instead, that it must have ‘left an imprint and shared stereotypes and prejudices’?15 Perhaps it is in contemporary national characterization,16 transnational economic competitiveness, and sibling rivalries that any dividedness is now sustained but nonetheless within a sense of an historic and current community. The idea of Pan-Scandinavianism enjoyed some popularity in the nineteenth century (expressed, for example, in Hans Christian Andersen’s poem, I Am a Scandinavian),17 but it was relatively short-lived and of its time and context (and even then was not free of nation-specific interests). There remain relationships and collaborative practices and, underlying these, common norms. This collaboration of autonomous nation-states or regions is significant, but this Nordicity rarely, if ever, matches distinct national identities and interests.18 To take a cultural example, the songbook of the Danish folk high school movement continues to have a section Norden (nos 347–420), but the songs each relate to a particular Nordic nation rather than the Nordic community as a whole,19 and the sentiments of Carl Ploug’s Længe var Nordens herlige stamme20 (‘Long was Norden’s Magnificent Stem’) are no longer evident. Yet, ‘Nordic and national identities do not tend to compete, they mutually reinforce one another’;21 they are complementary not competing or contradictory ‘nested identities’,22 though there are contexts in which they do become choices. Distinctiveness is apparent in the diversity of behaviours towards, and relationships with, Europe,23 arising from different histories, geographical proximity, international contexts, core attitudes, and economic needs, but (perhaps with the

13 These broadly would be thought to include universal social care, equality, democracy, freedom of speech and political activity, communitarianism, and a close-knit community. 14 Østergaard, ‘Danish National Identity’, p. 152. 15 Meyer, ‘A Comparative Look at Scandinavian Cultures’. 16 The question of stereotypes in inter-Nordic relations is one that emerges in Bron|Broen. 17 Andersen, ‘Jeg er en skandinav’, p. 385. 18 Stråth, ‘Scandinavian Identity’, p. 54. 19 Folkehøjskolernes Forening i Danmark, Højskolessangbogen. 20 Ploug, Længe var Nordens herlige stamme. 21 Hilson, ‘Norden – An Intertwined History’, p. 61. 22 Bechhofer, Frank, and McCrone, eds, National Identity, Nationalism and Constitutional Change. 23 Finland is the most integrationist, being a member of the European Union and participating in the monetary Euro. Sweden and Denmark have EU membership but retain their own currencies. Norway has voted not to join the EU but has significant engagement with the EU and is a member of the European Economic Area. Iceland has not expressed a desire for membership. The autonomous regions of Greenland and the Faroes are outside the EU, while Åland is within, but its relationship is regulated by a special protocol.

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exception of Finland) there are Nordic commonalities, in particular an underlying hesitancy which in some instances is close to Euroscepticism. This hesitancy in turn owes much to – Nordic notions of freedom and self-determination which are not merely personal but national – strong nation-affirming pride, continually culturally reinforced – a positivity around being ‘small’, reinforced by anxieties about large institutions (particularly if they are really, potentially, or in imagination externally dominated), and by a confidence in the capacity of the small to punch beyond its weight – a fear that their social and political values, policy commitments to an equal and caring society, and way of life held in common may become threatened within a wider Europe. ‘Nations are not something everlasting. They have a beginning; they will have an end. Probably a European confederation will replace it’,24 observed Renan, a pioneer of nationalism studies. The Nordic nations are amongst those least likely to seek that outcome, for the reasons above and because they have another option — a Nordic community, with a major institutional expression in the Nordic Council (and the Nordic Council of Ministers). While there are marked national and regional variations, Norden shows a far higher degree of integration than most other comparable groups of countries.25 In keeping with a Nordic egalitarianism, such cooperation is presented, and in measure exercised, as a partnership of equals,26 though Sweden has been and is ‘regarded — even envied — as the “big brother” in political and economic terms’.27 In accordance with the old saying, ‘Lige børn leger bedst’ (Equal children play best), Nordic collaboration is rooted in a sense that shared culture, traditions, and values create a sound base for co-operation.28 As a (then) Finnish Minister of Economic Affairs commented: ‘The Nordic cooperation appears natural, and we share values and qualities as well as challenges’.29 Indeed, there is more than a hint of ethno-culturalism, of myths of common ancestry or kinship, in some mid-twentieth-century arguments for Nordic co-operation. Such a striving towards greater unity in Norden finds its natural justification in the solidarity which is rooted in the Nordic people’s mutual descent, common linguistic heritage and the rest of the cultural affinity, binding the area together for more than a thousand years.30

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Renan, ‘Qu’est qu’une nation?’, cited and translated in Teich and Porter, ‘Introduction’, p. xvi. Jones and Hansen, ‘The Nordic Countries’, p. 566. Laursen and Olesen, ‘A Nordic Alternative to Europe’, p. 228. Bakke, ‘Nordic Cultural Policy in Transition’, p. 5. Laursen and Olesen, ‘A Nordic Alternative to Europe’, p. 229. Nordic Innovation, ‘The Nordic Countries Need Each Other’. Lauren and Olesen, ‘A Nordic Alternative to Europe’, p. 227, citing and translating a speech by the Danish Social Democratic Party chairman (later Statsminister) in Stockholm in 1945.

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These collaborative processes are underpinned by a set of perceived common norms, broadly social democratic,31 though Nordic governments now are as likely to be neo-liberal/conservative. These so-called Nordic values embrace the political (democratic), ecological (greener), socio-psychological (a relational individualism), and welfare-related (folkhemmet/the people’s home). The existence of this shared set of socio-political-economic norms has been a strong Nordic self-belief, but Nordic crime fiction at least from the era of Sjöwall and Wahlöö32 has often questioned the degree to which these norms are lived out and indeed their political and philosophical basis. Alongside such left-wing criticisms of Nordic societies for the alleged failure of the Nordic Model, more recently there have been assertions from the centre-right that what has become crucial to the resilience of Nordic economies has been, instead, a particular mix of ‘social trust and radical individualism’,33 ‘a highly evolved individualism […] accompanied by very strong community values’.34 Neo-liberalism politics is increasingly in the form of a globalized and large-scale, corporate-dominated, at times corrupt alliance of neoliberalism and transnational business, portrayed in such Nordic Noir television series as Follow the Money.35 The fundamental character of the traditional Nordic virtues has been challenged by the incremental development of neoliberal policies, not least in economics and in the welfare state.36 Yet the promotion of so-called ‘Nordic values’ is a plank in the ‘missionary’ efforts to extend the community and also its norms37 (however contested and changing) into other parts of the Baltic area, through direct support38 and as ‘role models’.39 Such moves to incorporation of the Baltic region within Norden alert us that the geographical, political, and cultural dimensions have changed and are changing. The boundaries of the three main Scandinavian nations have shifted, as have their status as nation-states and the power relationships between them. The flower of Ploug’s song of celebration of Norden has now sprouted additional stalks. Reconfigurations have come through the independence of Norway and Iceland; autonomy for Greenland, the Faroes, and the Åland islands; and the independence and consequent movement of Finland from the Russian Empire more particularly into the Nordic sphere.40 There is a measure of recognition of the nationhood and culture of the Sámi people by Finland, Norway, and Sweden.41

31 Hilson, ‘Norden – An Intertwined History’, p. 2. 32 Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, authors of the ‘Martin Beck’ novels. 33 Berggren and Trägårda, ‘Social Trust and Radical Individualism’. 34 Battail, ‘The Nordic Identity – An External View’, at p. 2. 35 Orig. Bedrag (2016) broadcast by DR. 36 Andersen and Clark, ‘Does Welfare Matter?’, pp. 91–102. 37 Bergman, ‘Adjacent Internationalism’, p. 80. 38 E.g. Nordic Co-operation, ‘Continued Nordic Support for the Development of Russian-Language Media in the Baltic Countries’. 39 Nordic Co-operation, ‘The Nordic Council of Ministers and the Nordic Council shared ATTN:’s Video’. 40 Arter, Scandinavian Politics Today, pp. 23–47. 41 United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe, The Sami of Northern Europe: One People, Four Countries.

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The re-establishment of the ‘Baltic’ nation-states has brought the Nordic political community into increased conversation and collaboration with them, in part because they are ‘comprehended as being quite close to the Nordic family’.42 The fluidity perhaps continues. In, for example, Scotland, there is certainly some interest in strengthening links with Nordic neighbours,43 based on such factors as geographical proximity and orientation, some shared (and in measure enduring) history and heritage, perceived common national characteristics and values, shared economic interests and concerns,44 though perhaps the ‘brand Scandinavia means reinventing the country as a better version of itself along the lines of an imagined north’.45 It may well be that the ‘changing geo-political landscape is […] an ongoing political project’,46 albeit a tentative one.

The Nordic of Nordic Noir Nordic Noir is a well-recognized, if imprecise, expression in bookshops (also in cinemas and on television screens), but its meaning is questioned. Is Scandinavian crime fiction a genre in any meaningful sense […] [or] is it simply a semantically void moniker for a collection of books that happen to (in most cases at least) originate from the same geographical region? Or worse, is it just a cynical marketing ploy?47 Publishers’ marketing departments are, of course, in the business of brand-creation and of selling one book on the back of associating it with other successful books, by suggesting a commonality. Neatly alliterative, the brand seeks to lead the potential reader to find something ‘similar’ to what they have read before or what they know by reputation as being Nordic Noir. This, however, may not take us forward beyond a fuzzy sense of the loosely related. Certain brand components do appear, however ambiguous and variously combined – authorial: much of what is sold as Nordic Noir has been written by authors originally from or now based in Norden48 – language: usually originally written in a Nordic language – content, especially location and principal characters: often there is ‘a particular alignment of location, landscape, characters and national characteristics that form

42 Joenniemi and Lehti, ‘The Encounter between the Nordic and the Northern’, p. 136. 43 Scottish Government, The Scottish Government’s Nordic Baltic Policy Statement. 44 Kelly, ‘How Scandinavian Is Scotland?’. 45 Hinde, A Utopia Like Any Other, quoted in Thomson and Stourgaard-Nielsen, ‘A Faithful, Attentive, Tireless Following’, p. 86. 46 Reeploeg, ‘Intercultural Opportunities and Regional Identity’, p. 116. 47 Broomé, ‘The Exotic North’, p. 270. 48 To use an indigenous-to-Norden criterion does not of course tell us the extent of the region, but it is sometimes a means by which others comment on whether or not a particular author and their work is ‘Nordic’.

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an integrated narrative together with the storyline, a tradition that has been itself identified as going back to Nordic silent film making’49 – socio-political comment: a significant component of explicit or implicit social criticism – textual: literary technique or style (though the corpus may be too diverse to allow for ‘clear delineation’).50 The intention of an author to create something that looks ‘Nordic’ is not always explicit or unambiguous, though many choose and craft the landscape description with such attention that they appear to show a particular consciousness of place, the so-called Trenter Syndrome.51 The authors of novels are generally52 quite specific about the national setting and particular locations. Some have asserted that they write about ‘people not about Scandinavia’;53 others that they have chosen the setting because it’s ‘the kind of place I know so intimately’.54 Writings about Nordic crime fiction tend to be specific to a nation, e.g. Nordberg on Norwegian55 or Albritton on Swedish writing.56 Forshaw, who writes extensively on Nordic Noir from a UK perspective, treats the principal Nordic nations separately in his Death in a Cold Climate;57 in Nestingen and Arvas’s collection of articles, the development of crime fiction from the 1960s is considered separately in Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish contexts;58 and, in his review of Nordic Noir and Neo-Noir in film, Nestingen similarly structures the chapter through the different national traditions.59 The practice often is of using ‘Nordic’ as a catch-all expression60 within an umbrella Nordic collection but to then undertake specific-nation studies. Stourgaard-Nielsen may well be right in suggesting that Nordic crime fiction […] is perhaps only really ‘Nordic’ when viewed or read from abroad — […] where the branding of national peculiarities is essential

49 Soila, ‘Sweden’, pp. 142–232. 50 Broomé, ‘The Exotic North’, p. 270. 51 Lundin, Svenska deckare. 52 The most notable exception to this is Håkan Nesser with his fictional town of Maardam, situated vaguely in Northern Europe. These books, with Inspector Van Veeteren as the principal character, began with Nesser, Det grovmaskiga nätet (English title: The Mind’s Eye). Nesser, however, with the Inspector Barbarotti series, beginning with Nesser, Människa utan hund, has a Swedish policeman of Italian descent in a fictitious town of Kymlinge which is nonetheless said to be set in Sweden, indeed the town’s name matches a closed-down metro station on the Stockholm system. 53 Anne Holt, reported in Forshaw, ‘New Stars of Nordic Noir’. 54 Karin Fossum, reported in Forshaw, ‘New Stars of Nordic Noir’. 55 Forshaw, ‘Nils Nordberg on Nordic Noir, Circa 2005’. 56 Albritton, ‘The First Nordic Noir Novel…from 1905?’. 57 Forshaw, Death in a Cold Climate. 58 Nestingen and Arvas, eds, Scandinavian Crime Fiction. 59 Nestingen, ‘Nordic Noir and Neo-Noir’. 60 Nestingen, ‘Nordic Noir and Neo-Noir’, p. 155.

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for attracting the attention of potential funders, publishers and book buyers in a crowded, globalised field.61 Indeed, the expression ‘Nordic Noir’ may be, perhaps not exclusively, but primarily, a UK term.62 While this is a shift away from defining a genre textually, it accords with the argument that ‘readers and their conventions assign genre to text’.63

Bridging Norden We have noted some of the factors believed to contribute to a sense of community and cohesion across the Nordic region (though recognizing permeability and fluidity, and even ambiguity and ambivalence in plenty). Shared history, mythic notions of kinship, a degree of linguistic commonality and reciprocal intelligibility, underpinning values, and like challenges all have fashioned and sustain a broader regional identity and community. These ties that hold them together are pictorially represented in the bridge straddling the Øresund between Danish Copenhagen and Swedish Malmö in Skåne (Scania). The bridge also forms the setting, title, and iconic image for a popular television series, Bron|Broen (The Bridge),64 broadcast in Nordic countries in four series in 2011, 2013, 2015, and 201865 and widely distributed. It is a co-production between Sveriges Television and DR of Denmark. The bridge itself is part of a wider collaborative project to develop an Øresund economic and labour market region, ostensibly a vision of a unified region as a non-political project focused not on democratic or transparent regionalization or on creating a transnational identity, but on the mobility and economic regeneration and development.66 The region and the bridge may therefore be expressions of Norden (or its nations in various combinations) as a collaborative transnational network that is focused on pragmatic developments and outcomes rather than shaping a shared regional Nordic identity. If Waade is correct that ‘location in TV drama has typically been considered subordinate to the narrative’,67 it is not true of Bron|Broen. A corpse (or more accurately two half-corpses) is found midway on the bridge, necessitating collaboration between Danish and Swedish police forces, led by characters Martin Rohde and Saga Norén respectively. The setting has an historical significance, for the now-Swedish province once lay within the kingdom of Denmark but was lost in 1658, together with several other parts

61 Stougaard-Nielsen, ‘Nordic Noir in the UK’. 62 Nestingen, ‘Nordic Noir and Neo-Noir’, p. 156. 63 Beebee, The Ideology of Genre, p. 3. 64 I use hereafter the Swedish/Danish title to distinguish this production from others bearing the English title, The Bridge. 65 Created and written by Hans Rosenfeldt; Director Henrik Georgsson, see Rosenfeldt, Bron|Broen. 66 Ek, ‘The Öresund Region – Six Years with The Bridge’. 67 Waade, ‘BBC’s Wallander’, p. 48.

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of the Danish realm. The shift from being a powerful multinational composite state was undoubtedly a shock to Danish self-understanding, yet little Denmark came to a fresh national self-identity, in which ‘outer loss became inner gain’ (a significant slogan at the time of the loss of Slesvig-Holsten). Smallness had been forced upon the Danish realm, but the reality of and the response to this diminution became a source of strengthening. ‘You don’t really know whether or not we are in Malmö or Copenhagen’, comments the writer, Bron|Broen’s creator Rosenfeldt.68 The territory, once the subject of violent conflict, is now represented as a shared Nordic space. Nonetheless, some legacy of the loss of dominance in Scandinavia and of ceding power to its neighbour is hinted at. There is a conversation involving Martin, the Danish detective, about the character’s vasectomy, and a reference to a ‘tom cat that has his balls cut off ’. Whatever pride Denmark may take in its ‘small is beautiful’ status, the imbalance in size, in power, in international regard, and in superiority between the two Nordic neighbours perhaps still has some capacity to rankle with the smaller nation. The disparity in size, influence, and status of Sweden within the Nordic community is not without significance, even though the myth of equality is affirmed. The nations brought together in a single region are held together but also distinguished by the bridge; channel and crossing becoming markers of national distinctions which are nonetheless bridged and blurred. We repeatedly observe Saga’s car crossing, indicating geographical and national distance between the two places, yet distance negotiated without hindrance or difficulty. Though Nordic freedom of movement has been conducted within a wider Schengen agreement, nonetheless the borderlessness affirms particular continuity within the Nordic region. (We shall return below to the impact of changes to border arrangements between Denmark and Sweden in response to the movement of immigrants.) We glimpse identifiable and iconic Danish and Swedish locations such as the Turning Torso in Malmö and Copenhagen central police station, and there are other nationally iconic visual references, such as Rohde’s Danish home.69 Visually, we are reminded that the distinctions are real but they do not undermine the connection, though the harmony of the unity is questioned in the presence of a divided but joined-up corpse, neither fully Danish nor Swedish but a hybrid. The treatment of the linguistic issue reflects this hybridity. Setting aside the matter of those languages not Norse-related, one of the features of Nordic homogeneity generally asserted is a common language heritage and a significant degree of mutual intelligibility (more questionable when one moves beyond the Danish — Norwegian — Swedish triad and also where English is employed between Scandinavians).70 The principal languages in Bron|Broen are, of course, closely-related, though perhaps more so in written form than in speaking.71 Hans Rosenfeldt appears to side-step the issue:

68 Sadler, Lawrence, and von Teeffelen, ‘Hans Rosenfeldt and Anders Landström on “The Bridge III”’, quoting Rosenfeldt. 69 Eichner and Waade, ‘Local Colour in German and Danish Television Drama’, p. 8. 70 Nordisk Gruppe for Parallelsprogliheds, ‘More Parallel Please!’. 71 Norberg and Stachl-Peier, ‘Translating between Closely Related Languages’, p. 65.

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‘We decided very early not to have a problem with the differences in language’,72 but of course there are linguistic issues. The Danish and Swedish characters speak to one another in their own languages and they behave as though the two languages are indeed mutually intelligible — barring some misunderstandings in the first two episodes. Does this a little underplay the reality that it is often the small differences, the exceptions, that are most utilized to assert distinction? ‘In fact, the writers perhaps over-state the level of mutual intelligibility. The co-creators and I [Rosenfeldt] decided early in the process not to make anything of it’,73 but they do hint at the existence of issues: – In series 1, Martin asks: ‘Want me to repeat that a bit slower’ and asks his Swedish counterparts if they can understand his Danish – Saga and Martin ‘mispronounce’ one another’s names – Jesper Andersson, a suspect (series 1:8), declares, jokingly, ‘I’m bilingual. It’s useful’ – There is a brief discussion in series 3:1 of Saga’s use of the Swedish neuter pronoun, hen,74 where it is labelled (unfavourably) as ‘politically correct’ by the Danish detective Hanne Thomson. The sibling relationship between the major Scandinavian languages and peoples is affirmed through mutual intelligibility but differences serve as identity markers.75 While there have been efforts, sometimes as part of broader pan-Scandinavianist policy, to bring closer or unite the Scandinavian languages, these proved unsuccessful.76 Alongside standard Danish and Swedish, there is, in Bron|Broen, also some use of recognizably Scanian dialect and accent, in particular by one of the characters, Maria Kulle.77 In Mankell’s The Dogs of Riga and The White Lioness, too, there is mention of Scanian: He spoke in a broad Scanian dialect. It was impossible to sound threatening with an accent like that, Wallander thought. He knew of no other dialect with some gentleness built into it;78 Wallander suddenly felt nervous and badly prepared. Perhaps they might not understand his Scanian dialect.79 Despite the early enforcement of a language shift from Danish to Swedish in Skåne’s Swedification, there has persisted a Scanian speech, variously viewed as a regional dialect (of either Danish or Swedish) or a language in its own right, though such

72 73 74 75 76 77

Sadler and von Teeffelen, ‘Hans Rosenfeldt and Anders Landström on “The Bridge III”’. ‘The Medium Is Not Enough TV Blog’. The Economist, ‘Swedish Hens and the Singular “They”’. Vikør, ‘Northern Europe’, pp. 109–10. Vikør, ‘Northern Europe’, pp. 111, 127. Lindqvist, ‘Språkforskare reder ut Kulle-skånskan i “Bron”’ (Language Researchers Unravel Kulle’s Scanian Speech in The Bridge). 78 Mankell, The Dogs of Riga, p. 64. 79 Mankell, The White Lioness, p. 238.

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dialects are often socially ranked.80 While little is made of the language question in these examples, their very presence speaks of the nested nature of identities within Norden, with the nation-state retaining, for the most part, its pre-eminence but alongside more local, regional, and transnational Nordic identities. As we have observed about the Nordic political sphere, the emphasis is on collaboration and cooperation, not least through the Nordic Council and Bron|Broen reflects this collaborative environment in a number of ways. Firstly, there is the TV production collaboration. Though clearly a co-production, it is in some aspects a non-equal partnership. Certainly, the two languages are used alongside one another, in titles and credits and in the dialogue. The financing came from Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and German sources. ‘We have a mixed [creative] team and we really try to make it mutual as the show is really coming from both countries. So I would say it is typically both Danish and Swedish’, argued the main writer.81 Yet, the series has been presented and discussed in the press and in fan discourse as a Swedish-Danish co-production, whereas the Swedish media sometimes tends to emphasize the Swedish creative trio, treating it as a substantially Swedish feat as well as an object of national pride.82 The situations reflect the interface of the two national communities. In series 1, the victims brought together to make a single ‘corpse’ on the bridge are a Danish prostitute and a Swedish politician; in series 2, the captives on the otherwise deserted ship are three Swedes and two Danes; the deceased in series 3 is a Danish woman, married to a Swedish woman (who incidentally is pioneer of a gender-neutral school, perhaps pointing to a region that is neither solely one or other identity?). The series’ title, location, and key image relate to a wider collaboration in the Øresund region. The bridge itself is both the outcome and the means of facilitating collaboration. The official opening was by Danish and Swedish royals meeting midway on the bridge (where the first series’ victim is placed and discovered!). Largely, the case for the bridge development was an economic one with perhaps a side dish of politics — an efficiency-driven strategy,83 a top-down exercise.84 This bridge is ‘a unifying [my emphasis] emblem, illustrating a modern society on the way to a prosperous future’.85 The unity then is about strategic and practical collaboration towards an economic end, not the unity of peoples united by a common history, shared living, or agreed values. The transnationality of Norden is affirmed but the basis is economic, not cultural. The primary movements across the bridge are commuting, with Swedes seeking higher wages and better job opportunities in Denmark and Danes buying lower priced Swedish homes while often continuing to work in Denmark. 80 Shilling, ‘Krister Henriksson, Interview’. 81 Sadler, Lawrence, and von Teeffelen, ‘Hans Rosenfeldt and Anders Landström on “The Bridge III”’. 82 Åberg, ‘Bridges and Tunnels’, location 2050. 83 Calzada, Comparing Cross-Bordering City-Regional Strategies beyond Nation-States in Oresund and the Basque Country. 84 Buckan-Knapp, ‘Just a Train-Ride Away, but Still Worlds Apart’. 85 Qviström, ‘On Regional Landscapes in a Multicultural Society’, p. 193.

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The Bron|Broen images of cars with their lights crossing the bridge reflect a reality of the region. People are shown in the role of commuter/consumer/client, not as citizen or member of a common cultural community.86 They are Nordic still, but within a new neoliberal perspective. The focus of the collaboration in the television series, of course, is the police cooperation in solving the crime. Despite the common assumption that collaboration is almost part of Nordic DNA, we encounter sometimes less than full enthusiasm. In Bron|Broen, there is initial reluctance on both sides: ‘Saga, it doesn’t matter where she was found or kidnapped. She was a Danish citizen. You’ll have to tag along with a Danish colleague’ — ‘have to’ is the language of requirement and ‘tag along’ hardly suggests an active collaborative engagement (series 3:1). Hanne, from the Danish police, is also reluctant and antagonistic. A complicating factor in their relationship is Saga’s role in Martin’s conviction and imprisonment; yet here again is implied a divide, with (allegedly) a Swedish adherence to a value and a rule, and a Danish disposition towards fellowship and loyalty. Initially, there is some jostling for position in series one, the remains having been found neatly spread across the national border, but they settle the dispute on grounds that the parts are respectively Danish and Swedish! On the whole, they settle down to a collaboration that is marked by complementariness. Superiors within the forces however are more conscious of potential transnational political ramifications — ‘Let’s put politics aside’, suggests one; ‘That’s easy for you to say’, responds the other. We are occasionally reminded of jurisdictional differences, as with the carrying of guns by police officers. A sense of being excluded or marginalized leads (series 3:4) to Lillian of the Danish Politi being reminded by Linn of the Swedish Polis that a Danish police officer has no status there (in, implicitly, a primarily Swedish investigation); the Danish officers from a Swedish point of view are simply assigned to the Swedish police. Neither their shared task nor their shared Nordicity trumps national distinctions in institutions, processes, assumptions, and attitudes, or habits. The interplay between the principal characters both affirms Nordic commonality and acknowledges distinctiveness. ‘Even though the Nordic region is often perceived by outsiders […] to be a relatively homogeneous area, people in the four Nordic nations seem to perceive differences between their respective national cultures’.87 Small differences matter and Rosenfeldt comments that the third season is ‘like the first in which we slowly look at the differences between the countries. […] We feel differently about different things’.88 Distinctions are evident, in ‘moral and ethical codes’,89 or where ‘significant differences in […] commitment to these values [show] ostensibly similar […] [yet] subtle but important cultural differences in nations that are similar yet dissimilar’.90 One legacy of a long period of interaction91 is the creation of a bank of stereotypical images, shaping and reflecting mutual (mis)understandings of the other and indeed 86 87 88 89 90 91

Ek, ‘The Öresund Region – Six Years with The Bridge’, p. 14. Vaara and others, ‘Nation Talk’. Sadler, Lawrence, and von Teeffelen, ‘Hans Rosenfeldt and Anders Landström on The Bridge III’. Creeber, ‘Killing Us Softly’, p. 23. Warner-Søderholm, ‘Culture Matters’, p. 7. Meyer, ‘A Comparative Look at Scandinavian Cultures’.

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self-image.92 ‘There is definitely a certain Swedish mentality […] the Danes seem to be a little different […] but they have other problems!’ comments the writer of Let the Right One in,93 the Swedish novel and film. They do not necessarily have to be ‘right’. Saga: ‘I don’t know how thorough you are’. Henrik: ‘I’m very thorough’. Saga: ‘Your self-image may not correspond with reality’. (Series 3:2) Often with humour,94 Saga and Martin reflect national stereotypes. The lead writer of Bron|Broen, observed Danes look at Swedish people like we’re all a little like Saga Norén, by-the-book, politically correct, we’re always in full control of ourselves. And we look at Denmark and think they’re like Martin, he’s had lots of wives, he drinks a little too much, he’s not taking care of himself.95 To take a few examples: Rule bound — ‘Danes characterise themselves as more easy-going than the Swedes, who are often unkindly perceived as mindless “gammas” doing precisely what the state tells them to do’.96 Martin and Hanne, by contrast, are presented as more open to rule-bending than Saga (sometimes said to be on the autistic spectrum). Literalism — Saga’s ‘condition’ involves a literalism, which in Danish tradition is held to be a Swedish trait, expressed in a joke like this: A Danish family was going on holiday to a summer house in Skåne […] Father, mother, and three kids. They drove off the ferry at Malmö, and the customs man stopped them. ‘Excuse me’, he said, ‘But how many of you are in the car?’ And he counted: one, two, three, four, five. Then he walked round to the back of the car and back again. ‘This is an Audi? An Audi Quattro’. […] ‘Yes’. […] ‘Well, I’m very sorry but you can’t come in […] five people, an Audi Quattro… No you can’t come in’.97 Over-assertiveness — Henrik to Saga: ‘I know that, Wiki’, responding to her assumption of his ignorance (Series 3:3). Henrik: ‘Are you always this bossy?’ Saga: ‘I’m not bossy. I’m efficient but you’re clearly not used to that in Denmark’ (Series 3: 2). The Swedes are presented as ‘never happier than when they are telling the rest of the world what to do’.98

92 Eriksen, Images of the Neighbour’. 93 Peacock, ‘Interview E’, p. 176. 94 Gundelach, ‘Joking Relationships and National Identity in Scandinavia’. 95 Kerridge, ‘The Bridge, BBC Four, Preview’. 96 Forshaw, Death in a Cold Climate, p. 162. 97 Jenkins, Being Danish, p. 77. 98 Jenkins, Being Danish, p. 77.

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The relationship of Saga and Martin bears some marks of sibling relationship, including rivalry and squabbling. Perhaps Denmark and Sweden may indeed be a Nordic ‘odd couple’, thrown together by geography, bound together by history, mildly irritated by one another, conscious of one another’s defects and strengths, even struggling a little for dominance. There is something to be bridged, but they are fundamentally connected. The bridge ‘lies at the very centre of the narrative […] not only as a geographical fact, but as a metaphor loaded with significance and emotions reminiscent of cultural clashes as well as cooperation’.99 The element of social criticism, so common in Nordic Noir, is evident in the storylines through a myriad of sub-plots. The issues that are raised across the series included journalistic corruption and distortion, inequality under the law, homelessness, mental health, immigration and integration, child exploitation and Nordic hypocrisy, domestic abuse, police corruption, environmental destruction, terrorism, corporate greed and misconduct, biological violence, sexual minorities’ rights and homophobia, gender equality, families and child care. A viewer of Bron|Broen would see the ease with which Saga’s car regularly traverses the bridge. This symbol of free movement is capable of a different inference, however — it is the means of alleged contamination, in particular from Europe beyond Norden (the ferries are similarly represented in Mankell’s Faceless Killer100 or in the Icelandic television series, Trapped.101 The allegedly more culturally-Europeanized Denmark is often identified as the soft belly that makes Norden more vulnerable to influences and issues. After the showing of the third series, the invisible border achieved a fresh visibility. The imposition of border controls in one of Europe’s most symbolically borderless regions is a telling reminder of the broader crisis that is unfolding across the EU. Re-bordering is emerging as either a nativist response to increased refugee flows or a reluctant policy fix by governments under pressure from anti-immigrant sentiment.102 As a commuter who works in Copenhagen but has family in Malmö commented, ‘The Scandinavian ideal of living and working together, where everyone could travel freely, it’s gone’. Yet, the issue is broader and deeper, as Joakim Zander suggests — ‘With my second book, The Believer,103 I had been thinking a lot about how Swedish and other European societies are changing as a consequence of immigration over the last decades’.104 As real border guards commenced checks at Kastrup airport and elsewhere on the Danish/Swedish border and the Schengen arrangements were compromised, The Economist observed, ‘Amidst their grumbles and imprecations, one could hear the sound of cracks spreading through the dream

99 Agger, ‘Approaches to Scandinavian Crime Fiction’. 100 Mankell, Faceless Killers, pp. 139–40. 101 Kormákur, Trapped. 102 Rosamond and Snaith, ‘The New View from The Bridge’. 103 Zander, The Believer. 104 Schepp and Zander, ‘Nordic Noir Is a Reflection of Modern Europe’.

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of an integrated Europe’.105 Though the Nordic nations have always been in varying degrees ambivalent about European integration and though the border checks at Kastrup airport were lifted in May 2017, they nonetheless had, for the time being or longer, lost both unimpeded access to the wider continent and a central plank of shared Nordic citizenship.

No Longer Vikings The predominance of series around a particular detective106 alone demonstrates the importance, to readers at least, of the central recurrent character, the investigator. They aid marketing by the publisher, recognition by the reader of a familiar character, and perhaps the author who has a constant but developing character to work with. The success of Bron|Broen, Wallander, Department Q, and other televised series owes much to the centrality of prominent police detectives. In A. D. Smith’s taxonomy of national myths, we see there the role of the ‘hero’, who (particularly in ancient times) brought out into the open […] those qualities of courage, wisdom, self-sacrifice, zeal, and stoicism […] felt so conspicuously lacking in the present generation […] In these alleged qualities of the hero were mirrored the best of the community’s traditions […] so badly needed to halt […] decline.107 Though Norden’s identity rests on many foundations, the Viking times, heroic in the popular imagination, have been and are one of the ‘symbolic epochs’108 forming a strand of usable past to shape national and/or a transnational Nordic identity.109 Though Nordic Noir’s detectives are various, and perhaps becoming even more so (notably through non-conventional feminine heroes such as Lisbeth Salander110 and Saga Norén),111 there is a clear subcategory of those who are anti-heroes in that they do not display conventional heroic characteristics. To take some examples: Wallander has been described as ‘a fat, divorced southerner who is so burned out

105 The Economist, ‘Sweden Drops a Barrier across the Huge Bridge that Links It to Denmark’. 106 Jussi Adler-Olsen (the Department Q series), Dan Turèll (the Murder series), Harri Nykånen (the Ariel Kafka series), Arnaldur Indriðason (the Detective Erlendur series), Yrsa Sigurðardóttir (the Þóra Guðsmundsdóttir series), Ragnar Jónasson (the Dark Iceland series), Jo Nesbø (the Harry Hole and Olav Johansen series), Anne Holt (the Hanne Wilhelmsen and Johane Vik series), Gunnar Staalesen (the Varg Veum series), Quentin Bates (Gunnhildur Gílsadóttir series), Thomas Enger (the Henning Juul series), Karin Fossum (the Inspector Sejer series), Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (the Martin Beck series), Stieg Larsson (the Millennium trilogy), Henning Mankell (the Wallander series), Camilla Läckberg (the Erika Falck and Patrick Hedström series), Liza Marklund (the Annika Bengtzon series), Åsa Larsson (the Rebecka Martinsson series), and Arne Dahl (the Intercrime and Opcop series). 107 Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, p. 66. 108 Aronsson and Gradén, ‘Conclusion’, p. 312. 109 Østergård, ‘Nordic Identity between “Norden” and Europe’. 110 Larsson’s Millennium series. 111 Rosenfeldt, Bron|Broen.

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that he can hardly make it to work’,112 suffering diabetes and depression; Beck suffers from stomach aches and nausea;113 Varg Veum and Harry Hole are alcoholics; Erik Winter takes headaches; Van Veeteren has cancer; Lars Martin Johansson is in poor health; and Martin Rohde’s vasectomy hints oddly at demasculinization.114 They are the visible products of welfare states that cannot solve all the problems of human life, symbols of decay woven into the very fabric of what it is to be human. These individuals mirror what Nordic Noir identifies as the root problem. Something has afflicted the nation and its people, a sickness in the psyche, a dis-ease, notably present in the ailing detective. Violence, corruption, exclusion, bureaucracy, neoliberalism, the collapse of social solidarity, etc. are ‘symptoms’ of an unwell society. It is unwell, through failures certainly, but also through an inherent and inevitable weakness in human society, the presence of evil. Aune, a character in Nesbø’s The Snowman, is suffering from cancer. He observes, ‘The more aged I become, the more I tend to the view that evil is evil, mental illness or no. We’re all more or less disposed to evil actions, but our disposition cannot exonerate us’.115 The Nordic Noir detectives may do their best to mitigate the impact of specific wrongdoing or systemic social failures or simply the outworking of evil in the world, yet they are not presented as heroic. My dear young friend, [said Mustapha Mond in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World] civilization has absolutely no need of nobility or heroism. These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic.116 The police officer is, even if exceptional, still a civil servant, an instrument of the state, and yet ‘A man who can push a vision of the truth, however colorless, however miniscule, through the thornbush of total systematic inefficiency, is a hero’, suggests Dennis Lehane117 in his introduction to Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s The Terrorists.118 It is, however, a rather Nordic affirmation of egalitarianism, of disapproval of standing out,119 and of the symbolic significance of the ordinary. The focus on the everyday experiences of people undermines the traditional tendency in crime fiction to describe the characters as heroic or morally superior; on the contrary, the characters are portrayed as ordinary men and women fighting ordinary problems in modern society.120

112 Quoted in Nestingen, Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia, pp. 252–53. 113 Tapper, ‘Dirty Harry in the Swedish Welfare State’, p. 21. 114 Wallander, Martin Beck, Varg Veum, Harry Hole, Erik Winter, Van Veeteren, Lars Martin Johansson, and Martin Rohde and Saga Norén are the creatures of Henning Mankell, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, Åke Edwardson, Håkan Nesser, Leif G. W. Persson, and Hans Rosenfeldt respectively. 115 Nesbø, The Snowman, p. 544; also Kindle edition loc. 6846. 116 Huxley, Brave New World, p. 161. 117 Lehane, ‘Introduction’, p. vi. 118 Sjöwall and Wahlöö, The Terrorists. 119 The norm of not standing out from the crowd or regarding oneself as exceptional (Janteloven) is said to be a pervasive one. 120 Meyhoff, ‘Digging into the Secrets of the Past’, p. 64.

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If Nordic Noir points to and undermines the folly of Nordic notions of perfectionism and perfectibility, not all sense that there has been good in the Nordic way is abandoned. The notion of a perfectable society is still part of the Norwegian [and Nordic] national psyche, suggests Staalesen, the Norwegian novelist and creator of Varg Veum. ‘I think that the generation to which I belong [born in 1947] still has a dream about an ideal society, a functioning democracy based on welfare and society’.121 Michael Booth’s jocular book title, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: The Truth about the Nordic Miracle122 is not entirely ironic in hinting at the possible perfectibility of society, or at least something very close. Some are fighting for good and that idealism has its positive aspects. The nostalgia of these ageing detectives, for all its apparent pitifulness, its pain and anxiety, its backward-focus, and false convictions about the past, affirms a proper idealism, self-critical capacity, and resistance to be swept along by harmful movements in history.

Landscape Readers of fiction each encounter it differently; some are particularly focused on plot or narrative, or on characters and characterization, on process and procedure, on local detail or wider context, on ideas and issues, and on place. Indeed, these elements commonly intertwine and interplay. Some will agree with Seligman that ‘an evocative and sharply drawn setting will often stay longer in the mind than the actual plot’.123 The images are not merely descriptive but may evoke resonances; they have symbolic significance in the society to which they refer and indeed beyond. 1. The Lands of a People

Land and landscape are fundamental, with very few exceptions to the idea of a nation, for whom territory is almost always a key component. An ethno-culturalist perspective discerns those features which have symbolic significance, which are utilized by nation-builders/sustainers, and become part of the often banal,124 iconic yet mundane125 social landscape of a nation or region which is woven routinely into and reinforces that sense of identity.126 Though the cause is mostly a national one, a wider regional identity and community can affirm both the particular nation and its wider cultural/political fellowship — there is no necessary contradiction. In the nineteenth-century nationhood movements across Scandinavia, painting was one of the significant cultural resources. A study by Facos, though about ‘Swedish Art of the 1890s’ is entitled ‘Nationalism and the Nordic 121 Forshaw, Death in a Cold Climate, p. 124. 122 Booth, The Almost Nearly Perfect People. 123 Seligman, ‘Gauntlet Road and Rules and Rebellion’, p. 18. 124 Billig, Banal Nationalism. 125 Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life. 126 Nuttall, ‘Building a Nation Today’.

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Imagination’ and, writing of Swedish painters, she observes that ‘They sought both a Nordic subject matter and language of expression, which, they felt, would foster a national identity […] The impulse to convey specifically Nordic or Swedish values was not unique to painters’ [my emphases throughout].127 ‘The “recurrent metaphor of landscape as the inscape of national identity”128 weaves its way through time, place and text in national imagination’.129 Quite central to national identity generally is a belief in ‘our land’, the territory which belongs to us, on which major historical events have taken place, in which our ancestors have lived, and which has certain beloved characteristics or sometimes characteristics that we bemoan. Place is a repository of meaning,130 symbolizing what we have been, what we are or were (at our best), and what we are called to be. This nation-building is not just constructed and constructive,131 but also remedial and reconstructive, for it very often involves a call to return to the allegedly initial and core values of the nation, a reawakening.132 Nordic Noir in the social criticism tradition is such a call to reawakening. That land and landscape have been core to Nordic national identities is apparent in their national anthems, frequently ‘homages to the landscape and human attachment to the land’133: – ‘Ja, vi elsker dette landet som det stiger frem, furet, værbitt over vannet’ (Yes, we love this country, as it rises forth, rugged, weathered, above the sea)134 [Norway] – ‘Du gamla, Du fria, Du fjällhöga nord, Du tysta, Du glädjerika sköna’ (Thou ancient, thou free, thou mountainous north, thou quiet, thou joyful [and] fair)135 [Sweden], in which the noun ‘north’ is used rather than ‘Sweden’, perhaps reflecting the song’s roots in Scandinavianism or even a presumption that Sweden is quintessentially Norden – ‘Der er et yndigt land, det står med brede bøgenær salten østerstrand’ (There is a lovely land, it stands with broad beeches, near the salty eastern strand)’ [Denmark]136 together with Finland’s references to ‘dark woods’ and ‘starry skies’137 or the Faroese ‘becalmed in the summer, in winter snow covered’.138 They reflect ‘an historic and

127 Facos, Nationalism and the Nordic Imagination, pp. 25–26. 128 Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, p. 143. 129 Thomson, ‘Stille Eksistenser’, p. 107. 130 Tuan, ‘Place’. 131 Nuttall, ‘Building a Nation’, p. 227. 132 Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, pp. 67–68. 133 Howard, ‘Resonance and Dissonance’, p. 243. 134 De facto, national or patriotic anthem, words by Bjørnsterne Bjørnson (‘Ja, vi elsker dette landet’). 135 De facto national or patriotic anthem, words by Richard Dybeck (‘Du gamla, Du fria, Du fjällhöga nord’). 136 National anthem (alongside the national and royal anthem Kong Christian), words by Adam Oehlenschläger (‘Der er et yndigt land’). 137 De facto national anthem, original Swedish words by Johann Ludvig Runeberg, trans. as Maamme by Julius Krohn (Runeberg, Vort Lånd). 138 Mítt alfagra land, by Símun av Skarði.

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poetic landscape, one imbued with the culture and history of a group, and vice versa, a group part of whose character is felt by themselves and outsiders to derive from the particular landscape they inhabit’.139 The features do not, of course, have to be exclusive to that place, so ‘the frozen landscape of a winter night’140 may be a phrase as applicable in the Pennines or the Fens141 as in Scandinavia. In its own setting, however, it evokes emotion142 and loyalty143 and affection. How can anybody fall in love with all this mud? [Wallander wondered]. But that’s exactly what I have done. I am a police officer whose existence is forever hemmed in by mud. And I wouldn’t change this countryside for all the tea in China.144 In the BBC television programme, Art of Scandinavia, Andrew Graham-Dixon observed that the linking by Montesquieu of climate and character was one that seemed to make sense in a Norwegian context.145 In many of the Nordic Noir novels, the landscape seems to form part of the narrative;146 characters, narrative, and landscape a unity.147 Johan Theorin, the Swedish novelist, writes of ‘the [seasonal] weather and the atmosphere of the landscape affect[ing] the characters of the story’.148 The landscape and its companion, the climate, seem to seep into the characters of the novels and also reflect a reality about the people itself: ‘The clay that sticks to the soles of your shoes’,149 the environmental and inner landscapes in tune with one another. A longing for the nation as once it was (at least in imagination and recollection) is part of that nostalgia which human beings may embrace. In Mankell’s The Fifth Woman there is an exchange in which Wallander speaks with Linda, his daughter, about his feelings of alienation and the example he gives her is of Sweden no longer being the ‘country where people darned their socks’.150 This might appear to be no more than a trivial reminiscence tinged with sentimentality, but surely there is more to it. The social landscape has changed from what he has known and loved and found habitable. The cast-off sock suggests a throwaway society in which not only goods but people are dispensable (‘when we didn’t throw everything away, whether it was our woollen socks or human beings’),151 at a socio-economic system in which fellow citizens have become consumers and participate only through their consumption, at a space that is primarily contractual, at an environment that is damaged by wastefulness, and at a loss of collective memory that is no longer valued or understood. 139 Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, p. 150. 140 Fraine, Northern Crime One Book. 141 Jones, ‘Scene of the Crime’. 142 Peacock, ‘Interview E’, p. 176. 143 Scruton and Worpole, ‘Landscape and Identity in a Globalised World’. 144 Mankell, The Man Who Smiled, Kindle loc. 733. 145 BBC4 Art of Scandinavia. Episode 1: ‘Dark Night of the Soul’, broadcast BBC4 on 14 March 2016. 146 Ingold, ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, pp. 152–74. 147 Jakubowski, Following the Detectives. 148 Peacock, ‘Interview C with Johan Theorin’, p. 168. 149 Mankell, Faceless Killers. 150 Mankell, The Fifth Woman p. 223. 151 Mankell, The Fifth Woman, p. 224.

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There is a risk of too readily dismissing or marginalizing nostalgia. Anthony Smith’s taxonomy of national/ist myths recognizes ‘A Myth of Decline or How We Fell into a State of Decay’ and describes it in words that resonate with Wallander’s sock-darning memory. The myth of decline tells us how the community lost its anchor in a living tradition, how the old values became ossified and meaningless, and how, as a result, common sentiments and beliefs faded to give way to rampant individualism and the triumph of partisan interests over collective ideals and communal solidarity.152 Nordic Noir had of course been conscious of this in the works of Sjöwall and Wahlöö with their Marxist critique of Scandinavian social democracy with its façade of participation, its reliance upon bureaucracy, and its compromise with capitalism. Much of Nordic Noir has been more concerned, not with criticizing the model in itself, but with its working out. Often, then it is found wanting, yet the criticism is not overstated. Rather, it is a matter of creating a picture that reveals the conflicts and the complexities and the compromises, which have often been omitted ‘from the national myths.153 Nordic Noir today challenges a pervasive neo-liberalism, not least in the social sector that has so much been at the heart of the Nordic welfare model with its universalism, its place within the state, its prioritization of care, its emphasis on solidarity, its support for people from cradle to grave, and its tax-based resourcing, now replaced by marketization, financializing, need-based assessment, and sometimes a rhetoric that problematizes those who are given support. The advocates of neoliberalism have in measure co-opted discourses that otherwise have been dear to Nordic welfarism,154 thus seeking to blur the distinction between the models. Some commentators suggest that Decades of (mainly incremental) change in welfare provision has led some to argue that the Nordic welfare model […] has been eroded to such an extent that welfare provision in the Nordic context has, if anything, come to resemble the continental welfare model.155 Yet, they also note that there is an alternative view,156 that while it is under siege the uniqueness of the Nordic model has not been destroyed. The suggestion of a more nuanced position is perhaps echoed in relation to evaluating both Nordic Noir and the state of the Nordic model, a view proposed by Bruce Robbins: If it were true […] that Nordic noir is constitutively critical of the welfare state […] that would not self-evidently be a desirable thing. But again, this seems to me at best a very partial truth. […] The success of Nordic noir both domestically and for export

152 Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, p. 67. 153 Meyhoff, ‘Digging into the Secrets of the Past’, pp. 64–65. 154 Dahl, ‘Neo-Liberalism Meets the Nordic Welfare State’, p. 284. 155 Baeten, Berg, and Hansen, ‘Introduction’, p. 209. 156 Kildal and Kuhnle, Normative Foundations of the Welfare State.

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contains some affirmation of the welfare state. The genre’s characteristic Nordic progressivism is not uncritical of the welfare state, certainly, but neither is it unwilling to abandon all the commitments and institutions that global capitalism has taken such pains to dismantle and dissolve. In order to see that productive ambivalence, however, you have to look at the texts themselves, not as bodies of sociological evidence or symptoms of the Zeitgeist but (if you will forgive the expression) as works of art – that is, artifacts that function to expose social contradictions and are organized so as to stimulate serious reflection rather than a simple yea or nay.157 2. Beauty Brutalized

The branding of the Nordic by publishers has been utilized by others, notably the tourism industry, seeking to turn the large audience of books, films, and television series into visitors. In cities and towns associated with Nordic Noir, such as Ystad, Malmö, and Copenhagen, there is a mini-industry of tours and walks around places associated with the stories:158 Creating an idyllic rural setting is probably good for tourist business […] Being embraced by the tourist industry entails enormous amounts of free publicity and automatic recognition as an established author […] it is a real factor to take into account.159 The promotion of the place as a tourist destination, however, generally distances the location from the more noir aspects, so the descriptions and photographs portray the delights of the picturesque landscape without any real or fictional crime scene in sight. For example, Visit Sweden, Sweden’s official website for tourism and travel information, asks the reader: If you have watched the ‘Wallander’ television series, adapted from the books of Henning Mankell, you pretty much have the southern tip of Sweden in a nutshell. And it really is that gorgeous; with rolling plains, white cottages in the distance, and endless sandy beaches. ‘Am I in Sweden’, you may ask yourself.160 This appeal contrasts of course with the perceptions that a reader of Henning Mankell’s Wallander books might have, for there they will have encountered the Scanian coastal town of Ystad with a fictional series of murders, including homicide of older people and xenophobia,161 tortured Eastern bloc gangsters,162 scalping,163 and impaling on bamboo sticks.164

157 Robbins, ‘The Detective Is Suspended’, p. 49. 158 Sjöholm, ‘Murder Walks in Ystad’, pp. 154–68. 159 Bergman, ‘The Well-Adjusted Cops of the New Millennium’, p. 42. 160 Visit Sweden, Destination Southern Sweden. 161 Mankell, Faceless Killers. 162 Mankell, The Dogs of Riga. 163 Mankell, Sidetracked. 164 Mankell, The Fifth Woman.

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‘Then finally the tourists came’.165 Ekman in Blackwater draws into the crime narrative, two murdered tourists, portraying, Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen suggests, a ‘touristic wound culture […] [a] genre […] at times read and marketed as nostalgic guides to idyllic and nondescript rural regions that only become interesting and meaningful to tourists when turned into violent crime scenes’.166 If landscape beauty is promoted by the tourist industry, it is no less, but often differently, the concern of the crime fiction author. The landscape may still be represented often as idyllic, but something further is said, rural purity contrasted with the darkness or ugliness of the city. The crime symbolizes the despoliation of what once was pure.167 The wounds on the murder victim are mirrored in the wounded landscape, the wounded idealism of the Nordic society. Or the autumn landscape may be described as ‘melancholy’, sharing in a despair in and for society as a whole:168 ‘Uppsala was bedded in a cold, grey October fog. The whole city was weeping’.169 Or the beauty of the place has been lost from the consciousness of the people itself.170 If tourism speaks of beauty, Nordic Noir is perhaps more drawn to the sublime. ‘Whereas beauty implies pleasure, smoothness and a human scale, the sublime contains terror, ruggedness and magnitude […] one reacts with astonishment rather than simple pleasure […] Sublimity, unlike the picturesque, depends on disorientation’. If, traditionally, the readers [are] often ‘taken close to disaster but also [know they] are safe […] disturbed and reassured’.171 Nordic Noir suggests that we are not safe, there is something rotten in the society, we are lost in a fog or snowstorm.172 All may appear well on the surface but ‘the decay was underneath it all’,173 a fissure from underground had appeared.174 3. The Snow Was No Longer White175

At the height of the Nordic Noir reception in the United Kingdom, many newspaper and magazine articles commented on the phenomenon — one with the headline, ‘Britain’s love for an imaginary paradise’.176 The expression ‘imaginary paradise’ holds together the iconic, exotic, aspirational image of the Nordic, from Scandinavian architecture and furniture to mountainous, icy, wilderness of the north but with the suggestion that the hopes have proved elusive.

165 Ekman, Blackwater, p. 334. 166 Stougaard-Nielsen, Scandinavian Crime Fiction, p. 161. 167 Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Roseanna. 168 Mankell, Faceless Killers, Kindle loc. 543. 169 Eriksson, Black Lies, Red Blood, Kindle loc. 4842. 170 Jakobsdóttir, ‘Meaningless Icelanders’, p. 52. 171 Siddall, Landscape and Literature, p. 33. 172 Mankell, Before the Frost. 173 Mankell, The Fifth Woman, p. 273. 174 Mankell, The Pyramid, p. 15. 175 Holt and Reiss-Andersen, The Lion’s Mouth, Kindle loc. 3022. 176 Crampton, ‘Britain’s Love for an Imaginary Paradise’.

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The snowy landscape is perhaps the most internationally recognizable signaller of the Nordic, an iconic and unifying Nordic feature. While not all the settings of Nordic Noir are ‘exotically snow-covered forests’,177 many of them are, and assuredly the potential reader is invited by means of snow-related designs on book covers (which Broomé rightly identifies as a significant part of the peritext, or ‘what the publisher wants you to see’).178 ‘There is all that white — a landscape of black and white, of rock formations, flurries and white-outs’.179 ‘Connotations cluster (or snowball) around the wintry elements’.180 The image of ‘snow’ contributes in many different ways to the social criticism that lies at the heart of much of Nordic Noir. The pristine virgin snow stands for a purity that contrasts with the crime, despoiled by the bloodshed;181 the ‘crunching virgin snow’182 has been sullied. In Swiss national consciousness, there is something of a self-understanding as ‘a pure and virtuous people and an unspoilt and unmolested land’183 and the Nordic have shared something of this sense of being an ‘idyllic society’,184 having ‘old and decent values’,185 unspoiled, a ‘utopia’.186 The blood and the mud symbolize, however, a blemished society: ‘the snow was no longer white; it whipped around him in a shade of grey’,187 idealism had been wounded,188 ‘Scandinavian innocence’ was no longer sustainable.189 The murder of Olof Palme (who perhaps embodies the idea of a politician committed to ideals rather than pragmatism),190 the killings by Breivik, business-related scandals, and the opening up of cultural divisions no longer supported the traditional view of homogeneous, harmonious Nordic society. ‘[The mountain’s] white slopes gleamed in the sun and the road [perhaps the symbol of what comes in from outside] became a black scar lying across the landscape the colour of a grubby bandage’.191 Snow covers the landscape. Nordic Noir as crime fiction, of course, acknowledges that there is a secret at the heart of the narrative — neither the investigator nor the reader knows who the perpetrator is. In the stories of Johan Theorin,192 for example, the local communities hold dark secrets beneath the surface. 177 Broomé, ‘The Exotic North’, p. 272. 178 Broomé, ‘The Exotic North’, pp. 273–74. 179 Thomson, ‘Incense in the Snow’, p. 164. 180 Peacock, Swedish Crime Fiction, p. 43. 181 Nesbø, Blood on Snow. 182 Olafsdóttir, The Greenhouse, p. 75, Kindle loc. 1098. 183 Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, p. 152. 184 Bergman, ‘The Well-Adjusted Cops of the New Millennium’, p. 42. 185 Katrín Jakobsdóttir, ‘Meaningless Icelanders’, p. 55. 186 Andersson, ‘Nordic Nostalgia and Nordic Light’. 187 Holt, The Lion’s Mouth, Kindle loc. 3023. 188 Lundin, Århundrets svenska deckare, p. 8. 189 Stevenson, Scandinavian Blue. 190 This pragmatism was apparent in the television series, Borgen, which no doubt was less of a surprise to Danish viewers, knowledgeable of coalition politics in their country, but perhaps more of a revelation to British viewers. Price, Borgen. 191 Bates, Chilled to the Bone, p. 215. 192 The Öland Quartet.

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The silence of the snow-covered landscape reflects the silence of the community193 in its refusal to offer up the truth of how things are. In turn, does not the silence of the local community mirror a propensity for society as a whole not to acknowledge its own hidden aspects — in its past, in its societal structures, in its policies and priorities, but rather to hide behind them beneath a carpet of snow? At a Nordic level, as Stougaard-Nielsen reminds us, those nations in various ways often feel less open about their past during World War II: In Nesbø’s The Redbreast,194 as in Mankell’s Faceless Killers,195 uncomfortable recollections of Nazi sympathies in the past are repeated in contemporary xenophobia and racism, revealing a collective incapacity to engineer the welfare state anew to be the purveyor of solidarity in a multicultural and multi-ethnic present.196 This element of the Nordic and national narratives remains a contested and delicate area of study and reflection.197 Yet, it is not only an isolated episode, for secrecy is built into how the powerful in society operate, and the shared and national myths feel less secure as fresh challenges appear to their story of a happy, harmonious, and homogeneous society. In a number of Nordic Noir narratives, the community concerned is cut off from the wider world by snow, by avalanche or storm, e.g. the Icelandic Trapped on BBC4 (or Ragnar Jónasson’s Snow Blind).198 Yet, the impact of globalization is invasive. To Seyðisfjörður comes the ferry bringing not only the many consumer benefits of globalization, but much more, something threatening, and not only in the form of a murder. In the story, it is decided to set off an avalanche, a controlled explosion, but experience proves that in fact their world is not as amenable to control as they might desire; there are forces which are beyond their management. What comes from the outside cannot readily be excluded or contained. Norden could no longer be imagined as a separate, even sealed world, connected to the wider world only when and in what ways it chooses. Trapped does in fact incorporate a number of Nordic Noir themes. Domestically, there is violence within the family, improper police conduct and alcohol abuse, alongside the role of the press in exposing wrong. Other storylines however are linked to globalization and the mixed fortunes that the arrival of the large Danish ferry implies. The shipping line and the captain are Danes, echoes of Danish colonialism are apparent in the superior attitude of the ship’s captain, though in fact he proves to be rather less powerful than is assumed. The casting of a Lithuanian as a criminal perhaps hints at a more complicated relationship between the Nordic and the Baltic than official liaison might suggest, with a reminder that freedom from 193 Peacock, Swedish Crime Fiction, p. 162. 194 Nesbø, The Redbreast. 195 Mankell, Faceless Killers. 196 Stougaard-Nielsen, Scandinavian Crime Fiction, p. 138. 197 Gilmour and Stephenson, eds, Hitler’s Scandinavian Legacy. 198 Jónasson, Snow Blind.

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Soviet domination had allowed the development of very un-Nordic ways in the new partners. The ferry is being used by international criminals for people trafficking, in which the positive Nordic opening of borders and free movement across the region becomes the negative of facilitating international crime and uncontrolled migration, in which both Europe and the wider world are seen to be a threat. The plot undertaken to burn down the fish factory in order to gain the insurance payout suggests non-viability, where the distinctive Icelandic industry struggles in a globalized environment in which Europe is thought to play a dishonest and environmentally destructive game. People in the town are being persuaded by corrupt business and political interests to sell their land for a Chinese investment with the implication that they are being enticed from their old community values by global capitalist economic interests. Trafficking brought a couple of young Nigerian women to the town and we do not know the outcome. From a land known for its corruption, they come to a land in which, it seems, corruption is replacing community and we are left to imagine what happens to them. Certainly, they are processed through a system, but the narrative shows also a more caring side as one police officer takes them into her home, suggesting that the changes have not wholly destroyed the commitment to care that underpins folkhemmet. Yet, the ‘inhospitable landscape’ of the snowy terrain199 reflects a threat to that commitment. The snowy wilderness and the inaccessible township reflect an alternative way of being, of individualism,200 a traditional trait distorted by neoliberalism as shared community is undermined. The concept of folkhemmet reflected a tight-knit integrated community, as we see in Seyðisfjörður, but there are cracks in this façade. At the end of Roseanna,201 we read ‘It’s snowing on [Beck’s] hat. He walks with a song; he walks with a sway. Hello, friends and brothers […] it is a winter night. Hello to you all […] He was on his way home’. But who belongs within the folkhemmet? ‘Once you are inside the farmhouse gate, it is really welcoming — here there is hygge. But if you have no legitimate errand, you should stay outside the gate, where there is precious little hygge about’.202 Home may be the place to which we escape from the wider world. Internationally, the Nordic nations sometimes appear more at home inside the Nordic household than in wider frameworks. Being cut-off from the outside world does not always appear to be a bad thing from a Nordic perspective. Yet, the Nordic community is shown to be a less secure haven than before. In the snowstorm of the modern world, an assumed clarity about identity and values and culture sometimes gives way to something closer to disorientation. Nordic society can be a little snow blind — few are so sure as once they were what to do, what they hold dear, and even who they are anymore.

199 200 201 202

Walker, ‘Review of Lars Petterssen’s Kautokeino, en blodig kniv’, p. 1. Tragårdh ‘Statist Individualism’. Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Roseanna, Kindle loc. 4192. Martin, ‘The Settled Secularity of Happy Denmark’, p. 195.

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Works Cited Primary Sources Novels Bates, Quentin, Chilled to the Bone (London: C&R Crime, 2013) Ekman, Kerstin, Blackwater (orig. Hëndelser vid vatten), trans. by Joan Tate (London: Vintage, 1996) Eriksson, Kjell, Black Lies, Red Blood (orig. Svarta lögner, rött blod), trans. by Paul Norlen (London: Allison and Busby, 2014) Holt, Anne, with Berit Reiss-Andersen, The Lion’s Mouth (orig. Løvens ga), trans. by Anne Bruce (London: Corvus, 2014) Jónasson, Ragnar, Snow Blind, trans. by Quentin Bates (London: Orenda, 2015) Mankell, Henning, The Fifth Woman (orig. Den Femte Kvinnan), trans. by Steven T. Murray (London: Vintage, 1996) ———, Faceless Killers (orig. Mördare utan ansikte), trans. by Steven K. Murray (London: Vintage, 1997) ———, The White Lioness (orig. Den Vita Lejeoninnan), trans. by Laurie Thompson (London: Random House, Vintage, 1998) ———, The Dogs of Riga (orig. Hundarna i Riga), trans. by Laurie Thompson (London: Vintage, 2001) ———, Before the Frost (orig. Innan frosten), trans. by Ebba Segerberg (London: Vintage, 2005) ———, The Man Who Smiled (orig. Mannen som Log), trans. by Laurie Thompson (London: Random House, Vintage, 2006) ———, Sidetracked (orig. Villospår), trans. by Stewart T. Murray (London: Vintage, 2008) ———, The Pyramid (orig. Pyramiden), trans. by Ebba Segerberg and Laurie Thompson (London: Vintage, 2009) Nesbø, Jo, The Redbreast (orig. Rødstrupe), trans. by Don Bartlett (London: Vintage, 2006) ———, The Snowman (orig. Snømannen), trans. by Don Bartlett (London: Vintage, 2010) ———, Blood on Snow (orig. Blød på Snø), trans. by Neil Smith (London: Harvill Secker, 2015) Nesser, Håkan, Det grovmaskiga nätet (English title: The Mind’s Eye) (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1993) ———, Människa utan hund (Man without a Dog) (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2006) Olafsdóttir, Audur Ava, The Greenhouse (orig. Afleggjarinn), trans. by Brian Fitzgibbon (Las Vegas: Amazon Crossing, 2011) Sjöwall, Maj, and Per Wahlöö, The Terrorists (orig. Terroristerna), trans. by Joan Tate (London: 4th Estate, 2011) ———, Roseanna, trans. by Lois Roth (London: 4th Estate, 2016) Zander, Joakim, The Believer, trans. by Elizabeth Clark Wessel (New York: Harper, 2017)

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Series of Novels Adler-Olsen, Jussi Bates, Quentin Dahl, Arne Edwardson, Åke Enger, Thomas Fossum, Karin Holt, Anne Indriðason, Arnaldur Jónasson, Ragnar Läckberg, Camilla Larsson, Åsa Larsson, Stieg Mankell, Henning Marklund, Liza Nesbø, Jo Nesser, Håkan Nykånen, Harri Persson, Leif G. W. Sigurðardóttir, Yrsa Sjöwall, Maj, and Per Wahlöö Staalesen, Gunnar Theorin, Johan Turèll, Dan

the Department Q series the Gunnhildur Gílsadóttir series the Intercrime and Opcop series the Erik Winter series the Henning Juul series the Inspector Sejer series the Hanne Wilhelmsen and Johane Vik series the Detective Erlendur series the Dark Iceland series the Erika Falck and Patrick Hedström seriee the Rebecka Martinsson series the Millennium trilogy the Wallander series the Annika Bengtzon series the Harry Hole and Olav Johansen series the Van Veeteren series the Ariel Kafka series the Lars Martin Johansson novels the Þóra Guðsmundsdóttir series the Martin Beck series the Varg Veum series the Öland Quartet the Murder series (anon. detective)

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Nestingen, Andrew, Crime and Fantasy in Scandinavia: Fiction, Film and Social Change (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008) ———, ‘Nordic Noir and Neo-Noir’, in International Noir, ed. by Homer B. Pettey and R. Barton Palmer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), pp. 155–81 Nestingen, Andrew, and Paul Arvas, eds, Scandinavian Crime Fiction (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011) Norberg, Ulf, and Ursula Stachl-Peier, ‘Translating between Closely Related Languages: Johan Falkberget’s Christianus Sextus in Swedish’, in True North: Literary Translation in the Nordic Countries, ed. by B. J. Epstein (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014), pp. 64–81 Nordic Co-operation, ‘Continued Nordic Support for the Development of RussianLanguage Media in the Baltic Countries’ [accessed 23 April 2017] ———, ‘The Nordic Council of Ministers and The Nordic Council shared ATTN:’s video’ [accessed 23 April 2017] Nordic Innovation, ‘The Nordic Countries Need Each Other’ [accessed 28 April 2017] Nordisk Gruppe for Parallelsprogliheds, More Parallel Please! [accessed 3 May 2017] Nuttall, Mark, ‘Building a Nation Today’, in Heritage and Identity: Shaping the Nations of the North, ed. by J. Magnus Fladmark (Shaftesbury: Donhead, 2002), pp. 223–38 Østergård, Uffe, ‘Nordic Identity between “Norden” and Europe’, in European Peripheries in Interaction: The Nordic Countries and the Iberian Peninsula, ed. by Luis Beltrán, Javier Maestro, and Liisa Salo-Lee (Puertollano: Universidad de Alcalá, Servisio de Piblicaciones, 2002), pp. 151–202, online (article only) at [accessed 18 April 2017] ———, ‘Danish National Identity: Between Multinational Heritage and Small State Nationalism’, in Denmark’s Policy towards Europe after 1945, ed. by Hans Branner and Morten Kelstrup (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2003), pp. 139–85 Peacock, Steven, ‘Interview C: Johan Theorin’, Swedish Crime Fiction: Novel, Film, Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 161–69 ———, ‘Interview E: John Ajvide Lindqvist’, Swedish Crime Fiction: Novel, Film, Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 174–82 ———, Swedish Crime Fiction: Novel, Film, Television (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014) Qviström, Mattias, ‘On Regional Landscapes in a Multicultural Society’, Landscape Review, 9.1 (2004), 193–95 Reeploeg, Silke, ‘Intercultural Opportunities and Regional Identity: Nordic Voices in Scottish Literature’, eSharp, 15 (2010) 112–32 [accessed 18 September 2014]

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Renan, Ernest, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’, cited and translated here in Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter, ‘Introduction’, in The National Question in Europe in Historical Context, ed. by Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. xvi, [Original in Conférence Faite en Sorbonne, le 11 Mars 1882, ed. by Calmann Lévy, 2nd edn (Paris: Ancienne Maison Michel Lévy Frères, 1882) [accessed 28 April 2017] Robbins, Bruce, ‘The Detective Is Suspended: Nordic Noir and the Welfare State’ [accessed 14 April 2017] Roesdahl, Else, ‘Vikingerne i dansk kultur’, Fortid og Nutid, 2 (1994), 158–72 Rosamond, Ben, and Holly Snaith, ‘The New View from the Bridge’, SPERI Comment, 19 January 2016, Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute Sadler, Jon, Andy Lawrence, and Kristel von Teeffelen, ‘Hans Rosenfeldt and Anders Landström on The Bridge III’, Nordic Noir and Beyond Newsletter, 1 December 2015. Online at [accessed 1 November 2016] Schepp, Emilie, and Joakim Zander, ‘Nordic Noir Is a Reflection of Modern Europe, Emelie Schepp & Joakim Zander Discuss Scandinavian Crime Fiction as a Mirror For Evolving European Societies’, Electric Literature, 21 June 2016 [accessed 28 April 2017] Scottish Government, All Points North: The Scottish Government’s Nordic Baltic Policy Statement, 29 September 2017. Online at [accessed 4 November 2017] Scruton, Roger, and Worpole, Ken, ‘Landscape and Identity in a Globalised World’, Open Democracy, 4 June 2002 [accessed 31 January 2020] Seligman, Melanie, ‘Gauntlet Road and Rules and Rebellion’ (unpublished master’s thesis, Auckland University of Technology) [accessed 18 April 2017] Shilling, Jane, ‘Krister Henriksson, Interview: from Wallander to the West End’, The Telegraph, 12 September 2002 [accessed 29 April 2017] Siddall, Stephen, Landscape and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) Sjöholm, Carina, ‘Murder Walks in Ystad’ Re-investing Authenticity, ed. by Britta Timm Knudsen and Anne Marit Waade (Bristol: Channel Views, 2010), pp. 154–68 Smith, Anthony D., National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991) ———, Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) Soila, Tytti, ‘Sweden’, in Nordic National Cinemas, ed. by Tytti Soila, Astrid Soderberg Widding, and Gunnar Iversen (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 142–232 Stevenson, Jack, Scandinavian Blue: The Erotic Cinema of Sweden and Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s ( Jefferson: McFarland, 2010)

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Stougaard-Nielsen, Jakob, ‘Nordic Noir in the UK: The Allure of Accessible Difference’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 8.1 (2016) [accessed 24 April 2017] ———, Scandinavian Crime Fiction (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) Stråth, Bo, ‘Scandinavian Identity: A Mythical Reality’, in European Identities: Cultural Diversity and Integration since 1700, ed. by Nils A. Sörensen (Odense: Odense University Press, 1995), pp. 37–58 Tapper, Michael, ‘Dirty Harry in the Swedish Welfare State’, in Scandinavian Crime Fiction, ed. by Andrew Nestingen and Paula Arvas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), pp. 21–33 Thomson, C. Claire, ‘Incense in the Snow: Topologies of Intimacy and Interculturality in Friðiksson’s Cold Fever and Gondry’s Jóga’, in Northern Constellations, New Readings in Nordic Cinema, ed. by C. Claire Thomson (London: Norvik, 2006), pp. 149–74 ———, ‘Stille Eksistenser: Silence, Language and Landscape in Grønfeldt, Greig and Warner’, in Centring on the Peripheries: Studies in Scandinavian, Scottish, Gaelic and Greenlandic Literature, ed. by Bjarne Thorup Thomsen (Norwich: Norvik, 2007), pp. 103–17 Thomson, C. Claire, and Jakob Stougaard-Nielsen, ‘“A Faithful, Attentive, Tireless Following”: Cultural Mobility, Crime Fiction and Television Drama’, in Danish Literature as World Literature, ed. by Dan Ringgaard and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 237–68 Tragårdh, Lars, ‘Statist Individualism: On the Culturality of the Nordic Welfare State’, in The Cultural Construction of Norden, ed. by Øystein Sørensen and Bo Strath (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997), pp. 253–85 Tønneson, Stein, ‘Nordlys. Sammenligning af nordiske nasjonalismer’, Den Jyske Historiker, 49 (1989), 146–59 Tuan, Yi-Fu, ‘Place: An Experiential Perspective’, Geographical Review, 65.2 (1975), 151–65 United Nations Regional Information Centre for Western Europe, The Sami of Northern Europe – One People, Four Countries [accessed 21 April 2017] Vaara, Eero, and others, ‘Nation Talk. The Constructions of National Stereotypes in a Merging Multinational’, in Merging across Borders, ed. by Anne-Marie Søderberg and Eero Vaara (Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2003), pp. 61–86 Vikør, Lars S., ‘Northern Europe: Languages as Prime Markers of Ethnic and National Identity’, in Language and Nationalism in Europe, ed. by Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 105–29 Visit Sweden, Destination Southern Sweden [accessed 21 April 2017] Waade, Anne Marit, ‘BBC’s Wallander: Sweden Seen through British Eyes’, Critical Studies in Television, 6.2 (2011), 47–50 Walker, James, ‘Review of Lars Petterssen’s Kautokeino, en blodig kniv’ [pub. Ordfront 2012], Swedish Book Review [accessed 24 April 2017] Warner-Søderholm, Gillian ‘Culture Matters: Norwegian Cultural Identity within a Scandinavian Context’, SAGE Open, 2.4 (2012), 1–12

Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir

Reinventing Agnes The Role of Icelandic Landscape, Nature, and Seasons in Hannah Kent’s Speculative Biography Burial Rites

Introduction In The Idea of North, Peter Davidson states that every person ‘carries their own idea of north within them’ and that as a ‘descriptor of place, “north” is shifting and elusive’ while being a term that ‘evokes a precise — even passionate — response in most people’.1 Situated a few degrees south of the Arctic Circle, and indeed with the Arctic Circle running through the northern island of Grímsey, Iceland would certainly fit the idea of ‘north’ in the minds of most people, and its landscapes, nature, weather, and seasons be seen as representative of northern climes. Iceland is a place of extremes: fire and ice, darkness and light, often adverse and dangerous weather conditions, yet many warm, bright, and seemingly endless summer days. The north is also traditionally seen as a place of extremes, and as a ‘harder place, a place of dearth’.2 Living in a place such as rural northern Iceland in the nineteenth century, without the amenities and comforts enjoyed today, meant being at the mercy of nature and the landscape, being irrevocably shaped and affected by these elements in everyday life. This is the setting of Burial Rites (2013), a historical novel by Hannah Kent, an Australian novelist who first came to Iceland to stay for a year as an exchange student in Sauðárkrókur, a small village on Iceland’s north coast.3 The claustrophobia and isolation Kent experienced during her stay, being very much seen as an outsider in the village, or as ‘the Australian’,4 contributed to a feeling of affinity with Agnes Magnúsdóttir, a condemned nineteenth-century murderess that Kent’s hosting family told her about when driving past the valley of Vatnsdalur, and a figure who Kent came to see as a misunderstood outcast from the past.5 Agnes was the last woman to be executed in

1 Davidson, The Idea of North, pp. 11, 20. 2 Davidson, The Idea of North, pp. 17, 11. 3 Friðrika Benónýsdóttir, ‘Myrkt ástarljóð til Íslands’; Reynolds, ‘Hannah Kent’. 4 Reynolds, ‘Hannah Kent’. 5 Kent, ‘Discovering Agnes’, p. 342; Morris, ‘The Cold Light of Day’. Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir, Senior Lecturer in British Literature, University of Iceland. [email protected] What is North? Imagining and Representing the North from Ancient Times to the Present Day, ed. by Oisín Plumb, Alexandra Sanmark, and Donna Heddle, NAW 1 (Turnhout, 2020), pp. 387–405 FHG10.1484/M.NAW-EB.5.120803

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Iceland and her life and fate are the subject of Burial Rites. On one level this novel is a speculative biography, or Neo-Victorian biofiction, and it is revisionist, feminist, and postmodern in terms of both theme and technique. Kent’s fictional exploration of Agnes’s life clearly aims to centralize Agnes’s story and to present her character and actions in a more ambiguous light. To this end Kent employs techniques such as different narrative voices and perspectives, as well as stream of consciousness, while also placing excerpts from actual historical documents pertaining to Agnes and the murder case at the beginning of chapters. This multi-layered narrative, with its different perspectives on Agnes and her actions, works to challenge and subvert the stereotype of the evil and murderous woman often seen in historical and fictional treatments of Agnes’s case. Alongside these techniques, Kent employs evocative, atmospheric, and often lyrical descriptions of Icelandic landscapes, nature, and seasons, all of which are pivotal to Kent’s speculative representation of Agnes and her circumstances. The harsh conditions of the north, a remote place of extremes, isolation, and dangerous weather conditions, yet in many ways laced with beauty and solace, reflect and underline the hopeless, doomed trajectory of Agnes’s life and her eventual cruel fate.6

Background The crime for which Agnes Magnúsdóttir was sentenced to death is a famous one in Iceland; it is the subject of numerous speculations and adaptations in popular culture, literature, and film, and continues to be hotly debated.7 The details are briefly these: on the 14 March 1828 there was a fire at Illugastaðir, a remote farm in the north-west in the district of Húnavatnssýsla. On closer inspection, two men, Natan Ketilsson, the farmer at Illugastaðir, and Pétur Jónsson, a visiting shepherd, were discovered dead inside the house. They had not died from the fire but had been murdered, as their bodies had several knife wounds, and the perpetrators had set fire to the house, trying to make it look as if the two men had been trapped in the fire. Three people were convicted of murdering Natan and Pétur and sentenced to death: Agnes Magnúsdóttir, a workmaid at Illugastaðir, Friðrik Sigurðsson, a young man from a nearby farm, and Friðrik’s





6 I am very much indebted to a dear colleague, the late Professor Eggert Þór Bernharðsson (1958–2014), one of many scholars who have written about and studied the murders at Illugastaðir. Eggert introduced me to Kent’s novel and I warmly remember many lively discussions on its plot and the validity of Kent’s version of events. 7 See Eggert Þór Bernharðsson, ‘Friðrik, Agnes, Sigríður og Natan’, and Helga Kress, ‘Eftir hans skipun’. There is still great interest in the murder case today; for instance, a mock-trial was organized by the Icelandic Lawyers Association and held in Hvammstangi (north Iceland) in September 2017, with prosecution and defence lawyers arguing for and against the three condemned, Agnes, Friðrik, and Sigríður, based on all the evidence that is available today. The tickets to the event were quickly sold out and it was a great success. The result was that all three defendants received a milder sentence than before, though Agnes got the harshest punishment of them all, i.e. fourteen years in prison while Friðrik received seven years and Sigríður five years. See Aðalheiður Ámundadóttir, ‘Baráttukonan Agnes’; Aðalheiður Ámundadóttir and Margrét Helga Erlingsdóttir, ‘Agnes hlyti fjórtán ára dóm’; Sigurður Bogi Sævarsson, ‘Réttað í ljóslifandi sakamáli’.

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teenage lover Sigríður Guðmundsdóttir, also a workmaid at Illugastaðir. Due to her young age, Sigríður’s sentence was soon commuted to life imprisonment in Denmark. Agnes and Friðrik were, however, executed (beheaded) at Þrístapar, Vatnsdalur Valley, on 12 January 1830. These were the last executions to take place in Iceland. Exactly why Agnes and Friðrik (along with Sigríður) murdered Natan and Pétur has not been properly established. The most common explanation, coming down through popular folk belief and hearsay, is that Agnes and Natan were lovers, and that when things turned sour between them, Agnes decided to murder Natan out of jealousy, convincing the others to help her because they believed Natan had money that they could steal. This has however been refuted by historian Eggert Þór Bernharðsson, who claims that there is no record of Natan and Agnes ever having been romantically involved.8 Further, literary scholar Helga Kress claims that Agnes’s testimony, as recorded at the trial, suggests that the women turned against Natan (with Friðrik’s help as he was Sigríður’s sweetheart) because Natan had been sexually abusing both women.9 Despite these recent scholarly claims, there is a persistent belief that Agnes developed from devoted lover to jealous and murderous fiend due to disappointments in her relationship with Natan. Over time, she has consistently been reduced to the stereotype of the wicked woman plotting vengeance on a former lover, in both historical and fictional treatments of the Illugastaðir murder. However, in the case of Egill Eðvarðsson’s film Agnes (1995), as noted by Kent,10 the opposite is the case and Agnes is portrayed as an innocent, almost angelic figure, oppressed by cruel womanizer Natan, ‘pitted mercilessly to the rocks by fate […with] with no volition of her own’.11 A more balanced view of Agnes, where she is not reduced to stereotype and allowing for more ambiguity — in Kent’s words, ‘that grey ground’12 — when it comes to the question of her innocence or guilt, has therefore been lacking in representations of her. This well-known Icelandic murder case and the woman at its centre fascinated Hannah Kent so that she began to look into the life of Agnes as well as the murders at Illugastaðir. The more she read about the murders, the more Kent became ‘perplexed and frustrated at the way in which Agnes was spoken of as being unequivocally evil’;13 she was also struck by how Agnes’s actions, represented as entirely lacking in humanity, had been mythologized in a way Kent found unfair.14 This reflects clearly how women in the past, who deviated from the norm or transgressed, not doing what was thought proper, were regarded with suspicion: ‘if you are not an angel, then you must be a demon […] a cruel dichotomy’.15 In fictionalizing the life of Agnes, Kent wanted to work against these stereotypes, and instead represent Agnes as an ambiguous figure, not necessarily to prove her innocence, but in order ‘to discover

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Eggert Þór Bernharðsson, ‘Friðrik, Agnes, Sigríður og Natan’, pp. 50–53. Helga Kress, ‘Eftir hans skipun’, pp. 106–07. Friðrika Benónýsdóttir, ‘Myrkt ástarljóð til Íslands’; Reynolds, ‘Hannah Kent’. Reynolds, ‘Hannah Kent’. Reynolds, ‘Hannah Kent’. Kent, ‘Hannah Kent Answers Questions from our Reading Group’, p. 350. Reynolds, ‘Hannah Kent’. Kent, ‘Hannah Kent Answers Questions from our Reading Group’, pp. 350–51.

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something of her complexity, and in that, her humanity’.16 Further, she wanted to explore something closer to the emotional truth of the events that brought Agnes to her death.17 Judging from critical commentaries on the novel, Kent has succeeded in both respects. For instance, critics praise the novel as one that lends new depth to the character of Agnes18 and depicts her as ‘equivocal’,19 with one commentator even seeing Agnes as a reminder of Hardy’s Tess Durbeyfield.20 Lea asserts that Burial Rites ‘does challenge the idea that Agnes is […] “an inhuman witch, stirring up murder”’,21 and other critics note the humanity of Agnes as portrayed by Kent. Thus the novel ‘convincingly animates Agnes, […] showing her headstrong humanity and heart-wrenching thirst for life’,22 and ‘the reader emerges from the novel with a powerful sense of Agnes’s full humanity — her capacity for suffering and wisdom, for vulnerability and strength, for violence and love’.23 Agnes therefore emerges as a complex, deeply human figure in Kent’s rendering of her life.

Fictionalizing the Past: Revisionist History, Neo-Victorian Biofiction, Speculative Biography Burial Rites was written during Kent’s own Ph.D. research in Creative Writing in which Kent explored representations of murderous women in contemporary literature.24 Notably, Kent was inspired by Margaret Atwood’s 1996 novel Alias Grace, which also tells the story of a convicted murderess, Grace Marks, and by Atwood’s article ‘In Search of Alias Grace’,25 in which Atwood discusses her representation of Grace Marks’s story through the medium of fiction. In fact, the two novels are in many ways comparable, for instance in terms of narrative structure, textual elements, and atmosphere, and both work within a feminist vein of historical novel writing defined by Jerome de Groot as ‘revisionist’, calling attention to the oppression women have had to suffer in history.26 Such works show awareness of a postmodern world view and question the authority of the grand narratives of historical writing, thus ‘allowing for the reinsertion of marginalized but genuine figures’.27 Both Agnes and Grace are such figures, especially due to their gender and low social status. Women are largely absent from recorded history and lack agency, and therefore a reimagining of historical women’s lives in fiction can be viewed as ‘a feminist intervention — a 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Kent, ‘Hannah Kent Answers Questions from our Reading Group’, p. 351. ‘Hannah Kent Discusses Burial Rites and Speculative Biography’. Payne, ‘Review of Burial Rites by Hannah Kent’. Coghlan, ‘“Burial Rites” by Hannah Kent’. Trooboff, ‘Burial Rites [Review]’. Lea, ‘Ambiguous Agnes’, p. 62. Sacks, ‘Book Review: “Burial Rites” by Hannah Kent’. Trooboff, ‘Burial Rites [Review]’. Reynolds, ‘Hannah Kent’. ‘Hannah Kent Discusses Burial Rites and Speculative Biography’. De Groot, The Historical Novel, p. 158. Cooper and Short, ‘Introduction’, p. 5.

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way of restoring female figures to their place in history’.28 Thus Kent’s novel can be classified as a postmodern, revisionist historical novel with a feminist focus, while it can also be read as ‘Neo-Victorian biofiction’ as defined by Marie-Louise Kohlke; this is the ‘mainly literary, dramatic, or filmic reimaginings of the lives of actual individuals who lived during the long nineteenth century, in which said individuals provide the sole or joint major textual foci and narrated/narrating subjects’.29 Kent herself claims that Burial Rites is what she terms ‘speculative biography’ and not a historical novel, i.e. ‘not a definitive history by any means, but a suggestion of a life as it might have been lived’.30 However, the historical novel, in broad terms, is certainly not a definitive history, but actually a fictionalized representation of lives in the past, albeit based around known facts of history. The same is true of Neo-Victorian biofiction, in part a subgenre of the historical novel. In researching and forming her speculative biography of Agnes, a process she calls a ‘research-led creative practise’,31 Kent relied on written records such as court documents, church records, inventories, and letters from District Commissioner Björn Blöndal regarding Agnes’s case and her imprisonment while awaiting her execution. Naturally, reliable sources are scant or non-existent as to what Agnes’s life was really like, what were its everyday occurrences, the talk between people, the banal details relating to the lives of the farmers and the poor servants and farmhands who worked for them, as well as Agnes’s true feelings. As Margaret Atwood so aptly states, there are so many details not found in the historical records and the facts can easily be twisted to suit people’s different agendas, or simply due to human error: The past is made of paper. […] What’s on the paper? The same things that are on paper now. Records, documents, newspaper stories, eyewitness reports, gossip and rumour and opinion and contradiction. There is […] no more reason to trust something written down on paper then than there is now. After all, the writers-down were human beings, and are subject to error, intentional or not, and to the very human desire to magnify a scandal, and to their own biases. […] If you’re after the truth, the whole and detailed truth, and nothing but the truth, you’re going to have a thin time of it if you trust to paper; but with the past, it’s almost all you’ve got.32 In a similar vein to Atwood’s methods in Alias Grace, Kent presents excerpts from printed sources, official letters, court documents, poems, and so on at the beginning of chapters. Importantly, as pointed out by Suzie Keen, the extracts from official documents seem emotionless and stark in comparison with the lyricism and descriptive prose of the novel as a whole.33 This also underlines the difference between the factual ‘truth’ of history, on one hand, and the emotional ‘truth’, on the 28 29 30 31 32 33

Cooper and Short, ‘Introduction’, p. 3. Kohlke, ‘Neo-Victorian Biofiction’, p. 4. ‘Hannah Kent Discusses Burial Rites and Speculative Biography’. ‘SWF2013: Australian Writers’ Centre interviews Hannah Kent’. Atwood, ‘In Search of Alias Grace’, pp. 1513–14. Keen, ‘Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites’.

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other. Furthermore, the excerpts provide a historical frame for the story that is based on the written records, thus in a sense honouring the facts while sidestepping ‘the ethical dilemmas that you inevitably face when you write about real people from the past’ as Kent asserts,34 and again in line with Atwood’s methods in writing Alias Grace. Yet, as Atwood’s statement above makes abundantly clear, this historical frame is in itself highly questionable. There is always the question of whose version of the truth is portrayed in historical documents,35 but there is little else we can depend on when forming an opinion of the past. Within this frame of ‘honoured facts’, which ostensibly provides a sense of authenticity to the tale, there are extensive sections in which Agnes’s story is related through a first-person narrative. This first-person narrative oscillates between Agnes’s thoughts on her past and scenes where she tells her story to the young assistant Reverend Þorvarður Jónsson, or Tóti, whose task it is to be Agnes’s spiritual advisor in preparation for her death and whose approach is to ‘provide her with a final audience to her life’s lonely narrative’.36 These exchanges take place at an isolated farm, Kornsá in Vatnsdalur Valley; this is where Agnes was kept as a prisoner for the last seven months of her life. However, towards the end of the story, Agnes relates the actual circumstances of the crime to the mistress of Kornsá, Margrét. With the exception of this last revelation, Agnes tells her story to her priest in the closely confined and intimate space of the Icelandic baðstofa (a communal room where all the people also sleep), where the family at Kornsá cannot help but overhear what is being said. Thus they are gradually drawn into her storytelling and all are curious about what really happened that fatal night at Illugastaðir, and why. As a result, Agnes’s stay at Kornsá has an even stronger impact on the people there as they are drawn into her storytelling and begin to empathize with — and even like — a person they initially find abhorrent and want nothing to do with. Eventually, as noted by Catherine Taylor, the Kornsá family come to realize that Agnes is ‘neither the contrite nor witchlike figure [they] expected: bedraggled, reserved, but with presence’.37 The stereotype of the evil and murderous Agnes is thereby deconstructed both within the narrative world and outside of it — that is, to the effect that characters within the story and the readers outside of it gain a different and more rounded understanding of Agnes and her story. This is in accordance with Kent’s aims to present a more ambiguous portrayal of Agnes, and adds to the revisionist nature of her novel. It also restores Agnes to centrality in the story of the murders, thus replacing Natan, who has traditionally got more attention, as noted by Nicholas Birns38 as well as Kent herself.39 Outside perspectives on Agnes that are provided through brief sections focusing on other characters, especially the women at Kornsá, add further depth to the portrayal. Finally, interwoven with this telling of her tale are Agnes’s thoughts on 34 ‘Hannah Kent Discusses Burial Rites and Speculative Biography’. 35 Coghlan, ‘“Burial Rites” by Hannah Kent’. 36 Kent, Burial Rites, p. 166. All further references to this novel are given in brackets within the text. 37 Taylor, ‘Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, Review’. 38 Birns, Contemporary Australian Literature, pp. 218–19. 39 Friðrika Benónýsdóttir, ‘Myrkt ástarljóð til Íslands’.

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events, past and present, a narrative in the form of stream of consciousness described in one review as ‘the most emotionally charged sections of the novel’.40 As a result, she does not reveal all the details of her story or her relationship with Natan to her audience at the farm, whereas the reader gains considerably more insight. Again comparable to Grace Marks in Atwood’s novel, Agnes is not a reliable narrator. Kent stresses this fact in reply to an interviewer who claims that Agnes is portrayed as a victim,41 and in another interview she explains: The decision to place Agnes’s first person voice alongside third person narration was not only to draw attention to Agnes’s interiority and her poetic way of seeing the world, but also to examine her unreliability. I was interested in exploring the difference between what Agnes thinks to herself privately, and what she actually says aloud. I wanted — in these multiple voices — to suggest that Agnes is contradictory, manipulative and untrustworthy, but to also illustrate that she has ample reason for being that way.42 Kent’s employment of narrative voice moreover creates a space of lyrical articulation for Agnes, whom Kent sees as having been ‘largely silenced in her own lifetime’.43 Such articulation provides a sharp contrast to the ‘dry, authoritative and plain-speaking’ voice of the historical record.44 Through Agnes’s perspective, Kent’s desire to both draw attention to and challenge the stereotyped Agnes is frequently made apparent. For instance, early in the story Agnes reflects on how she must hold onto her true self in spite of how others see her now: They don’t know me. […] They will see the whore, the madwoman, the murderess, the female dripping blood into the grass and laughing with her mouth choked with dirt. They will say ‘Agnes’ and see the spider, the witch caught in the webbing of her own fateful weaving. They might see the lamb circled by ravens, bleating for a lost mother. But they will not see me. I will not be there. […] I understood that these people did not see me. I was two dead men. I was a burning farm. I was a knife. I was blood. (29–30, 35) Different versions of Agnes are reflected here, ways in which others might see her; perhaps some will even sympathize with her, viewing her as a victim (lamb) at the mercy of a cruel world (ravens — a recurring motif in the story), although this is the least likely scenario. As argued by Danijela Petković, Agnes is ‘animalised’, both in her own rendering of what she believes others think of her (‘spider’, ‘lamb’), as well as in other characters’ comments on her character, being for instance likened

40 41 42 43 44

Finn, ‘Review: “Burial Rites”’. Friðrika Benónýsdóttir, ‘Myrkt ástarljóð til Íslands’. Touitou, ‘Burial Rites Is as Much a Dark Love Letter’. Touitou, ‘Burial Rites Is as Much a Dark Love Letter’. Touitou, ‘Burial Rites Is as Much a Dark Love Letter’.

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to ‘a lamb ripe for slaughter’ (46).45 Agnes’s essence is taken from her, twisted into different versions of Agnes, ones she cannot recognize or identify with. In Kent’s treatment, the tendency to stereotype Agnes is repeatedly emphasized, as in Agnes’s reflections on how her words were twisted at the trial: ‘Everything I said was taken from me and altered until the story wasn’t my own’ (100). To these people, Agnes already has become one-dimensional, associated only with one murderous event, and so the myth of the vengeful murderess as it has come down through popular belief is actively being created. Outside perspectives of more sympathetic characters also introduce another side to Agnes, thus furthering Kent’s aim to work against the stereotype. A notable instance is when Margrét of Kornsá, on first meeting Agnes, reflects on women who kill men, comparing Agnes to the women of the sagas, who ‘murdered from a distance and kept their fingers clean’ (52). Agnes, however, Margrét thinks, is ‘not a saga woman’ but simply ‘a landless workmaid raised on a porridge of moss and poverty’ (52). In some ways a paradoxical statement, since clear parallels are drawn in the text between Agnes and Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir of Laxdæla Saga,46 Margrét’s assessment nevertheless captures in essence Kent’s version of Agnes’s story, as it is a tale of terrible hardship and deprivation, all the way from her childhood years until the fateful events at Illugastaðir. Indeed, as Margrét learns more of Agnes’s story, she comes to realize Agnes’s status as ‘a victim of a patriarchal society that favours obedient and innocent women’.47 We learn that Agnes is intelligent and ambitious; she reflects as she looks back on her life: ‘I used to think that if I worked hard I might one day be made a housemistress’ (72), and indeed we find that these were her hopes when going with Natan to work for him at Illugastaðir. However, in her younger years she is an orphan and a pauper, and later a servant reliant on her masters, with almost no power over her own life, so that her ambitions are condemned and frowned upon in her community as not befitting a woman of her station. Accordingly, despite her obvious gifts she seems doomed from the start, and this sense of doom is accentuated throughout the novel through Kent’s employment of the northern setting, its landscape, weather, and the changing seasons.

Northern Landscapes, Nature, and Seasons While Burial Rites is a revisionist, speculative investigation of a life once lived, it is also very much a novel about Iceland and the north. These aspects of the novel do play into and depend on one another since Kent’s use of setting is integral to her portrayal of Agnes and her ill-fated life, as the natural world in which Agnes lives

45 Petković, ‘Like a Lamb Ripe for Slaughter’, p. 82. 46 Touitou, ‘Burial Rites Is as Much a Dark Love Letter’; Finn, ‘Review: “Burial Rites”’; Kent, ‘Hannah Kent Answers Questions from our Reading Group’, p. 352. 47 Ayuningtyas, ‘Deconstructing the Stereotypes of Women’, p. 78.

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‘both imprisons and shapes her’.48 Importantly, Kent has frequently referred to her novel as her ‘dark love letter’ to Iceland,49 one in which she wanted to pay tribute to the country through both accurate representation and poetic description.50 When first arriving in Iceland as an exchange student, Kent felt an immediate affinity with the landscape, a kind of spiritual connection.51 Iceland is for her a place of extremes, with a hostile landscape and nature as ‘queen’,52 a predominant shaping force for the people living there.53 Accordingly, landscape, weather, and nature should be pivotal elements in a novel set in Iceland, because in Iceland they intrude on your life in a way that doesn’t happen in other countries. […] the characters in this novel are completely formed by the land they live in. But in terms of writing the landscape, […] I knew it had to have a very strong presence […] because the [Icelandic] landscape is unique and so striking and so memorable.54 She further states that she wanted her readers to ‘feel the cold, the dark and the isolation, to visualise the landscape and smell the sea’.55 Indeed, the northern Icelandic landscape, nature and seasons are vividly portrayed, with lyrical and striking descriptions, and the Icelandic landscape and nature emerge as forces that shape and determine the lives of her characters, in particular Agnes, so that their ‘presence and harrowing influence [are felt] at every turn’.56 Therefore, as Stephen Romei asserts, landscape in Burial Rites can be seen as ‘a character of its own, demanding yet indifferent, the dominant influence on the lives of everyone in the story’.57 Also, in line with W. Tad Pfeffer’s argument concerning the importance of environment in the far north, the characters’ experience is formed by the ‘constraints of the environment imposed upon them by nature, and [by] changes in that environment’.58 As a result, Kate Soper’s description of nature is very apt when considering its function in Burial Rites, as in Soper’s definition it is a source of sensual delight, a nurturing bosom, […] Sublime and pastoral, indifferent to human purposes and willing servant of them, nature awes as she consoles, strikes terror as she pacifies, presents herself as both the best of friends and the worst of foes.59

48 Kent, ‘Hannah Kent Answers Questions from our Reading Group’, p. 353. 49 Kent, ‘Hannah Kent Answers Questions from our Reading Group’, p. 353; Touitou, ‘Burial Rites Is as Much a Dark Love Letter’; Friðrika Benónýsdóttir, ‘Myrkt ástarljóð til Íslands’; Hanke, ‘A Dark Love Letter to Iceland’; Maitzen, ‘A “Dark Love Letter to Iceland”’. 50 Kent, ‘Hannah Kent Answers Questions from our Reading Group’, p. 353. 51 Romei, ‘Hannah Kent’s Debut Novel’; ‘No More than a Ghost – Burial Rites’. 52 Hanke, ‘A Dark Love Letter to Iceland’. 53 Dotinga, ‘“Burial Rites” Author Hannah Kent Finds Mystery in Iceland’. 54 Starke, ‘In Conversation with Hannah Kent’. 55 Friðrika Benónýsdóttir, ‘Myrkt ástarljóð til Íslands’, trans. by Ingibjörg Ágústsdóttir. 56 McCabe, ‘Hannah Kent: Burial Rites’. 57 Romei, ‘Hannah Kent’s Debut Novel’. 58 Pfeffer, ‘People and Places in the Far North’, p. 81. 59 Soper, What Is Nature?, p. 71.

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This is particularly true in the extreme nature and climate of Iceland, and indeed the Icelandic sagas and folk tales frequently depict nature ‘as having a kind of magical or mysterious power [… and] as a powerful force that both gives and takes’.60 For Agnes, nature and landscape can be temporary friends, granting her joy and solace, yet they are also cruel to Agnes, and increasingly so as her life story unfolds. Ultimately, landscape ‘is destiny’ for Agnes,61 since it is integral to the unfolding of her tale and the portrayal of her harsh circumstances. In addition, landscape and nature are central to Kent’s methods of conveying the ambiguities and complexities of Agnes’s character. Kent’s use of geography and her depiction of Agnes’s movements between places during her life are important here. Agnes’s life story begins in the lush Vatnsdalur Valley, as she is born at Flaga. The murder takes place at Illugastaðir, a rugged place at the edge of the sea on the western side of the Vatnsnes Peninsula some distance north-west of Kornsá, and Agnes’s life ends at Þrístapar, at the mouth of the Vatnsdalur Valley. This is historical fact, but Kent cleverly manipulates this geographical dimension of Agnes’s story to suggest a circular development that has an ironic twist to it. This is because in her fictional rendering of Agnes’s childhood she suggests that its happiest period was Agnes’s stay with her foster parents at Kornsá, that is, until the tragic death of her foster mother Inga. When returning to Kornsá, however, the place has become Agnes’s last stop in life, her ‘last grim corner’ as Agnes reflects (71). She has mixed feelings, however, as her love for the valley and her anticipation for the joys of summer are conveyed through her thoughts even before being moved to Kornsá: I close my eyes and I imagine the valley in the long days of summer, the sun warming the bones of the earth until the swans flock to the lake, and the clouds lifting to reveal the height of the sky: bright, bright blue, so bright you could weep. (18–19) Clearly, the valley is to her a place of beauty, warmth, and colour, despite its anticipated function as the place where she will spend the last of her days as a prisoner. After Agnes’s arrival at Kornsá, Kent’s vivid and lyrical descriptions further underline the beauty and solace of the place, with the hills appearing ‘pink and muted, [with] shadows moving across them as clouds drifted overhead’ and ‘the sweet, damp smell of grass, almost ready to be harvested’ lingering in the ‘cool air of the valleys’ (32). This is the ‘lush north’ (104) in a northern summer full of brightness, sweetness, and beauty, ‘simply and lucidly painted’ according to one review of the novel.62 And here Agnes forgets herself during harvest, feeling somehow secure and removed from her impending fate as she falls into the rhythm of the farm-work. Thus, despite her thoughts on arriving as a prisoner at the farm, the earlier part of Agnes’s stay at Kornsá becomes a kind of respite, even lulling her into a false sense of security. Summers in the north are brief, however, the beautiful brightness quick to turn into the cold and dark of a cruelly harsh winter. That Agnes’s sense of security is only temporary,

60 Katla Kjartansdóttir, ‘Remote, Rough and Romantic’, p. 275. 61 Kent has emphasized the idea that landscape ‘is destiny’ in the context of what she is doing in Burial Rites, quoting the American writer Ron Rash. See Romei, ‘Hannah Kent’s Debut Novel’. 62 Heighton, ‘A Killer and her Death-Row Custodians’, p. 11.

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and due to be cut short in a cruel and shocking manner, is poignantly conveyed in a scene where Agnes, intoxicated with the beauty of summer, is cutting the grass. The scene, described as a ‘sublime moment’ by Linda Funnell,63 nevertheless has dark, foreboding undercurrents: I sway back and forth and let gravity bring the scythe down and through the grass, until I rock steadily. Until I feel that I am not moving myself, and that the sun is driving me. Until I am a puppet of the wind, and of the scythe, and of the long, slow strokes that propel my body forward. Until I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. It’s a good feeling, not quite being in control. Of being gently swung back and forth, until I forget what it is to be still. […] I feel drunk with summer and sunlight. I want to seize fistfuls of sky and eat them. As the scythes run sharp fingers through the stalks, the cut grass makes a gasping sound. […] I let my body swing, I let my arms fall. I feel the muscles of my stomach contract and twist. The scythe rises, falls, rises, falls, catches the sun across its blade and flicks the light back into my eye – a bright wink of God. I watch you, the scythe says, rippling through the green sea, catching the sun, casting it back to me. […] I flick the grass and the light through the air. I watch you, says the scythe. (103–04, emphasis mine) Agnes’s desire to eat the sky represents the hope still lurking in her breast that she will be shown mercy by the authorities. The rhythm of swinging the scythe apparently soothes her; yet the way in which its movements are described is a stark reminder of what lies ahead of Agnes. The symbolic meaning of the scythe, linked to the Grim Reaper — death — is made very clear, as is the reference to the gasping sound of the cut grass, reflecting the sound heard when a condemned criminal is beheaded at the block. Agnes is under the shadow of death, which watches and waits, showing no mercy at all. As is foreshadowed in this scene, then, Agnes’s false sense of reprieve is completely dashed in the following chapter when Steina tells her that District Commissioner Blöndal has made an appeal for Sigga, Agnes’s much younger partner in crime, while no such appeal is being made for Agnes. Here, comparable to numerous other places in the story, Kent utilizes the weather to underline her protagonist’s circumstances or state of mind, since at the moment when Agnes collapses by the riverbank, staring blindly at the river in complete shock at Steina’s news, ‘the dark clouds opened up, and the two women were engulfed in a sudden, freezing downpour’ (125). As outlined above, Kent emphasizes the more attractive features of Vatnsdalur during the summer season, presenting the valley in opposition to the other places in which Agnes lives, especially the harsh, rugged, and inhospitable Illugastaðir, located 63 Funnell, ‘Hannah Kent Burial Rites’.

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against the open sea on the north-western edge of the Vatnsnes peninsula. While the different locations all suffer the adverse northern weather conditions, with cold and harsh winters that leave people isolated and can even be life-threatening, the valley is clearly shown as a much more welcoming place, especially during summer. Conversely, Illugastaðir, the scene of both the crime and of much strife and distress for Agnes, is described as an inhospitable place with a sinister edge, though sometimes beautiful in its rugged wildness. Agnes states: ‘Illugastaðir is almost on the edge of the world. […] it was nothing like the valley’ (224), and later: It’s not much more than the base of the mountain, and the shore of the sea. It’s a long line of rocky ground, with one or two smooth fields where winter fodder is grown, and all the rest is wild grass, growing around the stones. The shore is of pebbles, and huge tangles of seaweed float in the bay and look like the hair of the drowned. […] On a clear day it’s beautiful, and on others it’s as miserable as grave-digging in the rain. Sea fog plagues the place. (227, emphasis mine) As Ayuningtyas states, Illugastaðir clearly has ‘a disturbing ambiance’.64 The images conveyed in the above quote emphasize a sense of sinister and morbid desolation, clearly related to the hardships Agnes suffers at Illugastaðir as well as to the murders she is eventually involved in. Thus, when things begin to go wrong for Agnes at Illugastaðir, as she realizes that her lover Natan is also sleeping with Sigga, the other workmaid, it is not possible for her to leave as she has no friend in the area, comparing her friendlessness to not seeing any light in ‘that wintered landscape’ (248). It follows therefore that as things come to a head between Agnes and her lover, she perceives the landscape of Illugastaðir and the Vatnsnes peninsula as a hostile element that works to entrap her: I could have gathered my belongings and left […], but where would I have gone? I knew only the valley of Vatnsdalur […] But Illugastaðir was different. I had no friends. I didn’t understand the landscape. Only the outlying tongues of rock scarred the perfect kiss of sea and sky — there was no one and nothing else. There was nowhere else to go. (265, emphasis mine) As a prisoner at Kornsá, awaiting her death sentence to be carried out, Agnes here looks back at a time when she was a different kind of prisoner, entrapped by the Vatnsnes landscape, where no help was to be found, in a situation that ultimately led to her downfall. As summer comes to an end, Kent’s unusual and evocative descriptions of approaching winter at Kornsá highlight the cruel reality of Agnes’s impending execution. Thus autumn ‘fell upon the valley like a gasp’ in October while the light ‘seemed to stagger through the window’ (198), and the wind ‘is like a wolf nipping at your heels’ (202). When winter arrives, ‘the light flees [the] country like a whipped dog’ (203); later, darkness has taken precedence and ‘settled down in these parts like a bruise in the flesh of the earth’ (254). Ultimately, winter is the defining season of Agnes’s 64 Ayuningtyas, ‘Deconstructing the Stereotype of Women’, p. 77.

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life, and the whiteness of snow the defining colour; winter is truly for her ‘a season of loss and despair’ as Geraldine Brooks comments,65 since it is during winter that all the bad things in her life happen. It is winter when Agnes’s mother abandons her at Kornsá (122), and her kind foster mother Inga dies in childbirth during a severe blizzard in the middle of winter. Inga’s death is portrayed as the most traumatic event of Agnes’s childhood, so that the keeping of her foster mother’s corpse in the storeroom and the death of the premature baby in Agnes’s arms haunt her into her adult years. Further, shortly before the date of her execution is announced, Agnes’s spiritual advisor falls ill and cannot attend her, just when she needs him the most. When things turn sour at Illugastaðir, Natan throws her out, naked, in the middle of winter, and, of course, the Illugastaðir murders take place in the wintertime. Last but not least, Agnes is executed in the middle of winter (in January). The last two events are of course historical, and their timing can therefore not be changed, but the rest is a fictional representation of possible events in Agnes’s life. The chapter describing Agnes’s childhood trauma of losing her foster mother is a particularly important case in point here. In this chapter, Kent employs the extreme Icelandic winter weather to reflect the trauma Agnes undergoes, in effect linking nature and the elements to Agnes’s character arc. Inga dies in childbirth during a severe blizzard which makes it impossible to fetch a midwife. The isolation and cold is palpably felt in Kent’s portrayal, and Agnes’s description of the weather is loaded with foreshadowing and sense of doom. At first, the wind begins ‘hurling ice at our home’, which Agnes feels is a ‘sinister’ sound (144). As she hears the ‘wind howling’ louder and louder, she opens the door to look outside: It [the weather] was an evil sight. Dark clouds bore upon the mountain range and under their smoky-blackness, a grey swarm of snow swirled as far as you could see. The wind was fierce, and a great, icy gust of it suddenly blew against the door so hard that it knocked me off my feet. […] I heaved against the door to shut it, but the wind was too strong. My hands stiffened with the cold rush of air. It was as though the wind was some form of ghoul demanding to enter. Then, all of a sudden, the wind dropped, and the door slammed shut. As though the spirit had finally entered and closed the door behind it. (144) The vicious weather prefigures Inga’s fate as well as the bloody and gruesome scene Agnes witnesses after Inga bleeds to death. Furthermore, it is implied that there is an evil in the weather — ‘some form of ghoul’ — that enters the house and wreaks havoc there two days later when the tragedy of Inga’s death takes place. This reflects and emphasizes exactly how much people in northern places such as Iceland have to rely on the weather and the elements, and underlines the precariousness of human lives shaped by extremes in isolated and harsh conditions. Also, what is being described here, with Agnes knocked off her feet, stands parallel to what Inga’s death will do

65 Brooks, cited by Romei, ‘Hannah Kent’s Debut Novel’.

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to Agnes: it will literally deprive her of the secure existence she previously enjoyed, since it leaves her a true orphan, with her foster father Björn ‘frozen’ to her grief, too wrapped up in his own (148) and ultimately deciding to leave for Reykjavík, throwing Agnes on the parish. Importantly, the young Agnes’s crying and screaming after hearing Inga is dead is also linked to the weather: ‘I howled like the blizzard outside’ (148). The narrative continues in a similar vein, as Agnes relives her experience in a dream after relating it to Tóti and the people of Kornsá. In her dream, she can hear Inga in the storehouse, clawing at the door, wanting to get out. As Agnes creeps down the corridor in her dream, she can hear ‘the wind howl into the night outside and I think I can hear my foster-mother claw at the storehouse door […] and under the wind I think I hear scratching, and then my name — Agnes, Agnes’ (157, emphasis mine). On opening the storehouse, her despair and grief at seeing that Inga is truly dead is powerfully conveyed: I weep because it is worse to know that she is really dead. Oh, my foster-mother is dead and my own mother is gone. And I sit on the floor, my legs buckled with the pure, ripe grief of an orphan, and the wind cries for me because my tongue cannot. It screams and screams and I sit on the packed earth floor, hard with cold. (157, emphasis mine) As on that fateful night of the blizzard, the wind is a participant in the dream, reflecting the turmoil Agnes is feeling; the wind’s howling is Agnes howling from the bottom of her grief-stricken heart. It is a scene of chilling emotional deprivation, and as a whole the chapter thus presents what Critic Watch terms ‘striking analogies’ between the weather, on one hand, and human actions and emotion, on the other.66 Winter, then, is a defining season for Agnes, and it is in the dead of winter that she sets out on her final journey to the place of execution at Þrístapar. Here, Kent’s landscape descriptions again vividly capture the atmosphere, as we are told ‘the clouds hang still in the air like dead bodies’ (323) and that snow ‘lay over the valley like linen, like a shroud waiting for the dead body of sky that slumped overhead’ (325). For Agnes, though, there is not even the solace of knowing her dead body will be wrapped in linen or given a proper Christian burial, as these are graces not granted to condemned criminals. Instead, in a deeply poetic passage Agnes, stunned by the news she is to die in six days, internally anticipates a landscape indifferent to her fate even while nature will do its work with her disintegrating body, so that, in fact, she will ultimately become part of it again: Now comes the darkening sky and a cold wind that passes right through you […] as though it does not care whether you are alive or dead, for you will be gone and the wind will still be there […] and soon your bones, now hot with blood and thick-juicy with marrow, will be dry and brittle and flake and freeze and thaw with the weight of the dirt upon you, and the last moisture of your body will be drawn up to the surface by the grass, and the wind will come and knock it down

66 Critic Watch, ‘How to Read a Big Book’, p. 119.

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and push you back against the rocks, or it will scrape you up under its nails and take you out to sea in a wild screaming of snow. (319) These reflections reflect the central motif of winter and snow being associated with suffering and death, simultaneously emphasizing how landscape, nature, and the weather will endure while people will always die and return to nature. The passage also echoes the scene from Agnes’s childhood discussed above, where the orphan child howls her grief in unison with the freezing wind that is screaming outside against a bleak and forbidding yet beautiful northern landscape. As can be seen from the above, landscape, nature, and the seasons are integral to the unfolding of Agnes’s life in Kent’s portrayal. This is very much the cold, forbidding, wintery north, and eventually death comes for Agnes; the landscape truly becomes her destiny. Linked with this is a sense of the cruelty of fate, manifested especially in the significance accorded to dreams and omens, an element of the novel that strikes a chord with Icelandic literary and folkloric tradition. For instance, the importance of dreams provides another link to the saga-person Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir of Laxdæla Saga, whose dreams foretell future events. There is also the presentation of ravens as both wise birds and ill omens, but in Icelandic folk tales, ravens are first and foremost seen as omens of death, and in heathen tradition the raven was seen as a symbol of wisdom and prophecy.67 Thus, in Burial Rites they are ‘Cruel birds, ravens, but wise’ as Agnes reflects (37), and they can foretell a person’s death, as when a raven ‘settled upon the wooden gable and jerked his beak towards the farm of Bakki, and a little boy drowned later that week’ (37). Furthermore, Natan has dreams that clearly foretell his death, and Agnes’s own dreams are vivid and telling of events to come, as when she dreams of her impending death and of her blood soaking the execution block (118–19). A particularly vivid dream is one she remembers having had when she was sixteen, of walking barefoot across a lava field covered with snow. The dream fuses the cold and desolate northern setting with the motif of dreams and omens, and it foretells the role the Reverend will play at Agnes’s execution, providing support and comfort as far as the execution block, but forced to let go of her in the end: In every direction there was nothing but rock and snow, and great chasms and cracks in the ground. My feet were bleeding. […] Just when I thought I would die from fear, a young man appeared. He was bareheaded, but wore a priest’s collar, and he gave me his hand. We kept going in the same direction as before […] Then suddenly […] I felt the ground give way beneath my feet, and my hand was wrenched out of the young man’s, and I fell into a chasm. (183–84) The dream clearly foretells Agnes’s fate, symbolizing her harsh and difficult life of thwarted dreams, essentially a painful walk on a snowy lava landscape towards a tragic end. It is a landscape that fate has mapped out for Agnes; it has wild and rugged beauty, some niches of comfort, but ultimately it is cold, desolate, and cruel.

67 Anna Þorbjörg Ingólfsdóttir, ‘Getið þið sagt mér’; ‘The Raven’.

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Conclusion For the Australian teenager Hannah Kent the rugged beauty of Iceland’s northern landscapes proved a captivating influence, evoking a precise and passionate response akin to that generally provoked by the idea of ‘north’ as argued by Davidson.68 It was not only Iceland, however, that captivated Kent, as the figure of Agnes Magnúsdóttir took over her imagination so completely that she spent years researching the life of this condemned murderess from the past. Burial Rites is a postmodern, revisionist, and feminist exploration of a marginalized figure from the shadows of history, providing a clear historical frame while essentially being a speculative account of Agnes’s life and the influences that shaped her. By utilizing different narrative voices and perspectives, as well as framing her narrative with excerpts from historical documents pertaining to the Illugastaðir murder case, Kent succeeds in working against the stereotype of the vengeful, wicked woman and overall presenting a more equivocal as well as a more human version of Agnes. Her life of hardship is recounted in vivid detail, and Kent’s use of the northern setting, its nature and seasons, works to accentuate and reflect aspects of Agnes’s life. Agnes is shown to be shaped as well as imprisoned by the Icelandic landscape, nature, and seasons, all elements that are pivotal to Kent’s exploration of both the harsh conditions of Agnes’s life and the intricacies of her character. Overall, Burial Rites presents vivid and striking images of Iceland and the north, of landscapes, nature, and seasons both cruel and comforting, desolate and dream-like, and in this instance ultimately and irrevocably tragic.

Works Cited Primary Sources Kent, Hannah, Burial Rites [2013] (London: Picador, 2014) Secondary Works Aðalheiður Ámundadóttir, ‘Baráttukonan Agnes’, Vísir, 9 September 2017 [accessed 16 April 2018] Aðalheiður Ámundadóttir and Margrét Helga Erlingsdóttir, ‘Agnes hlyti fjórtán ára dóm fyrir morðið á Natan’, Vísir, 9 September 2017 [accessed 16 April 2018] Anna Þorbjörg Ingólfsdóttir, ‘Getið þið sagt mér einhverjar þjóðsögur um hrafninn?’, Vísindavefurinn, 21 November 2006 [accessed 20 April 2018] Atwood, Margaret, ‘In Search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction’, The American Historical Review, 103.5 (1998), 1503–16

68 Davidson, The Idea of North, p. 20.

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Ayuningtyas, Paramita, ‘Deconstructing the Stereotypes of Women through a Female Voice in Burial Rites (2013) by Hannah Kent’, Lingua Cultura, 9.2 (2015), 75–80 Birns, Nicholas, Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2015) Coghlan, Alexandra, ‘“Burial Rites” by Hannah Kent’, The Monthly, May 2013 [accessed 16 April 2018] Cooper, Katherine, and Emma Short, ‘Introduction: Histories and Heroines: The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction’, in The Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. by Katherine Cooper and Emma Short (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 1–20 Critic Watch, ‘How to Read a Big Book: The Critical Reception of Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites in the Context of Contemporary Trade Book Marketing’, in The Return of Print? Contemporary Australian Publishing, ed. by Aaron Mannion and Emmett Stinson (Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2016), pp. 115–36 Davidson, Peter, The Idea of North (London: Reaktion, 2005) De Groot, Jerome, The Historical Novel (New York: Routledge, 2010) Dotinga, Randy, ‘“Burial Rites” Author Hannah Kent Finds Mystery in Iceland’, The Christian Science Monitor, 29 November 2013 [accessed 18 April 2018] Eggert Þór Bernharðsson, ‘Friðrik, Agnes, Sigríður og Natan. Heimildagrunnur morðbrennunnar á Illugastöðum árið 1828’, Saga, 51.2 (2013), 9–56 Friðrika Benónýsdóttir, ‘Myrkt ástarljóð til Íslands’, Vísir, 20 September 2014 [accessed 5 April 2018] Finn, K., ‘Review: “Burial Rites”’, The Oxford Culture Review, 22 September 2014 [accessed 18 April 2018] Funnell, Linda, ‘Hannah Kent Burial Rites’, The Newton Review of Books, 2 May 2013 [accessed 18 April 2018] Kent, Hannah, ‘Hannah Kent Answers Questions from our Reading Group’, in Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent (London: Picador, 2014), pp. 349–55 ———, ‘Discovering Agnes: Hannah Kent on Writing Burial Rites’, in Burial Rites, by Hannah Kent (London: Picador, 2014), pp. 341–47 Hanke, Andrea, ‘“A Dark Love Letter to Iceland”: Hannah Kent on “Burial Rites”’, Books and Publishing, 8 February 2013 [accessed 18 April 2018] ‘Hannah Kent Discusses Burial Rites and Speculative Biography’, YouTube, 17 September 2013 [accessed 20 April 2018] Heighton, Steven, ‘A Killer and her Death-Row Custodians’, International Herald Tribune, 4 October 2013, p. 11 Helga Kress, ‘Eftir hans skipun: Natansmál í ljósi sagnadansa og eftirmæla Agnesar’, Saga, 52.1 (2014), 99–118

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Katla Kjartansdóttir, ‘Remote, Rough and Romantic: Contemporary Images of Iceland in Visual, Oral and Textual Narrations’, in Images of the North: Histories, Identities, Ideas, ed. by Sverrir Jakobsson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 271–80 Keen, Suzie, ‘Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites’, InDaily, 19 June 2013 [accessed 18 April 2018] Kohlke, Marie-Luise, ‘Neo-Victorian Biofiction and the Special/Spectral Case of Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Hottentot Venus’, Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies, 18.3 (2013), 4–21 Lea, Bronwyn, ‘Ambiguous Agnes’, Australian Book Review (May 2013), 62 Maitzen, Rohan, ‘A “Dark Love Letter to Iceland”: Hannah Kent, Burial Rites’, Novel Readings: Notes on Literature and Criticism, 26 May 2014 [accessed 18 April 2018] McCabe, Brian, ‘Hannah Kent: Burial Rites’, Herald Scotland, 10 August 2013 [accessed 18 April 2018] McGirr, Michael, ‘Burial Rites Review: Prejudice Melts away in a Frigid Landscape’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 25 May 2013 [accessed 16 April 2018] Morris, Linda, ‘The Cold Light of Day: Hannah Kent’s Debut Reimagines the Last Woman to Be Executed in Iceland’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 May 2013 [accessed 10 April 2018] ‘No More than a Ghost – Burial Rites’, YouTube, 3 March 2017 [accessed 18 April 2018] Payne, Melissa, ‘Review of Burial Rites by Hannah Kent’, State Library of Queensland Shop, 13 (March 2013) [accessed 17 April 2018] Petković, Danijela, ‘“Like a Lamb Ripe for Slaughter”: Female Body, Law and “Domestic” Animals in Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites’, Gender Studies, 15.1 (2017), 74–90 Pfeffer, W. Tad, ‘People and Places in the Far North: A Vision of Life, Community and Change’, in Images of the North: Histories, Identities, Ideas, ed. by Sverrir Jakobsson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 81–90 ‘The Raven’, Icelandic Institute of Natural History, n.d.  [accessed 20 April 2018] Reynolds, Mark, ‘Hannah Kent: From Adelaide to Icelandic Noir’, Bookanista, n.d.  [accessed 6 April 2018] Romei, Stephen, ‘Hannah Kent’s Debut Novel Burial Rites Is Written in Cold Blood’, The Australian, 20 April 2013 [accessed 27 February 2018]

re i nve nt i ng agne s

Sacks, Sam, ‘Book Review: “Burial Rites” by Hannah Kent’, The Wall Street Journal, 25 October 2013 [accessed 27 February 2018] Sigurður Bogi Sævarsson, ‘Réttað í ljóslifandi sakamáli’, Morgunblaðið, 5 September 2017

[accessed 16 April 2018] Soper, Kate, What Is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995) Starke, Ruth, ‘In Conversation with Hannah Kent’, Writers in Conversation, 1.1 (February 2014) [accessed 20 April 2018] ‘SWF2013: Australian Writers’ Centre Interviews Hannah Kent, Author of Burial Rites’, YouTube, 3 June 2013 [accessed 17 April 2018] Taylor, Catherine, ‘Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, Review’, The Telegraph, 10 September 2013 [accessed 6 April 2018] Touitou, Lara, ‘Burial Rites Is as Much a Dark Love Letter to the Landscape of Iceland as It Is to the Life of Agnes Magnúsdóttir’, Feedbooks, 3 May 2014 [accessed 18 April 2018] Trooboff, Rhoda, ‘Burial Rites [Review]’, Washington Independent Review of Books, 4 October 2013 [accessed 16 April 2018]

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The North Atlantic World: Land and Sea as Cultural Space, ad 400–1900

All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds, based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field. In Preparation

Oisín Plumb, Picts and Britons in the Early Medieval Irish Church Margins, Monsters, Deviants: Alterities in Old Norse Literature and Culture, ed. by Rebecca Merkelbach and Gwendolyne Knight